EntreLeadership - #115: Creating Leadership Magic the Disney Way

Episode Date: October 5, 2015

Learn how to lead and build an amazing culture from Walt Disney World Resort’s former Executive Vice President of Operations Lee Cockerell. One of Lee's major and lasting legacies was the creation of Disney Great Leader Strategies, which is used to train and develop the 7,000 leaders at Walt Disney World. entreleadership.com/podcast Mission Statement Mapper Another great episode sponsored by our friends at Infusionsoft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entre Leadership podcast. Now here is your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the podcast of Leaders, by Leaders, for Leaders. Thank you so much for the download. We're focusing on culture this month, the month of October, all about culture at Entreeleadership.com, and we'll talk a lot about it on this podcast. And so we started off with a great feature conversation, none other than Lee Cochrell,

who's a former executive vice president of operations for Walt Disney World Resorts. That's right. 40,000 cast members underneath this guy's leadership during his time. You're going to really love this as we really dive into culture. Our October theme is culture, and so we have a wonderful free tool for you. It's a mission statement mapping tool. That's right, completely free. I'll tell you more about that after the conversation.

I learned about Lee just kind of by accident, if you will, on Twitter recently. Saw something bouncing around and was intrigued by the quote, clicked on his Twitter profile, and instantly when I see former executive vice president of operations for Walt Disney World Resorts, I go, hello. Because to me, and I don't know if it's because I'm a father of three, or I've read a lot about Walt Disney himself, I hear Disney on anybody's resume or I see it on anybody's resume, and I perk up. So I clicked on his website, Leecochral.com.

And I thought to myself, this guy has got something to say. You talk about the highest standard of customer service in the world. I think so. You could certainly say Nordstrom. If you've never read the book Nordstrom Way, you should. But you can think of a handful of brands when you think of excellent customer service. And I don't know anybody in the world who doesn't have Disney on their list. So anyway, I began to just look at some of the things this guy has done and said and he speaks and writes books.

And I thought, we got to get on this, Eric, the producer. So Eric hunted him down and we got him. And we're going to get right to this. But this is so important to understand the value of culture and where it comes from. And here's the context I want you to have in your mind as you listen to the conversation. Walt Disney is dead and gone. but the values, the principles, the culture has been passed down so effectively that it permeates everything that they do. Whether you stay in one of their resorts, you go to one of their parks, the list goes on and on of how they touch you in a way that you remember the experience.

In 40 years of the hospitality industry, this guy really understands how to take care of customers and his people. his team. Now listen to this. As executive vice president of operations for Walt Disney World Resorts, he led a team of over 40,000 cast members, responsible for the operations of 20 resort hotels, four theme parks, two water parks, a shopping and entertainment village, and the ESPN Sports and Recreation Complex. So let's put it this way. If you've been to Disney recently, or in the past 20 years, you've been a affected in some way by Lee's leadership. That's our guest today. Let's get right to it.

Here is my conversation with Lee Cockrell. Well, Lee, it's a privilege to have you. Full disclosure at the start of our conversation. I sought you out on Twitter because I am the biggest Disney fan. My wife and I got engaged at Disney. We've taken our little three kids. My gosh, I think we've been already six, seven times. We just love the place.

And there's a great culture and a great story. I admire the man, Walt Disney, a little bit of an amateur expert on the history of his life. And so it's such a treat to have you with us today to talk with us. So thank you for being here. Thank you very much. You're the perfect family. Well, so I want the audience, before we dive into your expertise, I want them to know a little bit about your experience when you came to Disney. Well, fast forward, you had been in the hospitality business.

And if I'm reading correctly, you joined the Disney team in 1990. Take us to that moment and take us through your experience as what you led at Disney. Yeah, that was quite a change. I'd worked for Hilton eight years, Marriott's 17, and I got recruited by Disney, and my wife said, let's go. I said, we get to live in Paris. So we went to Paris and opened Euro Disney and was there three years. I was there two years before the opening and a year afterwards. I started out as the head of food and beverage operations there and opened all the restaurants

and catering and all that kind of stuff. And then I was promoted to vice president of food and beverage, our vice president of hotel operations, ran all the hotels. And then I came down to Orlando in 93 and started out as head of all the hotels in Orlando. And then I got promoted a couple years later to be in charge of all operations of Walt Disney World. So that's kind of a 42-year career and a snap. But it was great. I mean, when I think back about it, really Hilton, Marriott and Disney were all great. But Disney was really special.

And it's just a special, special place. I tell people it's like the National Parks. The guests help us run it and they get upset when we don't do the right thing. And we get a lot of assistance. And I really enjoyed running Walt Disney World operations for all those years. It's, you know, today there's 72,000 cast members there that go into Orlando, go out to Walt Disney World every day. And I know you've been there, so you've seen that.

And it takes a lot of people to run it. It sure does. To run it right. Well, this is fascinating to me because you came from, two great companies that you mentioned. So Marriott and Hilton, and then you come to Disney. And the theme of our entire operation at Entry Leadership this month is culture. So what was it like coming into the Disney culture?

Marriott culture was great because Bill Marriott really takes care of people and has a high regard for people. So that was much easier for me to come into Disney than a lot of people might have found it. I was used to being available for the cast members, listening to them, helping them, helping them get what they wanted, helping them with training, development. So it was pretty easy. The thing I had to learn was what really the attention to detail at Disney is just incredible, that everything matters. And I really had to get really involved in it to learn the entertainment side of the business.

I'd been in the lodging, service, hospitality business for all those years. And when you add entertainment to it, it's a whole different ballgame. And by the way, it's mainly people saving up their money to come there, which is not an expense account business like Hilton and Marriott was. It's a big, big trip for a lot of people that save for years to come and bring their children. And they're so happy to see their child having a good time that they just keep coming back. Yeah. Well, developing a culture of excellence is something that I think every leader aspires to do.

And I'm just really blown away by the effect that Walt had. And then after he's gone, the attention to detail, the fact that you point out that people are spending their hard-earned money, is a personal trip, happiest place on earth, right? It's all those expectations when people roll into your properties. How did Walt and the leadership extend that attention to detail and the total service of their clients? How did they extend that all the way down to the lowest level of teammate? Yeah, I think what you're seeing when you come to Disney is, number one, we hire better. We hire better people. We take our time. We hire people with the right attitude, a can-do attitude, not a can-do attitude.

And I hope you see that when you come. I mean, that's the name of the game. The most important thing you do if you want a great culture, hire the right people. And then the second thing we do better than anybody else is training. We train them, we test them, and then we enforce the training to make sure we have consistency. There's total clarity when somebody's hired at Disney

about expectations for performance and taking care of the customer and the guests. I mean, it's just, I think that's one of the big things enough companies don't do. Clarify what your expectations are. And when you hire great people and train them and you clarify your expectations, they step up and they take care of. They know they're on stage and they know that every customer matters. You know, we talk about millions of people there, but we do them one at a time.

And that's how you have to think about it. And that's how you get a culture, you know. Culture is like, I told somebody the other day, culture eats strategy for lunch. You get the culture right. Your people will help you implement any strategy you come up with. If you don't get the culture right, you're not going to get anywhere because they're not going to help you. They're going to quit. They're going to have turnover.

We want people to wake up in the morning coming to Disney knowing they matter. And we make sure they know they matter, no matter what position they have, from the lowest level to the highest level. You matter. You're a part of this. You're a part of the show when we open the red curtain every morning, and we need everybody to perform their role in the show. And that's what it just becomes this big pride.

They understand how much it means to the guests coming and that their responsibility is to make sure it's a great visit. So it's kind of some simple things, but I always tell people, Don't get more with the basics. You know, hiring, training, and creating a culture where people feel appreciated, you'll do fine. I don't care what business you're in. You know, words matter so much, Lee.

I know you appreciate this. And folks, if you were listening to Lee's answer there, he said several little words that all themed together. And it's one of the many things I've appreciated about Disney as a customer. And that is the idea that the teammates are cast members. You said the red curtain lifts every day. You said it's a show. they have to perform their role. Words really matter when they become a part of a culture that is sustaining excellence throughout.

And I just wonder how much behind the scenes, Lee, do people talk about the leadership of Disney, do they talk about the words or the description cast members and the role that each one of them play and how important it is no matter whether it's sweeping the streets in Frontierland or, you know, getting people on a ride or welcoming people at the front desk? Well, I think that's what our leadership does the best because when we hire leaders, we really are careful because we want no autocratic people. We want people who treat people respectfully, make the cast members feel special, treat them as individuals when they have a problem, show respect to everybody no matter

where they're from or what color or what religion, and that we train and develop and make them knowledgeable so they can have a better life. You know, it's kind of like managed like a mother, which I'm I always talk about. Your mother is worried about two things, safety and education, and that's what our leaders focus on, safety and education. And when you educate people, they just have a better life. Five years from now, they may be a manager when they started out sweeping the streets, and they didn't speak English, and we put them in English classes, and we do a lot to create this feeling that they matter. You know, it's a simple thing. Everybody wants to matter, and you can do it.

My wife wants to matter, and I've learned how to make her, no she matters. When I come in, I don't turn the TV on. I talked to her. That's why I've been married for 47 years. She hadn't left me yet, so I'm a lucky man. You're a smart man. Well, we talked about expectations. You mentioned expectations early on in our conversation. So I want to take some time and camp out on this idea of expectations from two different unique vantage points that are so huge for leaders. The first is customer expectations. You outlined four customer expectations. Will you unpack those for us? Sure. I think in any business and all your listeners can take these to the bank, teach your employees, your cast members, and all your leaders and yourself make every customer arriving in your business feel special.

How do you do that? You pay attention, you go right to them, you don't stand around looking at your iPhone when somebody walks in your store or your restaurant or calls you on the phone, use their name, listen more carefully, make people feel special. We all know how to do it. And number two is treat people as individuals. People come to your business with individual problems. don't have this one way to do things, and when they have a complex problem, you kind of blow them off.

We have so many individual issues at Disney every day. Somebody needs a special diet, somebody needs special transportation, somebody needs a special room, all these kind of things. Treat people as individuals because companies who can individualize and personalize, I can tell you 100% are going to win in the long run. And three, show respect to everybody. There's a lot of bigotry in the world, and you've got to have an organization that doesn't put up with that. Everybody matters. We respect it. everybody. We don't care where you're from. We don't care what language you speak. We'll have the right kind of food for you. We'll have what you need. And we're going to treat you respect for you. Our guests come from all over the world, every religion, every background, every language. And that's

important. And last, your customers expect you to have knowledgeable employees. So train your people. And when you do those four things, make people feel special, treat everybody as an individual, show total and complete respect to people, even though you might have some bigotry in your bones, get over it and you make your castment, your employees knowledgeable, you're going to have a business that can't be beat. It's, again, these simple things that people forget. They get too focused on the product

and they forget about the service and the side and the emotional side. And that's the name of the game. You can buy products anywhere. And you can't get somebody loving you and caring for you and taking care of you and going out of their way. I tell a little story, you know,

at night when you lose your pacifier, when you have a baby, the manager can say, I'm sorry, sir, the store is closed or he can go get the keys and open it and get you one. That's the difference. Yeah, boy, we certainly can appreciate that any parent that's here in that conversation. Yeah, get the keys. Yeah, that's right. And get the pacifier quickly. All right, so let's shift the focus now to four expectations for our team members.

Yeah, you know, for a long time, we paid Gallup to help us understand what those four guest expectations were. And I just, after I read those, I thought, you know, I wonder what the cast members have come to work every day. What do they expect? You know what? It's the same thing. thing. If I work for you and you're my boss, make me feel special. If I'm doing a great job, tell me, Lee, you're doing a great job. We're glad you're on our team. We're glad you're here. We hope you stay with us. Number two, treat me as an individual when I have a daycare problem. I have to be off early because my son's having problems in school and I have to go up and see the teachers. Or my mother fell and broke her hip, so you have to change my schedule for the next few

weeks so I can go by and feed her breakfast in the morning. Or whatever. Treat everybody as individuals because we all, let me tell you, if you haven't had a tragedy in your life yet, you're going to. So hopefully you work for an organization and I have a family can help you get through it. And third, same thing. A lot of employees and companies out there today don't feel respected. They feel abused. There's a lot of bigotry going on in the world. So show respect to everybody.

And last, your employees want to be trained and they want to be developed so they can have a better life. So train them, teach them, and then develop them, which is having those tough discussions with them about their attitude and being on time to work. just like you do with your kids. When your kids have a performance problem, you get all over it until you fix it. And those are just simple things. Employees have the same expectations as guests, and we need to learn as leaders how to handle those and how to pay attention to the individual. Lee, what's the ongoing training process within the Disney culture?

It's not just a one-time training, I'm guessing. Oh, it's just relentless. You know, everybody goes through traditions first day and learns all about the company and the expectations. but every day the managers, every manager on property has a pre-shift meeting for five to ten minutes to talk about these very things I'm talking to you about. Before we open the door for the restaurant or open the park, we talk. Okay, guys, let's get out there again today. Pay attention to the kids. Pay attention to the older people today.

Let's really get on top of this. Pick up the trash. Every day, 10 minutes. And so all of a sudden, you're just getting continued. It's kind of like your mother. You know, your mother just keeps training. Even when you're 40 years old, she's still telling you what to do. So, yeah, it's every day.

It's ongoing. It's a part of it. They wouldn't even say it was being training. They're just getting total feedback and communication all the time over and over and over again about the basics. What's the culture of Disney like when it comes to promotion, meaning you come in at one level and they move up the ranks? Is there a maniacal goal or process for keeping team members, cast members within the family and promoting them up through the ranks? Well, our goal is to promote, I say, 85 to 90% of all management in the company or any job is promoted within the company because we have so much talent. If you've got 70,000 people, you've got a lot of talent out there, and at least half of them have college degrees.

And then we have the college program. I'd say probably 80, 85% of our managers come up through hourly jobs or the college program. So they know that there's opportunity. College kids ask me all the time, how can I be successful? And I tell them one reason. I said, one thing, be better than everybody else. If 10 people do what you do, you better have the best attitude. You better be there a little early.

When your boss is work Saturday night and Sunday and Monday and Christmas and holidays, you just raise your hand and smile. And you'll get ahead. Opportunities at Disney, many people. You know, George Caligrita's the president, started busing tables in a restaurant contemporary when it opened in 1971, and he's the president today. And that's the way the company works.

Anybody can move up and move around. Even I have my sons over there, you know. He started when he got out of college, parking cars in the parking lot. Now he's the vice president of the Magic Kingdom 24 years later. So everybody has opportunity. It's just whether you step up and you have the right attitude and you're willing to work hard and keep learning. I would say learn the business. Be a good leader and be a good manager.

Be discipline. Be organized. Do what you say you're going to do and keep your promises. And we have a lot of great people to select from for promotions every day. Wow, that's really good. What a great lesson for leaders to create a culture where people want to stay with you and move up the ladder. I want to talk to you about, I love a phrase that you've got in one of your books. The book is entitled Creating Magic 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney,

and the phrase is free fuel. I want you to describe, what is free fuel? We all like to sound of that, by the way. But what is it in the context of that book, and why is it so vital for leaders? Well, that's one of my favorite chapters. It's Chapter 7. It's called Burn the Free Fuel. The fuel that drives human performance, I named R, A-R-E, for appreciating.

recognition, and encouragement. When you give people appreciation, recognition, and encouragement, you drive their performance through the roof. Their performance goes way up. It's a free fuel. It costs nothing. It's renewable. When you do it, people learn to do it. Like if I tell you, you know, I see you in the hallway and I say, hey, you're doing a great job. Haven't seen you for a while. We really appreciate the good job you do. Hope you stay with us. Let me tell you, you just gave them a dose of free fuel. I guarantee the performance goes up. The commitment to the company goes up, and they'll do the right thing. In every step of life, we could all give more appreciation, recognition, and encouragement.

And you ought to just think about every day. Are you doing that? Are you letting opportunities pass when you should have done it? Could have done it. And why didn't you do it? It cost nothing. Lee, I can't wait to talk to you about this topic. And this is diving a little deeper for our audience.

And you certainly understand it as a man who ran all the resorts. One of the things I've appreciated most about Walt himself and what he created early on and it has sustained is the environment, the aesthetic. And for our listeners who maybe just have a showroom or there's some experience where they're dealing with their client, it could be any example, but they have a situation where their clients, their potential customers are experiencing them. I want you to talk about the importance of aesthetic environment and how it shapes the customer experience. Hey, listen, any business is so vital that you drive up in the parking lot, it looks

great, it's clean, there's no cigarettes are around the door, the doors are clean, they walk in, it's fresh, it smells good, the bathrooms are spotless, and when I ran a hotel for Marriott, I walked my hotel every morning at 615 for an hour, looking for the little chips of paint, no cigarettes in the driveway, everything was going to look great. I checked every elevator to make sure when my guests got in it, they weren't dirty, they were clean, they were spotless. I did it again at 11 o'clock before lunch, and I did it again at 5 o'clock before dinner, because I wanted to make sure that we say we're putting on a show, then everything matters. And that's what I would tell everybody out in the world.

Everything matters if you want to be great. If you want to be average, let it go. If you want to be great, everything matters. So you've got to walk your operation. First come into your business from the way the guests will come in or your customers will arrive, and then go back in the back and see the break rooms, the locker rooms, make sure they look great so your cast members and employees have a great place too. So aesthetics matter.

We all love to walk into a place that's great. The lighting's right. The music's at the right level. It smells good. These are things too many people let go and they don't pay attention to it. They have a plant in front of their door to their business and it's dead. It hadn't been watered in 12 years. And, you know, just everything matter.

Bill Merritt made me clean the U.S. post office box out on the street one day. I said, why? He said, because it's near our hotel. Keep it clean. So I'm out there. That blue mailbox. I'm out there having a clean, you know? So that was kind of, oh, that's good.

Okay, so this is huge. I want to stay here. If you want to be great, this is what Lee just said. If you want to be great, everything matters. So I want to dive in here because I think that's an overwhelming statement. That's overwhelming. You hear that and you go, oh, my gosh, Lee, how do I do that? And there is a way to do that.

If everything matters and those details matter so much as it relates to greatness, how do you begin to handle all of those things in a way that is efficient? and not overwhelming to where you just steam, you know, you just blow the top off because you can't keep up with it all. Yeah, I think you've got to decide what you want done, what it looks like, what your standards are. You've got to write those down and get a checklist.

If you've got employees working for you, you've got to assign some of those things to them, you know, Marys to check the front door and the parking lot and the bathrooms every morning before 8 a.m. before we open, and you get that laid out, and you get a system in place. Most people don't have a system.

And let the system. Maybe some of the responsibilities There's for you the owner. Some are for Mary the cashier. Some are for another guy that's going home after cleaning the place overnight. But I tell you, checklists. Defining in advance what you want checked every day. Because if you don't check it, it won't be there.

You've got to go and check it and put the check mark. And go look at it with your eyeballs. Don't try to do it all through a computer. And when you do that, and each time you find something going wrong in your business, you add that to the checklist. And next thing you know, you'll have raised the expectations for yourself. I think that's half the battle. People out there at own businesses need to raise their own expectations.

And then after they do that, it will be easy for them to raise the expectations for their employees. But you've got to know what you want because if you don't know what you want, you can't communicate it to your people. That's what I always thought about. What do I want? Write it down. Make sure I got somebody that's going to do it every day and then it'll get done. When it doesn't get done, I'll be there visiting. That's right.

It's kind of the same old story. Role modeling matters. Role model what you want and that's what you'll get. One of your lasting legacies from your time at Disney was you created Disney great leader strategies. This training developed thousands and thousands, 7,000 leaders at Walt Disney World. And so I want to ask you, as someone who spent a long time at a high level of leadership for Disney, what did you or what do you admire most about Walt Disney the man? I think when I think back about him, I love his ability to take risk.

And also, I think he really considered him, if you ask him today, he was a teacher. He taught everybody what it looks like when it's great. And that's where we all learn. If you work for a guy like Walt Disney, you become better. If you work for somebody who doesn't have very high standards, you don't ever get to be great. Because we all are kind of developed out of who we work with, work around, expectations, standards. So I think that was him. He just was relentless in setting high expectations, whether it was a movie or whether it was

or going back and reshooting a part of a movie ten times until he got it just perfectly right when an average viewer would not even have noticed, but he always noticed. And that, I think, risk-taking and a huge drive for excellence and attention to detail. And that's what he turned out doing. Disney's, there's no place like Disney. There's no movies like the Disney movies. Some lady said to me once, can you imagine the world without Disney? And I thought, you know, that's quite a statement.

And when you think about it, all those stories and all the things we... we've learned and entertainment and what people learn about real life and leadership and management just from watching the movies. So he was incredible. I love that you said he was a teacher because the higher you go up in leadership, you can't ever forget that at the end of the day, you've got to show people. You've got to show them. And that's really what the heart of teaching is.

It's instructing and breaking down and simplifying a way to do things. Yeah, we need less big bad bosses and more teachers and you'll get a lot more done. and your people step up. That right there, folks, you might want to tweet that one. We need less big bad bosses and more teachers. That's good stuff there. Curious, I just want to pick your brain more on this. When you look at the imprint of Disney on our American culture and certainly around the world,

have you ever heard stories or is there any evidence as to what Walt felt about the parks themselves? Of course, he started out with Steamboat Willie and, you know, or the early days. animating, but the parks themselves. He had such, I've read a lot about him, he had such a desire to create, you know, essentially this happiest place on earth for folks, or they could come be a child and childlike wonder, something that we, boy, we lose quickly in this very evil world. So have you ever heard much about that as to what he felt about the parks as opposed to maybe the movies, the animation, and beyond? Oh, yeah, you hear stories about it, but I, what the most I hear, He wanted to do whatever he could do to bring all those movies to life

where actually the public could walk into the movie and be in the movie and have a place where families could spend time together. And when you think about it, before he did that, there was no really big, clean, wonderful, nice family places to go and spend time with your children and safe and clean. And just it's too bad he didn't see Disney World open. But, you know, Disneyland in itself, can you even imagine thinking about doing that? No.

No, I mean, can you imagine putting your money into something like that? What? In Southern California. And it's amazing. But he was right. He could read the public and he knew what Americans, certainly, when it started, wanted. And that was a nice place to go with your family and get away from the stress of life and to enjoy it. And he nailed it.

He certainly did. He just took the movies and made them come to life for real people to be a part of the movie. He is Lee Cockrell. He loves leadership. He's passionate about it. I want to make sure folks so you can stay in touch and follow. what Lee is up to, Lee Cochral.com. That's Leecochral.com. You can check out anything and everything that Lee's up to. And Lee, again, this is a special treat for me. I know our audience is learning

so much from this conversation, but we really are grateful for your service and what you shared with us today. It really was a great treat. Thanks for being with us. Thank you so much. It was great to be with you. Well, we want to thank Lee Cochler for his time. One of the things that Lee did, and I mentioned it briefly in the conversation with him, he developed the Disney great leader strategies. This was the internal training program, and it still exists. They've developed 7,000 leaders at Walt Disney World. Love that culture where you heard him talk about it.

You can come in and start sweeping streets at Disney at one of the theme parks and find yourself as a major leader down the line. That's huge. Who wouldn't want to work for a company like that? That just always dangles opportunity out there in front of you. That's how you motivate people. Love it, love it. Hey, we want you to know more about Lee.

You can go to his website, Lee Cockerel.com. That's Lee, L-E, C-O-C-K-E-R-E-E-L-L-L.com. His latest book is Time Management Magic. Well, when you think about Walt Disney, you think vision, right? You think of the famous stories of him flying over the swamps in Orlando and somehow envisioning this master plan to entertain the world. That's great vision. But you know, you've got to have a mission.

Right? After you get the vision, the vision is the where. The mission is the how in some ways. I've heard it defined that way. But Dave really understands this here. And when it comes to our mission statement here at our company, well, we take it very, very serious. In fact, Dave defines a mission statement as what you are not as much as what you are.

It's an out-of-bounds marker. Dave really gets this. Clarity in mission is huge. and so we want to provide to you a great resource that will literally help you personally and professionally. That's what's great about this tool. Our mission statement mapper is going to help you walk through the steps because the reality is, is a mission statement is not that hard to come up with. Meaning there are clear, defined steps that will take you along the journey and you'll get

up to the point where you go, this is it. Now, you will wrestle with it. Sometimes it comes easier than others. But the point is, is that we're going to take it. take away all of the fear and confusion on how do you develop and create a mission statement. It's through the mission statement map. And again, this will help you personally and professionally. They're six steps.

And it's absolutely free. And beyond the six steps, we're also going to give you a few examples of some of the gold standard companies in America, like Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, and more. So all that coming to you free, just text the word mission to 33444. That's mission. Text it to 33444. Now, if you're international or you can't text, know that the tool is available for you at Entreleadership.com slash podcast. That's Entreleadership.com slash podcast.

Two ways to get the mission statement mapper. It's absolutely free. Jump on this. So to cement this in your mind, we are pulling from an Entree Master series a clip of Dave actually teaching on creating a mission statement. And this will really fire you up so that when you go get your tool, well, now you're ready to go. So here it is. Dave Ramsey speaking on creating a mission statement.

There's a lot of words thrown around in business vernacular and in sales and in entrepreneurship, dream. You need to have a dream. You need to be able to dream. You need to have a vision. And you need to have vision statements. And there's all these things thrown around. And honestly, to the point that I think it's a little bit confusing and a little bit cluttered in the marketplace. So we had to kind of narrow it.

and define it so that internally with our leadership team, with our whole team, for that matter, we could clarify exactly what these things mean. So the deal is this, dreaming is a good thing. Staying in a dream will cause you to live in your mother's basement. And so there's this positive aspect of dreaming and this negative aspect to dreaming. See, dreams are wishes that seldom happen. you don't want to just be a dreamer. To be labeled that in our culture would be a negative connotation. But to dream is a good thing. To dream big is a good thing.

To be crazy out there and to, you know, to think bigger than other people have thought. That's dreaming. That believes you have hope. It believes you think you can impose your will on the marketplace. Those are good things. But dreams are just wishes. And what you're doing when you dream and you can, convey your dream to other people, you are talking about the why. Dreams are essential to winning,

but they've got to come out of the clouds so that they're more tangible and touchable. And a more tangible, touchable dream then is called a vision. It's the next step of evolution in the process. You're thinking big, but then you've got to go do something to start to make it happen. And you're starting to realize that this task or this undertaking, when it comes out of those clouds is a pretty big deal. And it's something that has to be, it's going to require action. The Bible says, where there is no vision, the people perish. Perish. You don't have vision. You're roadkill. You're not going to make it. If all you're looking at it is making it till Friday, all you're looking at is making it through this Q1, you're not thinking out there 12 months, 12 years,

where there is no vision, you die. And so you've got to think about things like this more than just making payroll Friday, more than just collecting that receivable. And those things have to happen too. We have to do the tactical. We have to do the work of running a business. Our team has to too.

But we need to all be talking about all the time, dreams to visions. Now the next level that we take it to, once we say that it's a vision, then we put some real clothes on it and basically do a mission statement then. And a mission statement is an out-of-bounds marker. It defines what you are not as much as what you are. Because here's the thing, as soon as you get successful, as soon as you start making some money, as soon as you start getting a little bit of notoriety, as soon as things start working,

you're going to get opportunities that will ruin your life. Number one cause a small business failure, money problems. Number two calls a small business failure, too much success. And the infrastructure falls in on itself because you grow faster than you have the ability to grow. And you take on a bunch of crap that's outside your wheelhouse and you get distracted and you get your head taken off. We're going to horizontally integrate. No, you're stupid. You just put nice words on it.

Very few people in business can horizontally integrate until they've been in business for years. and do it well. Vertically integrate? Yeah, drill deep, yeah. With what you know how to do, yeah, within the out of bounds markers. But you need something that has white lines, and when you step or your team steps their foot across that line, the whistle blows. Out of bounds.

Flag on the play. And so you've got to have a level of focus. Otherwise, anything goes. If our mission statement is make money. And that's what some people have. They never wrote it down, but that's why they went into business. make money. That's their entire thing. You're going to go broke. Spend some time on developing your mission statement. A great mission statement keeps you on track. It keeps you focused. It allows you to

keep score. Money is just not enough to do it. It needs to be more. Your reason for doing the business has to be more than just make money. That's not good enough. Well, I hope you enjoyed Dave speaking on mission statement. And it occurred to us that many of you would probably love to hear what our mission statement is. So here it is. Ramsey Solutions provides biblically based common sense education and empowerment that give hope to everyone in every walk of life. I'll read that for you again if you want to write that down because it's a great model of a concise but very holistic mission statement. Ramsey Solutions provides biblically based common sense education and empowerment that give hope to everyone in every walk of life.

Now, again, if you want to get started on creating your all-important mission statement, we'll help you. Just text the word mission to 33-444. Mission to 33-444-4. All right, it is that time again. We love getting value-added content from Jeff Mask, a leader at a company that we work with. They serve us.

We are their clients. We believe in what they're doing, their entire mission, since we're talking about mission and culture, well, their entire culture and mission is to serve small businesses like you. So let's listen to our latest one question with Jeff Max. There are so many benefits to good follow-up. List some of those out. And this is so important because, again, sometimes we think that, you know,

customers only thinking about what they could buy from us. They've got a lot going on. Absolutely. And so there are benefits to really efficient, effective follow-up. of those benefits? You can finally scale your growth in a way that you never thought possible. You can increase your conversion rates because you're in front of your prospects and your customers with the right message at the right time. When that occurs, the efficiency of your business is phenomenal. In fact, there's a story that we like to share about this. Christmas of

2003, the business was okay, but not great. At least we were making payroll and we thought, I think we're going to keep the lights on for another month. All right. That feels good. Yeah, right. Wonderful. Clay did the time. His wife came to him and said, you know, what are we going to do for Christmas? And he had that just sickening feeling in his gut, knowing, I don't know. And so at the time, his wife was doing this little side business of making bracelets. And she said, well, I'll do a little bracelet party. We'll make a little bit of money. And Clayte cheered her on, but secretly inside felt really guilty. He just felt like he was failing as a provider and as a husband and thought, I got to do better. So what did he do? He finally implemented what we were teaching our customers to do of really

writing a follow-up marketing message. A seven-step sequence that gave the right message to the right people at the right time. And he thought, you know, I'm going to send it to just a little bit of list because he was a little bit worried. So he sent that out. Two days later, somebody responded saying, I'm interested, I want to do this. They purchased without him even talking to them. And he thought, well, we're on to something. And so that was a great motivation. Before it was hours upon hours. trying to convince somebody. Clayt knew he was on to something. What was it? Follow-up. That's all it was. And he wrote the next steps and over time more sales came in consistently, automatically, because the right message to the right people was getting communicated in a way that Clayte didn't

have to do it manually every time. That scale, that efficiency was his eureka moment and he thought, we have got to get this in the hands of more entrepreneurs. People are doing it on their own, manually day in and day out, and they're not sleeping a night because they know they're not doing it the right way. There's got to be a better way. And I just found it. And I've been telling people about it. Now I personally believe it. I have my own testimony, if you will. I know this is right. And I've got to share this with the world. Hey, again, we want you to connect with Infusionsoft. Go to infusionsoft.com slash Entree. They've got a great free tool there for you. That's their business playbook.

And you can connect directly at infusionsoft.com slash entree. I got an email the other day, folks. The Summit 2016 is barreling towards a sellout. Dave Ramsey, bringing Jim Collins, Seth Godin, Pat Lynchioni, Dr. Henry Cloud, Chris Hogan, and Christy Wright back together. Unbelievable. This lineup is crazy good, and we've got the mystery speaker. Now, a lot of you know who this is now, but I still can't tell you. If you're late to the party, well, then all you got to do is go to on-tradeleadership.com. slash summit and you can see who the mystery speaker is, but boy, oh boy, if that lineup alone that I just laid out for you wasn't great enough, this is an incredible addition. And again, like I said, we truly are moving very quickly towards a sellout, Dallas, Texas, May 22 through 25. It's going to be

great. I'm going to be there and I get to be on the stage with all these people. My goodness, I don't even belong in the room, but I'll take it. It beats working for a living. Go to Entreeleadership.com slash summit. Get your ticket, set up your travel, connect with our team about all the other things that are going on. There's a lot happening there. Don't just show up and wait for the details when you get there. Learn more about the event. Again, Entreeleadership.com slash summit.

Can't wait to see you there. It's going to be great fun in Texas. All right. On behalf of our producer Eric Anthony and the entire Entree leadership team, thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.