EntreLeadership - #360: Investing Your Resources with Craig Groeschel

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

Greatness doesn’t happen accidentally—and it takes a lot more than hard work to achieve it. In fact, one of the biggest game changers, says founder and senior pastor of Life.Church Craig Groeschel, is the way you invest your most valuable resources (aka people, time and money). Tune in to hear Craig break down the four most common mistakes we all make when it comes to divvying up resources. If you’ve got big goals, you can’t afford to miss this one!   entreleadership.com/podcast Craig Groeschel's website EntreLeadership Summit 2020 Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast episodes on resource allocation: Episode 30: Investing Your Resources the Right Way, Part 1 Episode 31: Investing Your Resources the Right Way, Part 2 The Five Fixes to Get Your Team to Act Like Owners - Free Training Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the principles that we constantly talk to business owners about is called the momentum theorem. And the momentum theorem states that focused intensity over time multiplied by the infinite power of God, well, that equals unstoppable momentum. And here's the deal. When it comes to business owners, we do not doubt your intensity. Intensity is kind of the price of admission whenever it comes to starting, running, leading, and owning a business. but what we see business owners are often challenged by is finding a sense of focus over an extended period of time.

From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership podcast where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host Alex Judd, and today we get to have a conversation with Craig Groschelle. He's one of our Summit 2020 speakers, and he's the pastor of one of the largest churches in America. And today, he's going to teach you the business owner on what we're going to be a business owner on one of the topics that he's deeply passionate about, resource allocation. Because here's the deal. If you're a business owner, you need a focus plan for where you are investing your time,

your talent, your money, and your energy. And as Craig lays out in this conversation, there are a few things about resource allocation that we all need to focus on. So we're talking about resource allocation. And if you think about just the two words, what are resources? Resources would be the time, the money, the staff, the assets, whatever we have to move the mission forward. And then allocation comes from the word allocate, which means to direct or distribute. And so the most simple definition that I have that I work with our team on with resource allocation is it's investing the available resources in the present to accomplish your goals and your objectives in the future. What do we have? How can we invest it to bring about the desired results in the future? So that's my best definition of resource allocation. And I love that you use that word invest. And I know that you use that word intentionally.

So can you explain to us kind of the mindset around that word invest? Yeah. So, Alex, in my early years of leadership, I tended to think about spending resources rather than investing them. And I think a lot of times business owners, leaders of nonprofits, we, think, you know, we need to spend the budget. We need to spend our time. And in my opinion, that's kind of a lower level thinking as leaders, what we should do instead of thinking about spending what we have. If we just change our mindset to investing, then it really does change how we approach our resources. Because if I'm spending, I don't expect to get something back or at best I'm getting a trade, meaning I might spend $75 in exchange for a pair of shoes.

If I'm investing $75, though, I'm hoping for a better return. In other words, I might get back $88 if I invest it wisely. And so as leaders of businesses or whatever our organizations would be, it sounds like a play on words, but I really, really believe it's way more than that. In our mindsets, we don't want to spend our resources because at best we're getting a trade. We want to do us say, how can we take whatever we have, the people, time, the energy, the money, any kind of capital assets, and how? how can we invest them toward the mission and believing this will get us a better return in the end?

You said that it was a shift that you made individually and internally. Do you remember what the motivation or the impetus behind that shift from spending to investing was? I wish I could say it was like in a moment. I think it kind of evolved over time in the early years of our leadership, and I say ours, because I might have been the point leader, but I've never been the solo leader. we've always led with the team. We thought when it came to resources, we often had a scarcity mindset and not an abundance mindset.

If you have a scarcity mindset, you always tend to think, well, there's not enough to go around, we're going to lose out, and we're going to be super, super careful. And that's why someone with a scarcity mindset is generally afraid to invest because they think if I invest in this doesn't go well, then I'm not going to have enough. I think in the beginning, Alex, my mindset had to grow from a scarcity mindset, meaning, you know, we only have so much money to, we actually can create more money. We can create a product that brings money. We can cast vision for to change lives, which attracts money.

And moving from that scarcity, we don't have enough mindset to an abundance mindset gave me the ability to then start shifting my assets from spending them and always afraid we're not going to have enough to say, okay, we can invest, meaning we can take risks. and what we actually want is we want to return. And so before long, we started using a really common business term return on investment, but that's just a normal phrase that's used all the time everywhere in our organization. When we invest our time, our people, our resources, we buy this piece of land, we hire a staff member, we buy some new software.

We want to return on the investment. What type of return do we expect when we invest this resource? And if we can get our whole team thinking that way, not just the senior leaders or the executive team or whatever, but everyone on the front lines thinking this way, it will change the way we manage resources in our organizations. And I love that you kind of clarify there. This is not just related to your financial decisions for your organization. This is where you're spending your time individually as a leader. This is where you're investing into the talent of your organization, into the leadership of your organization. It kind of runs the gamut, is that right? Well, 100%. And I think a lot of times as leaders, when we think of resource allocation, a lot of people tend to drift toward money. You know, where are we going to invest the resources we have? We have a limited amount of capital or such. But I think that equally or more important than our money would be our time because we can earn more money, but we cannot make more time. And we do have a limited amount of time. So as leaders, we can be really, really busy and not have a great return or we can be really strategic. on who we invest in, where we spend our time, how we try to use our influence and resources. And so unquestionably, our time really matters. And then our people would be really at the top of the list of our valuable resources.

And if we see them not just as someone who's going to get us a return, but as we see them as an investment, we want to invest in them and help them get better. If they can grow in their leadership, if they can become more capable leaders, if they can expand in their influence, then ultimately, that can help the whole organization win. And so, yes, we have to think broadly. Our people matter. Our time matters.

Our influence matters. All these things are resources that we need to strategically allocate. And we're not going to become great by accident. And, you know, in many ways, that's what Dave Ramsey teaches all the time. You know, every dollar has a name. We know where it's going to go. We don't get out of debt accidentally. We have to be intentional about it.

And I'm choosing, you know, in your personal finance, it might be I'm choosing to give first, and then I'm choosing to save next, and then I'm choosing to pay off these bills. And that's resource allocation. That's at its simplest. And that's what your team teaches all the time, and that's what we need to teach our leaders. And again, Alex, not just our senior leaders, not just our finance team, this needs to be interwoven into the culture so that everyone on the team recognizes we are all allocating very important resources. and what we do with them really does matter. And I know you lay out some specific actions that leaders and team should take with regard to this topic of resource allocation.

As you walk through these, I want to challenge our listeners to really be running through the lens of, okay, how am I doing in this arena with regard to my people, with regard to my time, with regard to my finances of the business, with regard to our time as a whole? Because I think that this is a really exceptional exercise in kind of self-evaluation and looking in the mirror. But I'd love for you to start with that first action, and it's kind of related to just starting with the end in mind. As leaders, what we have to do, Alex, is we have to clearly define the win. And that sounds almost insultingly simple, but the tragedy is this often doesn't happen in the organization. If you walk into a business and you ask 10 different people,

you know, what's your win? What are you trying to accomplish? You might get 10 different answers, and that's not acceptable. So we always say that you can't accomplish what you can't define. What is the win? Something that we're working on. This year, we plan on opening six new church buildings in different cities and states. And so you could say that's the win. But that would be really a limited win because if we open them all and they all have only 50 people coming or they're all understaffed, then how they're appropriate team members, then that's not really a win. So we can't just say we want to grow revenue by 20% or we want to open up two new branches or whatever. We need to be really, really, really clear what is the win?

How many people do we need coming? What type of revenue do we need? What kind of culture are we trying to create and be super, super clear on the win? If we can be clear on the win, then we can start looking at the second step, which is we're investing toward that win. We're intentionally trying to create the win. And I think a lot of times what happens is we're trying to implement what might be five or six or seven-year-old wins, meaning we're still, you know, someone had an initiative years ago. And now we're just coasting in our organizations.

And we're doing what we did in the past and not looking at what is the fresh win. What are we trying to accomplish today? If that's the goal, then what do we need to do with our time, with our money, with our people, our team, our energy to invest it very specifically toward that direct win? I've noticed this for myself, but also with the business owners and the business leaders that we coach and work with every single day. We use the question in our organization and with those business owners, what does winning look like by the end of the quarter? And so we base everything on a quarterly basis and we ask that question, what does winning look like by the end of the quarter? I've noticed that the natural impulse is almost to tend towards ambiguity. It's like we don't get super specific with it and we're not as clear as what you're talking about.

Why do you think that is and why is it important that we don't fall into that trap? Well, first of all, I think what you're doing by naming a clear win each quarter is brilliant, because if it was only like an annual goal, there's too much distance between the goal and the win. What we want to do is we want to clearly define the wins and then we want to have multiple wins. And I believe that businesses, organizations, ministries, they're like people. The way we feel about ourselves determines often how we play. A very talented athlete might get in a slump because he feels like he's not putting wood on the ball, he's not getting the ball and play.

And he's very talented, but he's lost his confidence. We have some organizations that can be filled with great people, but if we haven't helped them feel a win in a long time, then they're going to assume that they're losing. And so I love your idea of quarterly wins. What we do, Alex, and forgive me if I've not answered your question, We can come back to it, but we have 34 different church locations as of this recording. Across the United States, is that correct? Correct.

In 10 going on, 11 different states. And what we do, whenever we meet with the leaders of those different churches, is we have them working on one win, not two, not three, not four, because we find that it's really hard to win in three or four different places. And what we try to do is we try to create a win that has cascading positive effects. There are certain things in what we do, and I promise you in every business owner's mind, every business we're talking to, there'll be certain wins that if you win in that one area, it creates positive movement. Financially, culturally, emotionally, there's cascading wins to it. And we want our teams to do, we want to have six to 12 week windows, meaning I want something that you can celebrate and accomplish within six weeks, no more than 12.

And the reason is because we want them to feel that. Now, you asked the question of why are we so ambiguous, and I think that the natural trajectory of work life is toward the ambiguous. It's just doing what we did yesterday. It's showing back up and doing what's the path of least resistance. It takes intentional work to have intentional wins. You don't get better accidentally. And so because I'm lazy, because I want to do what's easy, it's really, really easy to drift.

That's why we have to be intentional. And we can't expect our team members just to come. up with the wins on their own. Some of them might, but most of them are coming and doing, you know, doing what they believe is their job. That's what we want to do is we want to create, you may have heard the term B-H-A-G, I think it was Collins that phrased that big, hairy, audacious goal. What I call it is an S-Bag. We want B-Hags, we want those big, hairy, audacious goals, but I don't want to wait five years to accomplish a big, hairy goal. Instead, I want S-bags, and I did make this up, so you can make fun of me. That stands for stretching,

but achievable goals, meaning I don't want it to be easy. I don't want to be guaranteed, but I want it to be achievable. And like you, I want to do it in a quarter or less, because we just accomplished something. So here's the win, whatever it is. In our world, it might be we're going to increase the number of people volunteering by 20 percent. So think about this, we're a church. So if I go from, you know, a thousand volunteers to 1,200 volunteers, what will those new volunteers be likely to do? They're going to have more emotional buy-in.

Therefore, they're more likely to invite people to church. They're more likely to pray. They're more likely to be generous because they're more involved. They're more likely to be in church because they have something to do in church. So that's a very specific win that has cascading wins with it. That's what we want to do in our businesses. We want to look at what is an S-bag? what is the clearly defined win, then once we have that, we want to take our time, our money,

our people, our talent, our energy, and we want to invest it toward that win, and when we're focused toward it, hopefully we'll have the win, and then we just had a very successful resource allocation. We took the resources entrusted to us. We moved them in a very specific direction. We moved the needle organizationally. Our team members feel like, oh my gosh, we just won. We did something together. We are good. We're moving somewhere. We create another win for the next quarter, and we do it again and again. And then you wake up and all those micro wins move into your best year ever, your most profitable, your best year of ministry, whatever it is. But it's not going to happen accidentally. And I love that focus on the cascading wins that come from that number one priority.

I was, it was today. I was on the phone with a woman that owned a pet care company, and she had 10 employees. She's crushing it right now. Her business grew like 50% in 2019 alone. And she was trying to define her number one priority that she was going to focus on. And she was doing exactly what you're talking about. She was trying to define the win. And we walked through this exercise where she listed out everything that was going on in the organization and everything that she could work on. And she looked at me and she said, how do I define one? Like, how on earth do I pick one thing to focus on. And it sounds like that cascading effect question could be the answer to that question. Possibly so. And, you know, I'm not going to say in a startup organization, there are a lot of

different things to do. And so she might need to focus on more than one thing. Like, you know, she might need accounts payable working. She might need to hire somebody. She might need to return calls and make sure the door's open. So she might have multiple things. But if three years from now, if she's not narrowing the focus, then she's probably not doing her job. And so, yes, I hope she could name one clear win that she's moving her whole team toward. Again, in the startup phase, there's just getting the rocket off the ground takes a little more energy and more places. Once you're moving in a direction, she might be able to increase the focus. But to those who do have teams or initiatives, if we can look for one area that really does move the team emotionally,

and then create other areas of profitability or effectiveness or efficiency, those types of things can really build the morale and also move the needle toward whatever the specific objective is. And I know I read just before we got on here that your organization, Life Church, was just named by Glass Door, the number one place to work in terms of small to medium businesses or organizations in America. Is that right? It is. It is. It is. It's a super. super thankful for that. I can't take much credit for it. I've got people that wake up every day really zoning in on creating a culture that were great people thrive in. And so I'm thankful for a whole team that made that award possible. But that's an engaged team. And I would imagine there's something to do with this fact of like, we've got a clear vision. We are aligning and

allocating resources and alignment with that vision. It sounds like that's something that would create an engaged team culture. Well, 100%. And, and, and, the word you're using is so important, you know, how engaged are your team members? And that's something that we try to measure through different surveys and then just, not just the formal surveys, but just your intuition as you walk around, are people laughing, are they smiling, are they coming to work on time, or do they have an attack mindset? Is there camaraderie? Is there collaboration? Or are we dealing with silos, bad attitudes, and poor work ethics? So those things really do matter. And again, why is it that there are a few?

college football teams that seem to dominate for years at a time. They've got a winning mindset, and they tend to attract the best people. The reason they have a winning mindset is because they're taking their talent, their resources, they're allocating them in the right places, they're creating many small wins that end up leading toward a championship. And that's the very same thing we want to do in our organizations is we want to create a culture where great people thrive, they become better, and there's clear direction. This is what we stand for. this is what we're trying to accomplish. Then we know that the resources are going in the right way,

and we actually do put points on the board, whatever that looks like in your organization, and people want to be a part of a place like that. If they don't feel like there's clarity, they're not going to be engaged. If they don't feel like they're valued, they're not going to be engaged. If there's not a clear strategy, they're going to lose interest over time. So all those things do matter in creating a great culture where great people thrive. Well, I love that college football example, and I think that connects perfectly to that third action. of investing resources in the direction of the desired result.

Because, I mean, what's crazy is in the world of college football, everyone has a pretty clearly defined win. Like, everyone wants to be at the same spot by January. And that's kind of the win within college football. But what's crazy is that some programs are successful in getting there and some are not. They all have the same win, but there are some programs that it seems like maybe the area that they excel is in that arena of alignment. Like they are able to actually point their resources in the direction of that win.

That's incredibly hard. So I'd love to know what are the lessons you've learned from a leadership perspective of getting everyone aligned, but then also keeping everyone aligned to this is our win. This is where we're going. We're pointing in that direction. If we're going to stay with the football metaphor for just a moment, think ultimately the win is going to be, if we're talking college, is the college championship. We want to win the whole thing. Yeah. And so in order to do that, we're probably going to have to be undefeated or maybe we can

lose one game. And so if we know real clearly what the goal is, and that's everybody's goal, so that's really probably not going to be the thing that's going to drive you every day, every week. So what we have to do is offensively, we might have a goal to get five yards of play every time we're on the ground, or we might have a goal to not turn over the ball. Or on, you know, in defense, I was a kid. or was my only role as a football player, so I'm going to lose credibility. I don't have the language to go too deep with this metaphor. But special teams may have a different win than

offense, than defense, than the kicking team. But all those teams are going to have a clearly defined win that then points to the ultimate goal of the championship. So in our organizations, that's what we want to know, is if we don't have the real clear big win and have the smaller team wins aligning and moving in that direction, that's where we get into trouble. And this is what you see all the time is you've got my department fighting for resources. I want the money. I want your attention. I want the space. And we feel like if you get it, then I don't. Well, we're not on the same team. What we want to do is we want to say, we want the resources that we need to get to the goal, but ultimately the goal is the goal. Not my little win, but the only time my win matters is when my

win contributes to the overall win. And I hope that's not totally confusing, but it probably is. We might have 20 different teams, and each of those teams have individual wins, but each of those individual wins have to be contributing to the overall win. And that's when you start to have clarity and alignment in your organizations. So before we jump into the mistakes, I'd love to know related to that, I mean, for the past, when did you start the church, Craig? The church is 24 years old started in 1996. And how many total campuses now did you say? As of right now, 34 campuses in 10 different states. So as fast as y'all are growing, I would assume that for you in the leadership position, but also for the other leaders that you have around the organization, there are a lot of opportunities

that come your way that look really good, that could really quickly and easily distract you from the thing that you feel like you're designed and called and driven to do. So how do you keep yourself personally? How do you have the discipline? But then also for your other leaders to stay on course and to keep driving towards the win and not get distracted or deviated from that. This is super, super important. And what we know about growth is growth creates complexity and then complexity kills growth.

And so any growing organization over time is going to have to fight. complexity. What tends to happen is if someone makes a mistake, someone else creates a policy or a rule. And I wish I could tell you who said this first, but they basically said that rules and policies, they call it organizational scar tissue. You know, anywhere you see, anywhere you see a policy, there is someone that made a mistake. What we try to do is we try to work toward managing the person rather than creating a rule. If someone makes a mistake, let's try to manage that person and let's let's make sure no one else makes the mistake, but let's not try to create policies and rules that slow things down. We have to stay nimble. We have to be able to execute quickly and execute with

clarity. So this is a problem. And to be quite honest with you at my next all-staff meeting, which is in about four weeks, I'm already working on a talk on simplicity because, you know, now with hundreds and hundreds of employees, we're moving slower. And there's more rules. There's more red tape and it's keeping us from being as effective as we need to be. We have to acknowledge that's a problem. I'll tell our team, kill a rule as often as you can, cut a meeting. We don't want to be in too many meetings. Cut who's coming to meetings. If someone doesn't add value, don't waste their time. Try to empower a person. Try to eliminate steps. If something takes three steps, ask ourselves, can we do it in two? Over time, spending money never tend to.

to stay complacent, it always tends to increase the same with time. What we want to do is say, how can we invest this, get a better return? More does not always mean better. You can put a lot more money into something, a lot more time, and sometimes you get a very diminishing return based on what's invested. How do we take what we have, invest in the best places, and truly get a really good return? Could you just plan to give that talk to the United States government as well? Is that, Are you up for that? Hey, it's a lot easier to talk than it is to live because we're trying to simplify here, right? Yes, sir.

Okay, let's jump into these mistakes because we've got kind of the outline for what is proper resource allocation now and why it's so important. So I love the first one because I think it's one that we often don't think we are susceptible to, but it's that area of static resource allocation. So teach us what that actually means. So the first big mistake we tend to make is doing what we did last year, or last quarter or last week. And, you know, I come from the church world. And the church I served at before this, our budget would change like one or two percent a year,

meaning essentially we ran the same plays, had the same strategy, and it hardly changed at all. If your budget's changing one or two or three or five percent a year, that means you probably aren't going to be growing at all. What I'd rather see is I'd rather say, what's fixed, and you might have, you know, 40, 50, 60% of whatever you have that you have to put in the same place every year. But there's a lot of things that feel fixed that aren't fixed. What we want to do is instead of just running the same place doing what we did last time, I'll often ask if we were starting over today now, would I continue to do all that we're doing? If the answer is no, then why in the world are we doing

it? If we replicated this, duplicated what we're doing somewhere else, would we do all these things, hire all these roles. And if the answer is, no, we wouldn't do them all, no, we wouldn't hire all these people, then why do we have them on the team right now? So I just tell, you know, every business owner look really, really hard to work against just running the same place. Even if things are working, the world around just changing so fast that we should be changing our strategy, not just annually, but better yet quarterly, or maybe even faster than that, depending on the age of your organization and the size and the rate of growth. I think that hits home so hard because I think all of us, even individually, from a leadership

perspective personally, our expectations for ourselves is that we will be a different person this year than we were last year and that we will have different results and different outcomes, but then if we actually look at where we're spending our time, our money, our talent, and our effort, a lot of times it doesn't actually reflect anything different. No, no. I guess it's maybe Alcoholics Anonymous or some other good organization that says, you know, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. And, you know, if you come over the new year and your plan is the same, you're probably going to look for the similar results. And so we want to really have the courage to not just to tweak, but every now and then, you know, really take a gamble and say, let's swing hard, let's believe big, let's take a big percentage of something that was going to. toward an initiative that doesn't have much of a return, and let's move it, let's bet the farm, let's move it somewhere else and really try to move the needle on what matters. Okay, so the first one was static resource allocation. The next one was under-resourcing a specific

area of the team or the business. Explain what this means and why is this such a common mistake. Well, the second mistake, in my opinion, is under-resourcing, and that's just when we have something that if we gave them a little more oxygen, they could run. a lot harder. It could be that we need to give them more space, more time, more money, more staff, more tools, more resources, better computers, better support system, whatever it is. But there's a lot of times that there's bright spots in our organization that have life, but we're putting our resources toward the dead spots. If we took them away from the dead, moved them toward what's bright, and gave them some more resources, there could be exponential returns. And we've seen that again and

again here, just in our, you know, years ago, we kind of created what was like the first church online, and we gave them almost no budget whatsoever. They had exponential growth, and yet we didn't really change our budget. And so we looked at it and said, okay, we've got a real bright spot here. We've got all these other programs that are kind of been flat for a long time, but they take, you know, 4X the investment as the church online. What if we moved resources and better funded this new initiative? And it went for, from, you know, just growing from 10,000 to 40,000, going to hundreds of thousands with a little more investment. My guess is that, you know, everyone listening right now, there could be

team member, there could be a team, there could be an idea, there could be an initiative that with a little more resources could have an exponential return. And that's why we want to reallocate. Let's take our resources away from what's flat or diminishing, and let's put it toward potential and growth. How do you, as a leader, make sure that you are spending, at least some of your time in energy, focusing on these opportunities that you could potentially double down on, and not just focusing on problems and issues that need to be solved. Problems will take all of your time. And I think it was Gerber in his book who said, you don't want to just work in the business, you want to work on the business. As leaders, that's something

we have to really, really focus on. I know that the trajectory of what I do is toward the urgent and whatever screaming the loudest. But what's most of the most of the most of the most of the important is often whenever I can get up above that and look at, you know, what's working, where is there momentum? If we shifted toward this direction, we could really do something well. And so that's, you know, what we want to do as a leader. I need to do that all the time. But we want to empower everyone in our organizations to think this way. If it's just the people in the corner office, we're being really, really foolish. We want everyone to wake up and think about investing what we have in the most valuable places. And that's when it gets really, really special.

It's not just a few important people making the decisions. It's everyone are the important people, and we're all making these decisions together. Okay, let's jump into the next one. We hit on under-resourcing. Now the next mistake is the exact opposite. It's that we're over-resourcing an area. Why does this occur? Oh, it's super easy. It happens all the time. So we're going to increase the budget by 5 percent, and then by 5 percent, by 5 percent, year over year, and before long, you're putting too much money, too much time towards something, and you're not getting a better return. turn. And this is one of the biggest problems. Again, my expertise or my experience is in the church world. And you see this quite often. What I like to do is I try to look at where percentages go. If too much percentage goes towards staff, and that tends to be what happens in the church world, and the older the church gets, the more percentage goes toward the staff, the less is going toward expansion to evangelism, to growth, or to other things. And to me, that's a problem.

Over time, most organizations become overstaffed, not understaffed. Honest to goodness, I would rather be slightly understaffed rather than slightly overstaffed. Super, super big issue. When you're overstaffed, you're fighting for resources, you become more territorial. This is mine and this is not my area. It's harder to make decisions. You move slower. When you're slightly understaffed, you tend to have more of a collaborative spirit because you have to.

you're able to move faster, you make quicker decisions, and you kind of got this all-in, one-for-all type mindset. And so I'm crazy, crazy passionate about watching for any areas where we've got spending drift, where we've got too many resources going, and we think that we're doing a good thing by funding this with a lot of time, a lot of resources, but we actually might be slowing it down and making it fat. There are a lot of areas, I promise people listening right now, that if you put a little less toward what you're doing, you might actually see an uptick in return on investment.

Well, it's amazing how what people are capable of, myself included, when our backs are against the wall and we feel like we've got to do a little bit more with a little bit less. Yes, yeah, it's amazing. And you feel like you win and it's fun. You're like, wow, we did this. And you're right. That's a great way to see your team win together. Okay, so I've got two questions on this. I love that you keyed on the topic of staffing. because it seems like that's where this issue most shows up for the small business owner. And a lot of times what we see around here in working with small businesses around the country is that they are not over-resourced because they are unaware.

They are not ignorant to the fact that they are over-resourced. It's just that with these staffing issues, it becomes a very emotionally tough issue. Yes. Because a lot of times, I mean, it involves people. And we always say business is easy until people get involved. And so I guess how do you keep your head on straight to make sure that you're guarding your responsibility as a leader and not getting too emotionally affected and causing the organization to become over-resourced? Let's say you do have too many staff members and they're good people. You care about them.

You don't know what to do about it. One thing to do is kind of wait for the natural attrition and then don't replace them. So someone moves, their spouse gets transferred. They have a change of family situation. decide to go home and be a parent, whatever. And you just, you kind of wait that out. If that's not happening naturally and you feel like you need to be more aggressive, then really not easy, but you might take, you know, your lowest performers and just kind of be real, real honest. And what you want to do is you want to give them a chance to succeed and to be successful, but just tell them,

hey, here's what we need out of you. Here's what we're not getting. You've got this much time to, you know, produce such and such. Here's what I'm going to do to help you get it. And if we don't get there, then we're going to have to make a change. And what you're doing is you're giving them a chance to add value and you're being real honest and you're trying to help them get there because if they can produce, then you can all win. If they don't get there by the specific amount of time, then what you can just do as best you can to say, you know, we're going to need to make a change. And I want to be generous with you as much as you can. And if you treat them well, you can transition people out. It seems really, really harsh. But if you don't have the whole organization,

in mind, you can let one or two people that you care about ending up compromising the other 20 or 30 people that you care about. It's not uncaring to do the right thing. It's actually the most caring thing to do the right thing. And this is the part about business that none of us like. It's never easy. You never wake up wanting to eliminate people that you care about. But if you're not doing that every now and then, chances are you aren't really leading the way you should be leading because every now and then you do have to clean to right size or to remove a person that's got a wrong attitude and not making a difference. And no fun, but it is a part of being an effective leader. And then that tension between under-resourced versus over-resourced. I mean, I know probably

a lot of us have worked for organizations before that were focused on being lean and were maybe too lean and so employee retention was horrible because people were getting burnt out. But then we've also seen organizations that are just wasteful. So how do you monitor and keep your thumb on the pulse of your organization to make sure you're right in that sweet spot of where you want to be? In a dynamic growing organization, it's hard to always be in the sweet spot. So the pendulum's kind of going to swing. So some quarters, you might be unintentionally over-resourcing and you kind of realize it. And other times you realize, okay, now we're under-resourcing and you realize it and you correct. So I would say there's got to be a lot of course correction.

That's why we like rolling budgets. I don't want to wait 12 months to adjust the budget. I want to be adjusting the budget every quarter. And the same is true in every other area. We only have, not just time, but we only have so much energy. So for me, I have more creative energy early in the day. So if I'm writing and producing content, I want to, I want to, devote my early day in that direction. If on the other hand, I'm solving problems and doing stuff

early in the day and I'm late in the day, then I'm not going to be as effective. So we want to make sure if a rocket's going to the moon, they're going to make thousands, maybe millions of micro adjustments the whole way. If they don't, they're going to end up in a bad place. And we as leaders want to make lots of micro adjustments. We don't want to wait until the pendulum swings far too wide one way or the other, but always tweaking. And that takes, constant evaluation takes humility. We have to admit, hey, we're wrong. We put too much here or we didn't see the opportunity. And what we want to do is we want to create a culture that's flexible enough to say, we're not going to get it right the first time or the next time.

It's not, we're not always going to be right, but we're always going to be adjusting. Okay. So the mistakes are static resource allocation under-resourcing an area of the business, over-resourcing an area of the business. And then this last one, it honestly caught me a little bit off guard because it feels a little bit different, but it's all about that topic of risk. So why is this so important and what do we need to understand about this? So these all come from a leadership podcast teaching. So these are my made up ideas based on my own experience. So just to be clear, this is kind of my opinion. And my opinion is that sometimes we're just too risk averse. So I know we've probably got some people that are starting

up right now. And you might take some risk because you have to. but there are certain risk if you take them, they're like do or die, meaning if this doesn't come through, we don't pay the bills and we go home and we're, you know, one of the four out of five businesses that don't make it in the first however long. And so you have to be wise. The longer an organization exists and the more successful they become, you would think they could afford to take risks, but what tends to happen is they become more risk adverse. They start to think, well, now we've got to protect this, we've got more at stake, we've got more

people. And the very things that got them to where they were, which was taking risks, investing in some things that could have a real return, they end up not doing. And the riskiest thing might be not taking risks over time, because you can't make an investment without having some risk, right? If you want a 10% return on your money, you've got to put it in a place that it's not going to be guaranteed. Again, you can't be just crazy and take every risk, but as a leader, you've got to be super calculated. I'm going to take the resources I have. I want to invest them in a place that we think,

we believe this is going to get a return, but there's going to be some risk. There's rarely going to be an investment that's completely risk-free. If we're always playing not to lose, then our odds of winning actually decreased significantly in leadership. What is one action that you hope people take as a result of hearing you present this content today?

I think, Alex, the most important thing I'd say is be intentional. There's never a ministry that really moves the needle accidentally. There's never a business that becomes wildly profitable accidentally. There's never an organization that wins year over year over year just by showing up and running the same place I did 10 years ago. And so I'd say it's just be intentional. What is it that matters to you? What is it that's a true win? where can you invest the resources you have to get that intended result, and then enjoy the ride

like crazy, meaning when you do win, when you do move the needle, when you do have something, sit back with your team and laugh about it, cheer, a high five, kind of have a party, throw stuff at each other, turn on some music and dance, and then come back and do it the next day. That's the thing I think a lot of people forget that doing business well is just fun, Meaning it's the same as I was an athlete, and so I like the sports metaphors, but you could pick any kind of genre. Whatever you do, winning is fun. And ultimately, that's what winners do. Winners define what the target is, and then they invest.

It might be they practice. It might be they get up early and they write every day or they collaborate with their team members or they paint or they sculpt or whatever they do. They're taking their resources and they're moving them in that direction of the clear win. They have small wins, small wins, small wins that add up to a really big win. And then you just kind of hug everybody that you're with and say, guess what, we got to win together. And that's just really fun. Be intentional and enjoy the ride because it really is fun to move the needle together. That's pretty powerful.

Well, I'll tell you, your business and leadership podcast is one of my go-toes. You and your team put out some incredible content every single episode. So we would definitely recommend everyone listen to that. But I'll tell you, I was reminded today that you are not just a business and leadership teacher. You are one heck of a preacher as well. We feel as though we exist to help the small business owner win. And so I felt in coming into this conversation today, I would be remiss not to ask Craig Rochelle to give the small business owner to close out. Maybe it's just a small mini message to give them the courage and the decisiveness that they need to do what they do every day.

So I'm going to get out of your way and let you talk directly to the thousands of small business owners around the country that listen every day. What would you want to tell that audience, Craig? Well, first of all, so I am a pastor, and sometimes there are business owners that feel like what they're doing. If people of faith, they may feel like that's like a secondary importance. And what I want to say is that's just completely stupid. That what the small business owner does is incredibly important on so many different. fronts. And in the same way, I care for people in the church, you care for the people on your team. And you can do that from a faith perspective if you're a person of faith, or you can do it just

from the fact that you're a great person and a great leader and you care about people. So what you do matters. I believe with all my heart that creating any kind of business is creating tremendous value that impacts everybody in a positive way. What you're doing is you're creating jobs that benefit families. You are creating a business. You are creating a business. product or service that people are willing to trade their hard-earned money to get whatever it is you created. And that means you're adding value. So what you do is righteous. It's significant. It matters in the community. It matters in the economy. It matters to families. It matters to the future. It really matters. Now, how do you do it? Well, the quote, you and I talked about offline

beforehand with simply this. We talked about victory. A lot of times winning, hitting the goal, people tend to think that that's what you do in the future, meaning you're going to be a real business when you've got 10 employees, or you're going to be a real business when you've got a half a million dollars or 10 million dollars or a billion dollars in revenue or whatever. And that's just not true. You're a real business today. And the victory or the win is not something that just happens in the future, but the victory takes place when you do what's right today.

Meaning, you show up, you treat people well, you lead with integrity, you add value to people's lives. You believe in them. You create a product or a service that people want and desire. That's significant. So you're not going to be successful way out there in the future whenever you hit whatever that arbitrary goal is that you have. You are successful today when you show up and you lead well. Feel that. Embrace it. Go do it. What you do matters. And I celebrate every victory and win that you have as business leaders. Boom. Thank you. That was amazing. We really, really appreciate appreciate you, everything you stand for, everything you do. We can't wait to see you in Orlando at the Entree Leadership Summit this year. Thank you so much for your time and your investment in our audience.

Yeah, I'm honored to be a part and I stand with you guys. I can't wait to be a part of Entry leadership as well. If you're like me, that conversation is just a little bit convicting because I think Craig kind of forces all of us to look in the mirror and think about where are we currently investing our most important resources? Where are we putting our time, our talent, our effort, our energy, our manpower, our money? Because the place where we're putting those, well, that's going to paint a pretty clear picture of our future. And hey, before we go real quick, I want to make sure you, the business owner, know about a free training that we've got coming up. It's all about how to get your employees to start acting like owners. How do you get them to care

about the mission, the product, customer service, just as much as you do as the owner. And so if you want to join us for that free training, text the word of five fixes to 3344. That's the word five fixes spelled FI-V-E-F-I-X-E-No-S, no spaces, to 33-44-4, or just click the link in the show notes. We look forward to seeing you at that free training. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast. If you did, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25, Amazon Gift Card, you can review this episode by clicking the length that's in the show notes. And be sure to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership.

This episode was produced by Tim Hull, and it was edited and mixed by Will Rutter. I'm Alex Judd, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.