Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
I can’t believe we’re back already. It’s Jeff Amerine here.
Jeff Standridge:
Well, we were back about four times until I messed it up and we had to start over. So we’re going to be on track this time. So hey, we are wrapping up a series of episodes on operational effectiveness and financial disciplines, particularly the operational effectiveness and financial disciplines that need to be in place for companies that are really trying to achieve sustained strategic growth, trying to scale, grow by multiples of two, four, six, eight, 10, what have you. And today what I’d like to do is talk a little bit about, as we close it out, any kind of parting shots that we want to make sure that we share with our listeners regarding operational effectiveness. Anything you want to start with, Jeff?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, I would say the one thing is many businesses go quite a while, sometimes multiple years, with the fundamental prime directive being we’re going to win through personal heroics. And what I mean by that is they don’t have good documented procedures, they don’t really have good financial discipline, they may be good at one particular thing like sales, but they’ve kind of ignored all those other things that make for a well-oiled machine. And those things have pillars under them like good operational efficiency and disciplines and practices and repeatable procedures and a financial discipline to know how to spend your money and on what. And so, I mean, that’s the general sentiment. Personal heroics will not grow, no doubt about it. You can’t build a business around it.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. That’s right. So you can’t grunt everything across the goal line, right?
Jeff Amerine:
Exactly. It’s like what you see in transportation, uh, build a transportation business. You had exactly one tool and it was a hammer and everything looked like a nail.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. That’s right. So, so really we need to be talking about having a cogent plan. So an actual documented plan that was created by you and your leadership team with some buy in from other key contributors around the organization that specifically focused on a future destination that you’re trying to get to. And that plan is documented and it’s there’s a cadence of follow up a cadence of accountability to make sure that the
the parts and parcels of that plan that get doled out to the various members of the team, that they have the opportunity to report that they’re on track, that they’re off track, ask for help when they need help. So we have that translating the strategy and the vision into an actual execution plan, wrapping a cadence around that. And then what I would say is cascading that plan down through the various departments within the organization. Each organization ought to have a correlating plan with a direct line of sight into that operational plan for the organization to operational, operationalize that strategy as well. And I’m getting my tongue tangled today. I mean, my tongue tangled. So. Makes for good, makes for good viewing, I guess.
Jeff Amerine:
You’re doing great. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, one of the components of that, and be interested in your opinion, when you’re, you get into that cadence where you’re doing the reviews, and we’ve seen it with Gino Wickman where he recommends the 90-minute weekly meeting. We’ve got that built into the way we think about strategic growth system as well. How do you convince teams to stay with it and to stay focused through a 90-minute weekly meeting. A lot of people at this point will say, man, that just seems like such a huge commitment. Talk about that a little bit.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, so it’s interesting that came up in our 10x accelerator yesterday. And I’ll just repeat kind of what I said for that group was that I always recommend that you start if you’ve never had a strategic growth system with a cadence implementation with a cadence, start with the 90 minutes. And here is a sample agenda that we recommend you follow and follow that for four to six weeks religiously and track your time. And at the end of the four to six weeks, make a determination. Is 90 minutes the right time and is this the right agenda? Or do we need to adapt it slightly, both the time and the agenda? And here’s what I found. I have found one particular organization that I orchestrated the strategic growth system implementation with them. And they came back and said, no, we need two hours. We’re growing so rapidly. Uh, and we have so many things going on in the organization. We really need two hours. And so they, they meet for two hours, three 30 to five 30 once a week. I had another organization that came back and said, you know, we’re, we’re not meeting for 90 minutes. We’re meeting for 60 minutes, 90% of the time and 75 minutes or an hour and 15 minutes, the other, the other, you know, rest of the time he’s there. So, so they decided to instill the discipline to just meet for 60 minutes. Um, and then, and then that’s probably, I’d call those, you know, a couple of folks, but then the vast majority say, yeah, you know, that 90 minutes seems to work well for us. So the bottom line is don’t take Gino Wickman’s, uh, cookie cutter or Vern harnesses, cookie cutter, or Jeff Amerine:nd Jeff’s cookie cutter and, and just apply it blindly to your organization. Take it as a model, take what works, adapt it because you and I both know that if for something to stick, people have to feel like it’s adding value.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, a hundred percent right. A hundred percent right. And, and I think the thing too is, is not so much the duration of the meeting, but the commitment to be consistent and cover the things that are most important to make progress in that meeting. A big part of that is reviewing the issues and making sure that you’ve got accountability for knocking issues down on a weekly basis so that it’s not constant firefighting during the week. That’s the one point of reporting back and accountability on review of important issues to the business.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, that’s right. And of a 90-minute meeting, that’s that really comprises about 45 minutes of it. So 50% of that meeting is focused on actually tackling the issues. And, and so for those organizations that have. Paired their meeting down to 90 to 60 minutes, what they did in order to do that is if, if they have a list of the issues that crop up that they don’t, that they’re not able to get to in that 60-minute meeting, then about once a month, or once every couple of months, they’ll schedule just a two-hour lunch meeting where all they do is clear out all the issues that are on their list. They make decisions about all the issues that they hadn’t been able to solve over the course of the last three to eight weeks. And they just solve them right there. Bring in lunch, we’re going to meet for two hours, we’re going to knock all these out. Hey, if it works for them, do it.
Jeff Amerine:
Absolutely. And the other thing too is having that degree of discipline on that cadence, it cuts out a bunch of other unnecessary meetings because you can focus on that one time and then the rest of the time you can be spent on the productive things that the leadership all needs to be doing.
Jeff Standridge:
It sure does.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. And so I’ll just go ahead and throw out there is for our listeners, if you want to see a, uh, a recommended 90-minute weekly leadership meeting cadence, which, uh, Gino Whitman would call the L 10. Uh, we, we call ours basically just the weekly leadership meeting. Uh, if you want to see what we recommend that organizations implement along with a strategic growth system in terms of that weekly meeting cadence for you and your leadership team.
Shoot me an email, jeffs@innovationjunkie.com, jeffs@innovationjunkie.com. I’d be glad to send you a copy of that. So what else? Yeah, what else, Jeff, do you see in terms of making that organizational strategy a reality in terms of operationalizing it?
Jeff Amerine:
Good stuff.
Jeff Amerine:
Well, one important part that, and it relates to what we just spoke about is the commitment to tying this, your strategic plan to what you do tactically every day. It can’t, you say no three-ring binders. It can’t just be something that’s up on the shelf. And the commitment means those what you do day to day is tied to the strategy and it’s all integrated. It’s not a separate thing where we did a strategic plan. Now we go back to doing what we do every day.
I think more often than not, companies fail against the strategy because they don’t have that connection. And maybe they don’t even have the commitment at the highest level, at the CEO level, at the board level to the plan. And so consequently, everybody goes back to whatever bad habits they’ve had. And then they’ll kind of randomly think near the end of the year, I better check and see what kind of progress I made against the strategic plan. So having that good execution plan, the accountability of the weekly meeting to make sure you’re making progress against long-term objectives and your short-term targets and your, your 90-day rocks and you’re hitting your KPIs. I think all that is hugely important.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. That’s right. And, and, you know, I’ve had, I’ve had CEOs of organizations that we’ve implemented our strategic growth system, come back and say, you moved us forward, forward more in the last six months than we’ve moved in 10 years. I’ve had CEOs say, you know, I was working 70, 80 hours a week, zero time off on the weekends, constantly up here trying to get things done. And I finally have a life now because we’ve built a mechanism of accountability and we’ve put it in place and we’ve created the visibility into that so that everyone knows what everyone else is responsible for and we’ve got the right people focused on the right things and it’s given me time back in my life to be able to actually enjoy my work and focus on how do we grow this thing strategically.
Jeff Amerine:
Well, and if you go through this, the other thing that can be kind of an outcome is something you talk a lot about, the culture of excellence. So being able, if you’ve got the strategic growth system in place, you’ve got the disciplines that we’ve been talking about. Ultimately, one of the outcomes is you’ve got a culture of excellence because everybody can rally around something. There’s visibility. It all ties together.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, that’s good. And, and, and I think, uh, since you bring that up and we’re coming up on near the end of the year, we’ve got a couple of episodes that I know we’re going to finish the year out with, uh, one is going to be a special guest that we’re going to be bringing in, uh, for the last episode of the year, but I think the next episode is I’d like to just, uh, review once again, that culture of excellence and maybe talk a little bit about, uh, the, the key, the key things that leaders need to be thinking about as they finish out the year in terms of how they bring that culture of excellence into place in their organizations in 2024.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, sounds great, man. Let’s do it. I look forward to it.
Jeff Standridge:
All right. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Thank you for joining.
Jeff Amerine:
See you next time.