EntreLeadership - Don't Wait for the Race to Start Training

Episode Date: April 11, 2020

Tune in to hear Daniel Tardy and Michael Finney respond to some business owners' fears around Coronavirus.   Give us your feedback on these daily, COVID-19, bonus episodes: Text DAILYBONUS to 33444   Get access to the EntreLeadership Weekly Report Tool, FREE, for you and your team for 3 months: Text TEAMHEALTH to 33444 or visit entreleadership.com/weekly-report   Follow us on social media to stay plugged in to everything we’re doing to help the small business owner win: LinkedIn Instagram Facebook Twitter YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, this is Alex Judd, and this is a bonus episode that our team recorded specifically to bring you hope and practical action items that you can use as a small business owner to tackle this whole coronavirus situation. So here's Daniel Tarty with Ramsey Operating Board member, Michael Finney. Hey, guys, Daniel Tarty and the Entree leadership team here at Ramsey Solutions. And I'm joined today by Michael Finney. Michael is our chief digital officer. He's been with Ramsey for 13 years now. He's also one of our operating board. members and leads alongside me and Dave and our team every day here. And so it's a pleasure to have you with us. Thanks for being here, Finney. Yeah, thanks for having me, Daniel. It's fun to get to do this. We do this kind of stuff all the time, but now we get to do it for others. So it'll be fun. Yeah. It occurs to me that everyone at Ramsey calls you and I both just by our last name, tardy and Finney. So I almost said, like, it's good to have Michael here. And I'm like, that feels so so weird to say Michael because everybody calls you Finney. So, you know, when I was growing up, like,

you know, at school, people didn't know my first name. I don't know. It's just something about our last names that people, people just do it, right? Like, I didn't ask for it, but hey, that's it. It just rolls off the tongue. So, Finney, we're talking with business leaders today about leading in times of chaos. Obviously, everything has been disrupted as a result of our response to the coronavirus. Business leaders especially are trying to figure this out. A lot of changes, a lot of things to adapt to. and you and your team, I'm just so inspired by how much you guys have been a big part of the solution for us here at Ramsey. From a technology standpoint, you guys stood up a lot of things that allowed our team to quickly be able to work from home. And we've never done that before.

Some companies, that's old hat. For us, we are in the building, brick and mortar, come in physically meet in conference rooms, and all of a sudden we're not doing that. What was it like for you when you realized for the first time? oh, we've got to stand up all these systems. I remember it vividly. I was on spring break. And things were changing so fast, right?

It was like, oh, everything's going to be fine to, oh, like, maybe some stuff's going to start shifting here. And then, you know, Trump's changed, and then the governor changed, and then the city changed. And then all of a sudden, oh, we're going to be working from home next week. And we had about like five days to get 900 plus team members that are all used to work in here, all of our rhythms. but thankfully we were invested enough in technology. I give a big props to Chelsea, our director of IT. I mean, he has been, you know, just preparing, you know, things all along, right? Just in case, right?

Like, like not crazy amounts of time, but just, you know, making sure you have the right infrastructure in place so that when we did, when we were able to make that switch, it was actually even possible, right? And it was fun thinking about how all the rhythms that we have here and all the ways that we have meetings and we're such a collaborative company. And we really had to take some time and think through how is that going to change with all of us being at home? And so we wrote up some guidelines and sent it out to the whole team and said, hey, here's some ideas for how we can work from home and keep the collaboration going. And it's been a fun experiment and I think been pretty

successful so far. So I love it. I want to get some of those ideas. But first, I want to highlight this principle that I hear in what you said. Chelsea and the team, were getting prepared long before they had to. You know, and if your business owner going, well, that sounds great, but I wasn't prepared, what do I do? We'll get to some things you can do to navigate this. But that's true in life, right? Like, if you wait until the day of the race to start your training, like, you're not going to win that race. You know, if you wait until the storm is there before you buy the umbrella, you're going to get wet that day.

So talk a little bit about your team especially in technology. thinking about potential risks and threats and things that can happen. And of course, the rate of change in technology. And it's just always, you buy a computer and by the time you get home, it's out of date. How does your team keep that mindset of always preparing before they, it may not be on fire, but there's always this discipline of staying prepared ahead of time? It's a good question. When it comes to technology, you're right, things do shift fast. Probably one of the biggest things to do is to pay attention to the trends, right? Like, used to, you had to, like, be in the office to work on a mainframe, right? Like, to even get computing resources, like, you actually had to, like,

book time on the mainframe computer. You know, those days are long gone now, but what things have shifted recently? Well, it's been, things have shifted to the cloud, right? Like, used to, like, look at your budget or look at some financials or some sensitive documents. Like, you had to be in the building and on the network, right? And that was solved a long time ago with some solutions like VPN virtual private networking. But even then we've made more and more moves to like the cloud, right? Where we've had tools that we can just log in and use with a username and password, and then we know that it's secure.

And so just the fact that we've been kind of paying attention to what those trends are and staying up with those trends as opposed to saying, oh, we don't need that. We'll never need that. So that when the time comes, we go, oh, now 900 people don't have to be in the office to access the files that they need and the software that they need in order to get their jobs done. And so really just paying attention to those trends and making sure, you know, you don't want to be on the bleeding edge. You don't want to be, like, because you never know if something's going to actually work out, right? But you also don't want to lag too far behind because you don't know what shifts are going to happen.

Well, it occurs to me, you know, we talk about all the time in leadership, the importance of vision and being visionary. I think sometimes we're just talking about that in the context of like cast the vision, what's the mission for the company. But technology is really, you've got to be visionary. You've got to be, I mean, what you're saying is you've got to be anticipating this is where this is headed. How can we be ready to embrace it versus kind of be pummeled by the fact that we weren't ready for it? Right. And there's two sides to this, right? Like there's visionary in terms of like your team, right?

And what is your team going to need to be successful? What are the tools and software? What can I do to make my team more efficient, right? With the day-to-day work that they do. But then there's also for your customers, right? And that's probably where the more visionary stuff tends to happen, right? is out there for the customer. So if you have this focus on the customer as opposed to going, well, you know what, maybe I can just like shoot a camera and like, you know, and like we can just

take this thing that we used to deliver in person and now we'll just deliver it on video. Maybe you start thinking of, well, there's some new ways to deliver video or there's some new ways, you know, that people can interact with our brand that aren't just, you know, pointing a camera at it and doing what we've always done, right? And so technology opens up your options, right? And if you're on the leading edge and you know what more of those options are and what people are developing and creating of what new platforms and software there is, then that gives you the opportunity to take advantage of these shifts when they come, because you actually know what's possible and you've been preparing for that as opposed to just, well, we're going to do it the way we've

always done, but we're just going to do it digitally now. That's really good. I wrote down something that I heard in that is that vision is really about the customer. When you think about your customer, that should be the beginning of where your vision's coming from. It's really cool. You know, you're a numbers guy. you're a really smart you even if I remember correctly have done like actuary work in your past is that right yeah numbers matter a lot and they can also be overwhelming right now as business leaders are paying attention to certain metrics kPI's we call them kPI's key performance indicators and essentially it's like you break that down it's an indicator of performance and an area that's key But how do I know what to track and how do I mean, my day's so busy just leading the team and trying to respond to everything going on in the marketplace right now?

What should I be paying attention to? I mean, cash is king, but what other numbers are important for me to be watching so that I can have vision? So I can be kind of reading the tea leaves on what's coming down the pipe for my business so we can respond and pivot appropriately. Yeah, it really depends on your business. So revenue is always a lagging indicator, right? Like, people pay you for a product or a service, right? But before that happened, there were things that that customer was engaging with or thinking about. And depending on your product or service, those may be things that you can measure.

And so for us, it's simple stuff like website traffic, right? Like, how's website traffic doing? And you might notice trends in that. Like, oh, people are visiting more during the day now than they used to. They used to visit more at night. Well, guess what? It's because they're home. That might present an opportunity to you.

maybe you have a product and you can measure engagement on it. Are people engaging with it more or less as a result of what's going on right now? And so those are leading indicators, right? Like there are things that are upstream of revenue. Maybe it's something like as simple as a financial report, right? Like maybe you're looking at your accounts receivable report and you're going, huh, our accounts receivable are ticking up a little bit, right? And like people are holding on to cash a little bit more.

They're not paying out quite as quickly anymore. So our director of analytics and insights, Matt, the guy is absolutely brilliant. And he and his team got together and they said, let's come up with just all these ideas of leading indicators that we have all throughout the company. And we're measuring about 50 things right now that aren't revenue, that are things upstream from revenue. Some are kind of close to revenue. Some have a loose tide of revenue.

But it's all things that we can do to get a dashboard to say, how are things shifting and changing right now? And you might notice some stuff really unexpected. We have one line of business that's kind of been small, that's kind of been this thing, that's kind of been this thing over here. But all of a sudden, because of more people being at home and have more time to think about things, it's just like shot up. And we saw that and we went, well, we wouldn't have thought to like market that more or

talk about that more. But because we're actually looking at it, now we're actually going to talk about that thing more and do more with that and say, how can we take advantage of this thing? So think upstream from revenue. That's so cool. What do customers do before revenue ever get there? and then start, is there a way that you can measure that? You can kind of create a little crystal ball and predict the future a bit, right?

Let's bring it to the world of a business owner. I've got seven employees and I'm going, that's great. I don't have a chief digital officer. I don't have a director of analytics and insights and blah, blah, blah. It's me and my seven guys. I guess I can't really track data because I'm not sophisticated enough. No, I mean, there's still things that regardless of your level of automation and how clean your data. is, there's still things you could pay attention to, right?

Yeah, absolutely. It could be anything from, are the phones ringing as much? Right? Or is the time of day that the phones are ringing, shifting? It could be something as simple as, like I said, your website traffic. Like, there are free website traffic tools out there that are fairly easy to load on a page. So, absolutely. There are lots of things that you can look at. Yeah, that's good. I think the principle is regardless of how much data you have, this is a time that you've got to be paying attention. And not just every week or every month, throughout every day. I mean, the more chaotic it is out there, the more frequent we should probably

be looking at our numbers than our different metrics. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, you know, we're looking at our revenue and expenses right now daily, right? We're just, we're like, you know what, times are a little uncertain. We know lots of stuff in this economy is shifting. Let's just play closer attention because it's not business as normal right now. So let's play closer attention to what's going on, both on the revenue side, on the expense side, and then anything else that we can track. so good. You know, I think our whole world is figuring out how to do the virtual experience of meetings, Zoom and, you know, we use Microsoft teams. That's been great. Churches, schools, businesses. I think

there's this question across all of that right now where we're going, is this, is this like the new normal? Like, are we now all going to be using this all the time, even if we go back a little bit to the way it was? or do you think we're going to go all the way back and ditch the virtual meetings? Like, what are you sensing is, like, the bigger picture of what's happening right now? Well, some of this is certainly going to be temporary, right? Like, when things go back, you know, some things are going to go back to normal, but not all the way back to normal. So I saw that, you know, one of the, you know, web conferencing companies was up like 20-fold

right now. That's just crazy. I think 20-fold growth, like, in just a couple of months because this is going on. I saw that podcasts are down a little bit right now, just industry. Why? Because guess what? People usually like to listen to podcast in their cars and they're not driving as much. Well, people are going to go back to driving normally again, although I have enjoyed the lighter traffic. That's been kind of nice. But, you know, for us, it's like if we wanted to do a virtual meeting, like, if you and I wanted to have a meeting maybe with like two other people and let's suppose, you know, you were in California at a conference, you know, but I was back, like, you would have probably just called into that. But now you're going to be like, hey, we've got this tool that we're familiar with using. And, you know, you're probably going to jump on that and we're going to have a virtual meeting, right? And so I think that will kind of stick with us. You know, you think about all these school teachers that have had to pivot, right?

Like, sure, kids are going to go back to class, but do you think more kids in the future are going to be consuming things virtually? Absolutely. My mom got on social media this week. That has never happened, but she's like, I'm going to actually figure out this social media thing out. And she's using more tools than she ever has before. So as an entire culture, we were shifting. right and we're accelerating and so that's the thing here is sure some of this is temporary but as a culture

we've accelerated our use and knowledge of these tools and I think about you know I went to we've been using pickup a lot more right like you can't go out to eating restaurants and you get tired of cooking every night we're cooking a lot more but we're also doing a lot more pickup and in the last week I've been to two restaurants to do pickup and one of them when I when I drove up it was I still had to like park. I still had to go in. I had to navigate around all this merchandise, you know, and all this stuff. And then I get to the counter and the person's not really ready.

And I'm like, there's no customers here. Like, it's not like you're busy. It's not like you have one thing to do right now. Like it's takeout. But it still was just, you know, they hadn't shifted. But then I went to this other restaurant and they had, they said, hey, here's exactly where you pull up. And they had people ready to say, what's your name?

They had someone else ready, you know, to take your payment. They had someone else bringing out orders. And they had these cars just, like, flowing through there. They're solving the problem. They're solving the problem. They're focused on the customer. And so, do you think that more people in the future are going to be using pickup from restaurants now? Like, now that they've learned that, like, oh, this is a thing that, like, I can order online or I can call.

And absolutely, they will. And the ones that actually figure out how to serve the customer more are going to be the ones that win in the long term. And the ones that just be like, oh, everything's. going to snap back to the way that it was are going to be the ones that are going to lose long term. Yeah. That's a really great byproduct of all of this. And I was thinking about, you know, when you're saying if you were in California and now I have this technology, it's already on my computer or my phone. What is it? Is it network theory where you talk about like the value of a network gets brought, like the first person who bought a fax machine? What do they do with it? Yep.

Well, who do you send a fax to? You're the only one that has the fax machine. But there's, there's like this compounding effect that the more people that have the access to the network, it's like this compoundingly greater value proposition to the whole thing being there, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, think about, you know, everybody that you text message now. Like used to, texting was like a thing that you just saw like the kids doing, right? It's like, oh, there's all those kids. And like, how do you text on these?

But now everybody texts, right? That's so true, because there's a season where you would ask people like, hey, are you a textor? Like, do you do the texting thing? Oh, no, you don't. okay, I'll send you an email or whatever, but then certain people would, but now it's not even, you just automatically do it. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, remember, you used to, like, you would have to push eight, like, four times

to, like, get a T to show up, you know, it's like, you know, and you think the same thing now, like some of these platforms to actually do web conferencing on are harder than others. But the ones that have invested the time to make it easy, those are the ones that are seeing the hypergrowth, and those are the ones that are going to be best positioned for the long term, right? Yeah. So it's having that vision of continuing to iterate and make yourself. better in things that are going to be that positions you better for the long term you know when shifts

do change like that when everybody goes oh yeah we are going to have more virtual meetings hmm all right i want to talk for a second this is really good i'm thinking about at a philosophical level and i know this is risky asking somebody who's a technology guy uh what's the solution it's almost like if you ask a hammer you know everything's a nail but i i know you well enough and i know your principles that you understand technology does not replace authentic human connection and relationship. It's a tool that should empower that, but not get in the way of it. So talk to these leaders right now who are going, all right, we're just going to become a virtual company now, and that's the new thing. We're going to save on overhead, rent, whatever.

Now that we figured out we can do this. I think we would say there's also a risk in going too far with this. What would we miss if we just want to be? went to virtual everything all of a sudden. Yeah, that's a really good question. You know, I'm thinking we did church on Sunday at home. Like most people that do church, they're doing it at home right now. And my church did it via Facebook Live. And so I'm sitting there and, you know, the preacher, he's, you know, he's talking. But I can see over here on the side, I can see this chat going, right? And like, and like people are being like, oh, that's a really good point. Or like, oh, hey, so good to see that you're on this chat. And then there's this thing where, like, you can

like put like high fives and you can put like you know hearts and you can you know like and I see these things flying up and it's like it was very interactive right it was very like wow this is a lot better than I thought it would be watching this service like it's actually a little bit different but it still wasn't the same it still wasn't the same like there's still something about being around the people right and seeing the people and seeing them in the hallways and those chance encounters that that happen when you're actually like at a conference together at a meeting together at church together. And so it can't replace everything. But the point is, is don't just think about how can I do this online. Sure, more people are going to be online. More people are going to be using these tools.

Think about how can I take what we were so good at offline and recreate that online in a new and different way, given the new platforms and services and technologies that are available. But even then, even then, it's not going to be just a complete replacement, right? Schools aren't going away. Universities aren't going away. You know, conferences aren't going away. We're still going to have events that we do, right? Like all of these things will be back in the normal fabric of what we do. But they're going to have more digital components going forward. And I think that the businesses that win are going to figure out how to do both. We were meeting with our board. I guess it was yesterday and we're going through the different critical areas that are important

for us right now. One of them is team communication. And I think if I remember we graded, like we were asking how is the technology virtual thing going? And a lot of us were saying the tactical meetings seem to be really great. Highly efficient, a lot of productivity. But the magic in our more creative and more strategic meetings is almost just dead. It's really hard to do that stuff digitally. So it seems like there's certain types of communication that technology is way more efficient. And then at times it's like it's kind of in the way. It's a blocker to the magic. that we tap into when we're in person. Yeah. If you and I are having a one-on-one meeting virtually, it's pretty easy that we're not

going to talk over each other too much, right? Like even right here right now, we're not just going to talk over each other. But you have a, you know, a conference call with 10 people or 20 people or 30 people, all of a sudden, like, I kind of hold back a little bit, right? I start going, has anybody else going to talk? And then if I talk, there's just even that slight delay, right? And I can't make eye contact with you to say, you know, oh, were you going to talk? I'm going to talk. Like, like, people start to hold back a little bit. Or you love to facilitate. You have all these crazy exercises you like to do to get rooms to think about different things and the way you draw things up on the board.

Or maybe you'll have us all write something down on a Post-it note and put it up, you know, so that we eliminate group think out of the room. Like doing those kind of exercises are so much harder, right? Like when it's a digital experience. And sure, there are tools and ways to help overcome some of those challenges. But I think the point is the more tactical the thing is, especially in a work setting and a communication setting, the more tactical it is, the easier. it is. But like, you're really going to have to work hard and you're going to have to double down and put some time into thinking like, oh, if I have to have a, you know, a meeting with 10 of my top leaders or five of my top leaders and it has to be a strategy session, a creative session. And I really

need people to not group think and to tell me what they really think. Like, it is extra hard for you as the business owner, as the leader, as the facilitator to be able to get that out. And it's just going to be harder in a digital setting. It is. Makes me think about music. I'm not really a musician, but I, you know, I understand the difference between, you know, when you're playing jazz, there's just, there's like this flow. You're playing off people. It builds. It rises. It falls. There's just all this texture and beauty.

You know, when it's not highly structured, and then if you took like a robot and said, play a piano and hit these notes at this time, it would just be like, dun, dun, dun, done, done. Like, technically the notes would still be coming out, but it just would be clunky. It wouldn't feel as enjoyable to listen to as kind of that organic, like, flow thing that happens

when really brilliant musicians, just get in a room and do their thing. You know, it's funny you say that. I've got a friend that is world-renowned at the instrument that he plays and actually coaches and teaches others on how to play these instruments. And he's had to go to 100% virtual in order to do that. And so he's had to learn how to hear the notes and how to coach people. And it's been difficult.

Like he said, like we're still getting through it, but they're having to find new ways to do it, right? So as opposed to having a live coaching session, what he's doing is he's having to have them record themselves playing, send him that recording, and then they sync up and coach on, okay, well, here's some things that you can tweak. And so again, that's just thinking differently, right? Like in that creative environment, like they're having to shift how they do things in order to get a good result while we're in this work from home and social distancing era that we're in. Crazy. Crazy times. Finney, it's been so good to just hear some of your insights and encouragements on things, certainly on the technology front, but even just generally. leadership principles through all of this. I got a lot of friends right now that are business owners and they're just scared and they're struggling. They're having to make really hard decisions

right now. Before we jump off, what final words of encouragement or advice can you give some of these leaders out there who are heroes and they're battling, but they're also just tired and they're not sure what the future looks like. Yeah. I would say your customers are tired too. Everybody I talk to right now, the word is like angst, right? Like even if, even if your business is fine, but you're just tired of working from home, right? And you're ready to get out there. You're ready. Like, there's like this pin up like angst that's just like ready to go out and go do something. And if you're feeling that way, know your customers are feeling that way. And let that give you the energy and the drive to actually go figure out ways to serve them better. Because if you keep the focus on

your customer, that's why you got into business was to serve your customers. And if you can meet them where they're at and maybe even in a new and different way right now, then that's what can get you off the couch and keep you motivated. So, so good. Fannie, thanks for jumping in here today. This has been really great. Thank you. I just want to encourage you guys as you're listening and as you're hearing from us, you're our customers and you're the reason that we get out of bed every day. And to Finney's point, that's what motivates us and fuels us is, you know, our team is thinking about Anything we can do to help business owners win right now, to help business owners get through the storm. We want to be a part of the solution with you guys.

We want to be a voice of hope. We want to encourage you guys. And we want to blow wind into your sales because we believe that our best days are ahead of us. We believe that you guys are a part of the solution. And we believe that we're going to continue to be here for you as long as you guys need us. And so don't hesitate to call us. Don't hesitate to let us know how we can help you guys out. and together we'll get through to the other side.