EntreLeadership - How to Make Better Decisions, Faster with Matt Bodnar

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

Success in business can hinge on a leader’s ability to take action. Sometimes that means making a choice without all the answers. And when there’s money and people’s livelihoods at stake, the uncertainty of an outcome can be paralyzing. Fortunately, decision-making is a muscle you can grow. Matt Bodnar, chairman of Fresh Technology, host of The Science of Success podcast, and a 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30, has faced his fair share of high-stakes decisions. In this episode, he shares the practices that have made him comfortable with risk, a smarter decision-maker and a more confident leader.   entreleadership.com/podcast Matt Bodnar’s website The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint’s website Fresh Technology, Inc.’s website The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber The Science of Success podcast Range by David Epstein Good to Great by Jim Collins The Ramsey Show Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini Learn more about EntreLeadership Coaching Decision Making Checklist EntreLeadership Partners Schedule a call with Tim, the Producer   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

Every day we're making decisions that hopefully take our business to the next level. What do we do with this particular team member? How do we find the best vendor? What colors and fonts should go on the website for the next marketing campaign and hundreds of other decisions like these that we have to make every single week. The stakes are high. We can't afford to make a bad decision. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entry Leadership podcast,

where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams and their profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and my guest today is Matt Bodner. Matt's the chairman at Fresh Technologies, and he's done a lot of cool stuff. He's helped start businesses, run businesses, launch new businesses, turn businesses around, and especially is passionate about helping businesses scale up from the startup stage to being a big deal. He knows a lot about decision-making, strategy, and how to align our behaviors with our goals. but he didn't start out in this space.

In fact, he actually started out as a successful analyst on Wall Street. He was making a lot of money at Goldman Sachs. And so I was super curious to ask him, hey, Matt, why didn't you leave? One of the biggest influences, and I mean, this is a book that's influenced me tremendously was the four-hour work week, you know, the whole Tim Ferriss thing. And so reading that and really thinking about what do I want to do with my life and where do I want to spend my time? And thinking about, I mean, in a place like that, you can see the trajectory. You know what I mean? You can see if I stay here 15 years, I'm that guy. If I stay here 20 years,

I'm that guy, et cetera. And so I could see what the future looked like. And ultimately, I wanted to do something more entrepreneurial. And I had this epiphany. I was reading this article on Bloomberg about one of the founders of Google. I forget if it was Larry Page or Sergey Bryne, but it was basically this thing. And they were saying, you know, who, whichever one was the CEO at the time, and their salary was $100,000. And as a first year analyst at Goldman, my salary was more than that. And so I read that article, and I kind of had this chuckle to myself as like a 21-year-old or 22-year-old.

And I'm like, I'm so awesome. Like, I have a bigger salary than the CEO of Google. And then literally there was a comma. And the next half of the sentence was like, Andy's worth $27 billion in Google stock or whatever, right? And so it was just like an anvil, like crushing me on the head that was like, oh, you don't get wealthy from a salary, you get wealthy from having equity and something. And that was really, that was a big epiphany for me that made me realize that having a high salary doesn't really, I mean, it helps, but ultimately ownership and equity is really where you generate the most value. So did that prompt

you to think I, I want to start my own thing or I want to build something? My dad's a very successful restaurateur and he had been doing a bunch of stuff in Nashville and kind of the southeast broadly for while I was in middle school, high school, all that stuff. And he was always, when I was up at Goldman, he was always like a bug in my ear, hey, come back and help me out. Come join me, come join me. And so eventually I answered that call and moved back to Nashville and got involved with him and a company called Fresh Hospitality, which is an investment business,

essentially that invests kind of across the food and restaurant world and scales various different restaurant brands. How big was the team when you joined? basically me, my dad, my brother, and one other gentleman whose name was Nick Pahackis. It was basically four of us at the time. It was just a scrappy crew, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, there were other, I mean, we were essentially almost like a small private equity or venture capital firm. And so, I mean, the operating companies that we invested in obviously had a bigger employee base, but really that was it at the beginning.

And since then, we've built this whole kind of ecosystem and infrastructure of, of various businesses. You've worked with a lot of businesses here locally. Many that I've personally been a patron. I remember Martin's barbecue. We went when they were a little like double-wide trailer out south of Nolan'sville. Yeah, over the auto body shop or whatever. Oh, that was the best barbecue around.

And nobody knew who they were unless you live like right in that little community. And now, I mean, if you know Martin's barbecue, if you've been in Nashville, you know Martin's barbecue. I mean, it's just, it's the spot that you go. you're in Nashville. I'd love to hear that story. You know, I mean, you guys clearly were a part of them, you know, becoming a big deal and kind of putting them on the map. And I know you guys do that with countless other, you know, restaurants. But how do you find the Martin's Barbecue when they're just this little local story and nobody really knows who they are? I mean, we're at a point now where, and I think you see this in a lot of different businesses where you get inbound deal flow, right?

And so, I mean, we met Pat actually through a point of sale reseller that we had a relationship with. It was selling POS terminals. And he said, hey, this guy's got a really cool thing. You should go check it out. And so we went and we went and just had lunch there, checked it out and got to know him and helped partner up from day one when they were back over that little auto body shop. And, you know, our whole thesis for how we invest in a company specifically within the fresh platform is, is we have this whole ecosystem that we've developed over the last decade or so of everything from technology to accounting to real estate expertise, marketing, the whole suite of services

that sit around a business. And we go in and we provide them growth capital, but we also provide them what we call our intellectual capital of all of those different things to help them scale up. And so, you know, we plug that infrastructure in and really helped him first identify a great site and that was their store in Nolensville that they moved to that was across the street, the kind of bigger flagship store and then started very strategically looking at, hey, what are some other great opportunities for this brand? And really one of the biggest strategic decisions we made at Martins was we ultimately decided that we needed to have a presence downtown. And to truly be a competitive player in the Nashville barbecue space and plant our flag, so to speak,

we needed something downtown and that's how we ended up ultimately finding the property at Martin's, we call it Rutledge, but the downtown Martin's barbecue. And that's, now we sort of, we jokingly refer to it as the mothership because it's, it's this behemoth compared to the other typical Martin stores, but it's been a really great component of that business. What do you find, you know, that business owner who's got a passion in this case for barbecue, and it's just kind of all they've ever known. and they're taking care of their team, they're taking care of their customers, they've got something really special, but they don't have all this other stuff that you guys brought to the equation.

What have you noticed about that gap? It's extremely common. And both specifically, it's almost worse in the restaurant industry in some ways because if you think about a restaurant, we look at them restaurant operators or restaurant tours in many cases almost like you would look at a musical artist. Somebody who's super creative. their art form is just food instead of music or painting or whatever. And that creative personality typically isn't as good at the accounting and the technology and all of the back office type of functions. And you see it certainly in restaurants,

but you see it across many, many, many small businesses, the passionate creator, the technician, as Michael Gerber would call them, that really cares about the work, but doesn't necessarily spend their time and energy on the business side of things. And that's always been our focus and our pitch is really easy because it's basically all that stuff you don't want to do, we want to do that stuff.

And we want you to focus on the food and the customers and the brand and the experience. And we want to focus on the accounting and all of the things that are causing you a bunch of headaches. I have to imagine that even if they're not having to do all those things, when you guys come into the picture, there's still a mind shift that they have to go through in terms. of how they think about their business. No doubt. What are you coaching them on? How are you getting them to think differently about these things that allow for scale and it being more than just this little homegrown startup thing?

I mean, that is, it's, there's no light switch, right? It's an ongoing years and years long process in many cases of really just starts with just conversations and principles and ideas that we really care about and share and through the boardroom, through meetings, that kind of thing. You start to build that infrastructure. And the funny thing is, my podcast really came out of a lot of those conversations. And at one point, I started putting down less about really hardcore business principles and more what I would consider life principles or success principles, things that are generally really valuable and helpful, like how to communicate with people, how to make better decisions, how to deal with

negative emotions and fear and deal with setbacks and all these things. I created this PowerPoint that I used to sit down with business partners and I would say, hey, let's spend an hour or two and just go through these ideas because I think they're really important. And I want to make sure you and I are aligned about how do we deal with a tough situation and how do we deal with a communication breakdown? And how do we deal with these things? And that presentation, I shared it originally with some internal partners and friends and so forth. And then eventually got this idea to start sharing it with other people that I was just friends with, acquaintances, interesting entrepreneurs and people that I would have lunch with and so forth,

and shared it with a friend who had the website and ended up convincing me, he's like, you should turn this into a podcast. And six years later, that's how the podcast, the seed of the podcast got started. And it's, you know, all the principles and ideas that have flowed into that show really came out of that question of, how do we teach these these fundamentals and these things that you don't learn in school, even if you did go to business school, they don't teach hardly any of this stuff. They teach you accounting and they teach you how to manage a process flow and optimize a supply chain and all that stuff. But they don't teach you how do you fire somebody?

Or how do you make a tough decision when you don't know, when you don't have all the information? Or how do you deal with your own emotions? How do you work through really difficult situations? And so all of those things really came out of answering that question, which we certainly haven't answered it perfectly, but we've been working on how do we answer it. Well, and you're working across a broader sample size of different businesses where you can kind of field test. And you're teaching them how to think different, but you're also not just confined to that one business. And we see this a lot with Entree leadership where we're going, hey, we're coaching you and your business, but we've worked with thousands of business. and we can take this principle to the bank. The application of your business is going to have some

nuance. And it gives that person a lot of confidence to go, okay, this isn't just us in this dialogue. This represents thousands of data points across what works in all business. Have you found that to be true? Definitely. And certainly not on the scale in terms of just the raw number of companies that you guys have interacted with. But yeah, I mean, across our portfolio, you know, we both cross-apply and share lessons, both really tactical things, but also those big principles, right? And it's, hey, there's a reason that Taziki's has done as well as it's done, or Martin's has done as well as it's done, and it's because we've really executed on a lot of these core principles. And that comes to a lot of the really sort of esoteric things I talked about,

like decision making, et cetera, but also stuff as simple as, hey, this is how we manage our food costs and this is how we use our software platform, and this is how we, you know, the nuts and the business as well, all of those things fit in and having those little laboratories of, hey, this worked really well in this situation. And for this company and for this company and this company, why don't you think about using this approach as well? But one thing, I'll add one tidbit to that, which is, and this is something that I have always thought about, struggled with. And I think anyone in personal development asks themselves these same questions, which is you can, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink, right? And so you can try to provide

somebody with all of these things, but in some cases, whether it's, whether it's personal, coaching, whatever, whether it's a business context. If someone repeatedly won't listen to you, then it's really hard to get them to apply those principles. Yeah, what do you think is the biggest personal transformation that business owners have the hardest time making? Like when you guys join forces, they got to reinvent themselves a lot. what tends to be the sticking point? I would say we're fanatical about the financial side of the business,

so the accounting, the principles that we use to manage that and the technology side of the business. And it's an adherence to those two dogmas, for lack of a better term, that is the hardest part in really changing your workflow to integrate in the technology systems that we use to forecast our costs and manage our labor and all of those things.

Building that in is, it almost becomes a way of life in the business to the point where you could take a manager, a well-trained manager from, let's say, a Martins and pluck them into a Tazikis or a Big Bad Breakfast or a Waldoz or something like that. And other than the nuances of, okay, this is chicken tenders versus pulled pork, they would know how to run 85% of the back end because it's exactly the same. You know, it's interesting you mentioned the accounting. I'm a firm believer that you just can't play in the big leagues if you don't know your numbers. And it's actually very common for businesses to get to a certain level of success without really knowing their numbers. And many businesses get to one or two million. And what they know about their numbers is they call their CPA and they say, how do we do last month? You know, it's fairly common practice. You just can't get to that next level if you don't do the accounting and you're not on top of the budget and the forecast. and the metrics and the dashboards.

It was Mark Cuban who said, accounting is the language of business. I'm curious, you know, what is it? Let's talk about this more. You know, why do you need to know your numbers? What numbers are you tracking? Why is it so hard for the typical small business to actually plug in and change the behavior to run the business using the numbers and to plug things in where the accounting system actually reports on that kind of stuff?

Lots of different questions that all kind of intersect with. with that. And to me, I come from a financial background, right? So I worked on Wall Street. I, when I first joined Fresh, my first assignment was actually to take over one of our portfolio companies that was struggling financially. And I spent two years in the trenches line by line going through accounts on the balance sheet and collecting accounts receivable and reworking all the accounting principles and all this stuff. And so I have a lot of experience just coming up on the financial side of businesses. And fortunately, I didn't know it at the time, but that's given me a really great perspective. And to me, I have, I think financials first. Like, if somebody gives me,

I mean, I look at and invest in a lot of different companies. And if somebody gives me a pitch deck for a business, I'll throw out 90% of the stuff that's in there except the historical financial statements. That's really almost the only thing I care about. Even the projections, I'll build my own projections if I, if I want to really evaluate it. But to me, that is the essence of understanding the entire operation. And through just looking at a P&L, for example, and pulling questions out of it, okay, well, why are you spending so much money on travel, right? Why do you have no marketing budget? Like, you can get to a lot of the core issues, certainly not everything, but a lot of the big issues going on in the business just by understanding

the financial statements. And I think it comes back to what we talked about a minute ago, that a lot of small business owners got there because, not because they were approaching it from a business standpoint, but because they were really gifted technicians or really gifted artisans or creators, and they cobbled together people and expertise around them to get that to the next level. But to me, I mean, it's hard for me to, it's very mind-blowing for me. I still almost can't conceive of it because I'm so financially driven and numbers driven that when I look at something, the first and only thing I really care about is what are the financials, whether they're KPI's, whatever, I really need to understand and see the numbers. And I almost feel like I can't

really have a meaningful conversation about a business until I know with great detail what the numbers are. It's interesting that, you know, passion for that artist, I mean, it really can get you to a certain level. I mean, the swagger and many times this business owner is the top salesperson, and so They're bringing in a lot of revenue and people like them. And a lot of revenue can cover a multitude of accounting sense or the lack of tracking things. It's not necessarily that business is failing. There's just so much more headroom. There's so much more efficiency. There's so many more knobs they could turn up to really catapult their growth. That business owner who struggles to really embrace this discipline of getting into the numbers and do everything you're talking about, what do you say to

them. What should they start with? What should they start planning for more? What should they be tracking? How do they go from being this passionate artist into kind of embracing these new disciplines? I mean, I think at some level, you have to lead into your strengths, right? And so I don't know that if you have a certain skill set, you're never going to be the CFO of the company, right? That said, that doesn't mean you can't have a great financial and accounting function at your business. And so finding the right partners or people, whether those are internal hires, whether those are outside, you know, BPO accounting outsource firms, outsource CFO services, whatever it might be, finding the right people that can get you the key information is really,

really important. And to me, answering another part of that question and something you asked earlier as well, the thing that I care the most about is what I call free cash flow. And it's a very simple question. It's a very simple principle, which is basically just how much cash does the business generate over a period of time? Now, whether that's monthly, whether that's annually, et cetera, it's just how much cash do the operations of the business generate just from operating? And you could look at a P&L and say, oh, well, the business made $100,000 in profit. So we generated $100,000 in cash. But any moderately savvy business owner knows that profits definitely don't always equal cash. and many, many businesses.

And so I try to first answer the question of the, I think of it as almost an engine, the economic engine of the business. How much cash does it generate on, let's say, an annual basis? And then all the other questions of the business are really, how do we deploy that cash? How is it getting deployed? Is it going into new inventory? Is it going into new hires? Is it going into growth?

Is it being eaten up by accounts receivable? Is it going into debt service and high interest loans? All of those questions then come back to really informing, okay, well, we know what we're generating and we know what our goals are and we know where our cash is currently going. How do we optimize those pieces to get to where we want to be? Yes. You know, you're describing something. I think it's so key. When you're looking for an accountant, a CFO, somebody that's going to help you with your numbers, there are people who are good at just reporting

the numbers. But what you're talking about is interrogating the numbers. It's getting the numbers to tell a story. Say more about the difference between just polling reports and actually using the data to be Sherlock Holmes and dig into the business. Yeah, that's such an important distinction. And the more that I've spent time around what I'll broadly call the accounting function of a business, the more you realize that it's actually a bunch of discrete skill sets that all fit together. and a lot of small business owners will have, as you said, they have a CPA and they say, oh, yeah, my CPA does the books and that's that. But bookkeeping is one of maybe 10 or 15 things that an accounting function should do, right? And what you're talking about, the more

interrogation of the numbers, I would call that more CFO level approach, right? Chief Financial Officer, the higher level financial strategic analysis of where is the business going? what is the business generating from a cash flow standpoint? Where is the cash being used? Right? I mean, you can give me the P&L, the balance sheet, the cash flow statement of a business that I know nothing about. Don't even tell me what industry it's in.

And I could probably tell you with pretty good degree of certainty, okay, here are some of the big struggles that the business is having. Here are some of the things you should think about doing. And here's X, Y, Z, probably three or four strategic priorities you should think about. And to me, finding somebody who has that financial skill set comes back to either having, whether it's a business partner, whether it's an outsource CFO or whether it's an internal hire, having somebody who really has a higher level financial perspective is really, really important to, I love the phrase you used to interrogate the numbers as opposed to just reading a report. Yeah, that's really important. And, well, you know, the numbers and the data become more and more important, the more sophisticated the business gets. I'd love to hear from you.

Let's talk a little bit about decision-making, because oftentimes we start out and getting a business off the ground. A lot of the decision-making is from our gut. Gut instincts, it feels right. You might even call it common sense. You know, take care of people, ship the product, go, go, go. As the business gets more complex, the more that we have to test, the more the numbers have to speak to. the behaviors that we're going to, you know, really inform our strategy around. So let's talk about when you're shifting away from gut and more into letting the numbers drive the decision-making,

how do we actually formulate a strategy that represents that? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think to me, decision-making is a field that has a lot of different facets, a lot of different avenues for really thinking about it. And the funny thing is, and this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a principle of decision making, which I'll talk about in a second, but I would say any business, almost regardless of the level of complexity, you can usually distill the core economic drivers of the business into easily into one page or less and really, I mean, you can draw it on to departmental levels, all this stuff, but I mean, even, uh, publicly traded massive companies, you can distill the, the,

the core drivers, the things that really matter in most cases to a few key numbers. and kind of a core really understanding. How do you define a core driver? What are the key things that are moving the business forward? What are the major things that generate revenue, right? Is it putting sales into the pipeline? Is it a number of sales reps that you've hired? I mean, so what are the big revenue drivers?

What are the major levers that move cost, right? Is it a key supplier? Is it your, you know, this one, your rent, right? Maybe that's a major car. Whatever it might be. There's usually a couple key drivers of cost. There's a couple key drivers of rent. revenue and really understanding those. And that comes back to essentially understanding the 80-20

principle. And that's what I would call a mental model, which I'll talk about in a second, which is a really important framework for making better decisions. And it's paraphrasing, I think Warren Buffett said something similar, but basically, you know, any business decision or any investment decision, if it doesn't make sense on one page, it probably doesn't make sense. And again, that's a loose paraphrase, but the idea is the same concept, which is you can really distill it down to the key things. And if you're roughly right, that's usually good enough. And a lot of people get really focused on precision and making sure they're exact to the decimal point when really it's, as long as you're in the ballpark and you think you're loosely there, a lot of times, that's often good enough. So that really comes to, to me, one of the most important elements of decision making that a lot of people don't understand. that I think is critical is what I call the emotional side of decision making. I think that there's, you know, there's sort of the emotional side and then the decision quality side. Like, are you making decisions and how do you make better decisions? And to me,

the biggest hurdle for, from an emotional standpoint, is often just getting comfortable with being uncertain and getting comfortable making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. and there's a couple other principles that that flow under that. But to me, I mean, that is probably one of the most important elements of decision-making is realizing that we live in an extremely uncertain world, right? I mean, coronavirus is a great illustration of that. Today is a great illustration with that. I was supposed to be in the studio, but a snowstorm hit, right?

So, I mean, we never know exactly how things are going to, how things are going to pan out. And a lot of times clinging to the need for certainty really paralyzes your decision. making process. And to me, that recognition that it's okay to make a decision if you don't have all the information is really, really critical. Yeah, it's really good. I've always been pretty comfortable with ambiguity. I think some personality styles are more comfortable with the unknown. But in business, I mean, when this is your baby, we feel the weight of if I make the wrong decision, we could be risking everything. We could be doing something and not have visibility into our blind spot and we hear these horror stories of, you know, just this one wrong decision and the

whole thing went down the tubes. How do we balance the uncertainty and embracing being comfortable with uncertainty, but still good planning and minimizing risk? Yeah, that's a great perspective. And the short answer is it's a lifelong process, right? Nobody ever fully has an answer to that because it's truly a life's work to figure out how you can become the best decision maker possible and how you can make really difficult decisions. And Jeff Bezos has a couple frameworks that I like to work into my own decision making process that I think are really helpful, one being that often like really evaluate whether the decision is reversible or not, right?

A lot of times we make a decision and realize that, okay, well, can we just reverse that decision later if we need to, and we get really hung up on what are the, you know, what are the impacts, what happens if this happens? What happens if this happens? Oh, no, I'm worried about this. If you can just reverse the decision, make it, and then reverse it if it's not working. And again, that doesn't work in every case because not all decisions are reversible. Like the decision to have children, not reversible, right? But a lot of them are. And there's some that are the, is it back to the future, the point in no return was it 68 miles an hour in the Delorean? It's like, once you get there, you're going, right? That's right.

But a lot of business decisions that seem like they're not reversible really are, and there's some great tools you can use to think through really how, what the real consequences of making a decision are. And another heuristic from Bezos that I think is really good is make decisions when you have 70% of the information that you think you should have. That's the Amazon rule of thumb is when you have 70% of what you think you need, that's when you should make the decision. because if you wait around to get 100% of what you think you need,

you're going to be too late and you're not going to be moving quickly enough. I'm not sure you ever get to 100% in any decision. You don't, right? And I mean, to me, I had this weird, the thing, one of the things that taught me the most about decision making in my life was poker, believe it or not. And I'm a very avid poker player. I played in the World Series of poker number of times, all this stuff.

Really? That's pretty cool. And it's fun. I didn't play this year, obviously, because of COVID. but I played the last three or four years running up to that. But the, you know, poker teaches you an incredible amount about decision making because, one, even if you make the right decision, you can still have a bad outcome, right? Which is something that a lot of people don't understand.

They think that there's a one-to-one correlation between making a good decision and getting a good outcome. And just like it also in poker, you learn that you can make a bad decision and get a good outcome, right? And so when you're evaluating your poker game, you really have to evaluate decision quality. And just with the facts I had at the time, running the numbers, et cetera, was this decision the right choice to make? And you can make the right decision in poker and know that, okay, this is the correct decision, but 60% of the time I'm still going to lose the hand. But I still made the right bet. And that's something that just internalizing that in the world of poker where the feedback loop is really tight. And if you keep making bad decisions, you just go to zero really quickly and it's a very

unforgiving game built that kind of decision character. But I think finding ways to play around with uncertain decision making in smaller stakes is how you build that muscle for more high stakes situations. And so find ways or decisions that you can make in your life that you can start to be more decisive and start to make decisions with less information to realize that, you know, in every case, it's not necessarily the end of the world if you make the wrong decision. Well, it strikes me that in poker,

I mean, if you're good enough to be at the World Series level, you still know a lot of information on statistically. Is this the best decision? I mean, it's not an excuse or crutch to say, well, I'm just going to embrace ambiguity and I'm not going to go to school and know my numbers or study the model or if I'm going to do an acquisition, I'm not going to do the due diligence. I mean, I don't hear that in what you're saying. There's still a lot of things we can do to

control the controllables to maximize the odds of making a great decision, right? That's exactly right. And I would equate it in poker, studying your hand charts and your probabilities and all of that is the exact same thing I would say in business is understanding your numbers, right? Understanding the financial model. And this touches on something we talked about a second ago, which is you don't have to build this crazy, complicated 20-page Excel spreadsheet to see if a decision's a good decision. You can probably get pretty close to whether or not it's a good decision just with a couple numbers and on the back of a napkin. In most cases, or maybe a simple model that you build an Excel or something. And obviously not every decision

can be modeled, right? Like, if you're dealing with a problem employee or something, you know, an Excel spreadsheet is not going to solve that for you. But there's a lot of ways. We're talking about strategy type decisions. Yeah, exactly, right. There's a lot of big business decisions that you can make with some quantitative support and a realization that you want to stack the odds in your favor, but know that you can never control the outcome of the odds, whether it's in poker, whether it's in life, whether it's in anything. And that's a really important lesson to understand that you have to be able to make decisions knowing that it could break either way, even if you make a perfect decision. I want to hear what you think about experience and decision

making. It's funny. We're talking about this snowstorm. And yesterday we're at home. And I've got a new four by four truck. It's beautiful. It's expensive. It's got all the bells and whistles. It's just it's something that I've dreamed about. And I got it for Christmas for my wife. And I've had vehicles in the past where I've gone off road and really torn stuff up. I've had jeeps. I've had trucks. And so we've got this snowstorm. And my brother was over and we're talking about, hey, should we go out and, you know, spend donuts in a parking lot in your truck. And it was just kind of one of those like, no, not this time. And we started laughing and telling stories about, he said, every time I've been with you in a snowstorm, we've always torn up something

on your vehicle. And it's costing you like thousands of dollars. And, you know, it just struck me that my courage or, you know, wisdom, if you will, to not go out and spend donuts in the parking lot like a 16-year-old kid in my new beautiful truck, I don't know that I would have that conviction had I not torn up a lot of trucks before. You know, like there was something visceral in that moment. I was like, no, I'm not this truck. This was too nice. And I'm very likely to do something that I'm going to regret. Do you think you have to experience some failure and pain to develop that wisdom that's so bright? the conviction to say, no, we're not going to go this way or we're going to wait a little longer and do some more due diligence? I love that you use the term of wisdom. And that's a fantastic question, by the way. But I think wisdom is really what I think about instead of just the, just experience, which

I think is important, but in some decision criteria and experience can actually be, can actually hamper you, right? And so having wisdom or perspective, having the ability to step. back and really understand how things fit into each, how the relationships fit into each other and connect and the broader context of a problem, those are some of the really, really important elements of making good decisions. And as with anything, you know, the answer to really any good question in business is it depends, right? And so it depends on whether experience is useful. In a lot of cases, it's incredibly useful. But in a lot of cases, it can, it can mislead you or sabotage you. And

And there's a great book called Range by David Epstein. I don't know if you've ever read it or encountered it, but he talks about this idea that in a world, this is less necessarily about experience, more about expertise, but obviously they're very interrelated. But in a world where everybody's increasingly siloed and we have all of these experts and we have all of the knowledge in the universe essentially at the tip of your fingers, the skill set that becomes really valuable is being able to step back and take a broader perspective. and connect dots that are seemingly not connected. And if you look at people that are innovating in an industry or bringing some breakthrough, a lot of times that breakthrough is a direct result of not having the ingrained mindset of whatever that industry is, right?

And so everything from Elon Musk with SpaceX to Dyson vacuums, all kinds of different examples of people who came into an industry, they had very little experience in, And as a result of not having that experience, they ended up creating a massive innovation. And so it's a double-edged sword. I mean, in a lot of cases, that wisdom and that experience can be super helpful. But sometimes wisdom can come from a lack of knowledge or lack of experience in some contexts as well. Well, you know, sometimes we live so close to our stuff that we don't see it.

My friend Donald Miller talks about this idea, the curse of knowledge. and he consults with people on their own home pages, their landing pages. He'll come in and say, hey, I can't find where to click to get more information. And they're going, no, it's right here. And they see it because they built the page and they know exactly where it's at. And it's something that I just, you know, it's like art on the wall in your house. You walk by it every day. You don't see it anymore.

And there's really something valuable about getting fresh eyes on your situation. Totally true. And that's why, I mean, one of the other things that I think, is really important from a decision-making standpoint is having a broad perspective, right? And cultivating information sources and whether it's reading whatever from all kinds of different fields, right? Because a lot of times you might get a new insight that you never would have seen before. But back to what you said a second ago, too, I mean, that's in a lot of cases the value of having a coach or a consultant or something like that is just more than anything. It lets you see

the stuff that's you can't see anymore. I've never actually heard the analogy of it's like the art in your house, but that is a perfect way to describe that phenomenon because it's so true after a week or whatever, you basically stop seeing any painting on the wall or if you have a blank space, it just you get used to it and then you put a piece of art up and you're like, what's going on? Or you take a piece of art down. You're like, what is this giant canvas sitting in front of me? So it's so funny that that's a really good way to contextualize that. Well, I think enough brain scientists talk about this, that our brains are designed to conserve calories. And so anything that's familiar, you know, it's a primal thing to say, I'm only going to focus on things that are new,

that are moving, that are a potential threat. You know, and so our physical environment, we get desensitized to things that are there, almost as a primal instinct to say, we got to put as many calories, as much energy as we can into the things that are potentially going to keep us alive, right? Or keep us safe. And I think the same is true with our businesses. I imagine when you guys come in and you work with these small restaurants and you're bringing in your team to wrap around them, you guys see all kinds of things that they've been staring at for years. And you're like, why is this? And they don't even realize it because they've been so close to it. Yeah.

No, that's totally true. And I, you know, it's funny. We definitely see that across the board. And I think really looking at any opportunity, I mean, you're always going to encounter blind spots. and things that you've missed. And there's, as I said, there's no substitute for a coach consultant third party kind of coming in and looking at that stuff. But there are some really cool hacks that you can use as well to almost short circuit

that decision making process or get out of your own head in some senses. Yeah, what does that look like? And I'm a big fan of journaling. And to me, there's a couple different avenues of this. I mean, there's, if you've ever heard of the concept of a decision journal, that's, a very specific journaling methodology that talks about this, but more broadly, just journaling as a whole is a tremendously valuable exercise

to almost freeze your thoughts on paper and get everything out and put it all down and then come and revisit it later to see, oh, where was I off, where was I wrong, et cetera, et cetera. And a decision journal is a subset of that, which essentially tells you or asks you when you're making a decision, you write down. I mean, you spend maybe five, 10 minutes days, you write down, I'm making a decision to X, you know, fire somebody, invest in this new company,

you know, replace myself as CEO, whatever it might be. And here's why I'm making it. Here's what I think is going to happen. And here's what I think some of the risks are. And you write that down and you date it and everything. And then you come back and revisit it three months down the road, six months down the road, whatever it might be, and you start to see, you can start to see these patterns in your thinking, and you can start to see, oh, wow, I was totally right about that one thing, but I was completely wrong about this other thing. Or maybe it didn't work out, but it didn't work out for a reason that was totally outside of my control. Or, you know, maybe, I mean, I've gone back and looked at journal entries from seven, eight years ago. And I remember this

probably happened to me maybe six months ago, maybe a little before that. and I was reading an old journal and I was looking at some stuff I was really frustrated with in like 2013 and I was actively frustrated about like two of the things that were on that list at that moment and I was like oh my God it's been seven years and I still haven't

like I've changed some of these things but I haven't fixed the fundamental issue and and just that was like a lightning strike you know to see that and come back and say like, I, you know, I have to do something about this because I, when you're just stuck in your head and you don't freeze your thoughts on paper, you just get, you just think, oh yeah, it's something I've been dealing for a little while, but like, you know, I'm da-da-da-da, you know, whatever, it hasn't been an issue for that long. And then you go back and see a journal from seven years ago and you're like, man, I'm still dealing with that same issue. I really need to figure out something that, that I can solve that. And, and, you know, coming, like, bringing that back to business decision-making. I mean, it's a really valuable tool to improve iteratively your own thinking and create that space, right, that distance, that ability to see your own art again, essentially, because you can, when you take time out of the daily reactivity of your life, you know what I mean? We're all flying by the seat of our pants and you've got a customer call and you got this and you're going to put out this fire. You've got to do the XYZ.

When you set aside 30 minutes to say, hey, I'm going to write about. What are my big goals? And is what I'm doing even aligned with those or not? Yeah. I mean, that's simple stuff that can tie that in. I'm such a fan of journaling. I mean, it's one of those things that I would say has changed my life. I mean, a lot of what you're saying, I've experienced.

And I've experienced both sides of what you're talking about. I've had that experience where I've gone back in five years. I'm like, oh, I still haven't addressed this core issue with me. You know, like I just keep kicking the can down the road. don't see it in real time because it manifests in different situations differently, but then at some point you pan back and you go, okay, this thread has been true in all of these experiences. I've got something I've got to confront to myself. I've also experienced the inverse of that where I look back a year ago at a journal entry and I see a problem at the time that was all

consuming, like anxiety, losing sleep over it, super stressed about it, didn't feel like I had the courage to make this big decision, whether it was to fire somebody or go in and have a the guts to tell the truth about something that I was dealing with. And in hindsight, after dealing with it, a year late, it's like, that is so minuscule. That was not a big deal. And it took so much of my energy at the time. And I find that I draw confidence out of that the next time I'm facing something that feels all consuming to go, hey, you've been here before. You've been here before, right? And in a year from now, it's going to feel really petty. So just go ahead and roll with it instead of losing and all the sleep and the anxiety around this particular issue. Have you had that experience?

I totally have. And that's a great, that's a great perspective. And it's funny, I don't know what it says about my decision quality, but whenever I go back and review any kind of thinking broadly or journal or whatever from, let's say maybe a year, 18 months, I don't know when the exact threshold is. I usually read something of my writing or journaling and I'm like, I was such an idiot. Like, you know, I was such an idiot. Like I had no idea what I was talking about. And then I, you know, It's like every 18 months that I go back and like, I had no idea what I was talking about. Right. And then the problem is I know, like you intellectually know, okay, so when I go like the things that

I think are really important or the things I'm concerned about or I'm losing sleepover now, in 18 months, I'm going to, whatever I think now, I'm going to think I'm an idiot. So it's like, how can I fast forward that? And there's a really cool journey exercise I've done once or twice, which is around that question of basically pretending to meet your future self and get advice from your future yourself to try and, you know, short-circuit that process. But it's like, what am I doing now? What am I working on? What time-wasting goals do I think I should be spending time on that I really shouldn't? What am I really frustrated with now that when I look back, I'm going to be like,

you shouldn't have been doing that. You shouldn't have been wasting your time on that. And that question is one that I think about a lot. Yeah, I love that. I'm going to try that exercise. I haven't done that. You know, as we're talking about decision-making, and we've mentioned that it's kind of like a muscle that you grow and it gets stronger. But there's this paradox that in business, the more success that we have and the bigger problems that we solve, our reward is we get a bigger problem to solve. And so it's kind of like, do you feel like decision making is one of those things that you get better at it and then eventually all the decisions are kind of easy, or does it just rise to meet the occasion of the next big challenge? I think that to me, there's no

doubt at all that the higher up you move, you just have bigger problems. We talk about it. One of the companies that I'm invested in very active in has grown tremendously over the last year or two. I talk to the CEO all the time and we say level up, devil up, right? Like we're always dealing with newer, bigger problems, but in a good way. So I think that dynamic is certainly true. But I do think that decision making is an iterative skill that you can build on. And I think that the stakes get higher, but your ability to be comfortable at the high stakes is something that you can train, something you can improve. Not to know that the answer is always going to be clear, but to be comfortable that your methodology is getting better. You know what I mean?

and that your process is improving and that your decision quality is improving. And it comes back to the really important caveat that we touched on earlier, which is just because you make a great decision doesn't necessarily always mean that you're going to get a great outcome. And understanding that's really important because it goes both ways. You can make a terrible decision and get a really good outcome, right? Which happens all the time. I mean, every single day you can see that happening.

across Instagram, across people's lives, all sorts of things. And so really trying to drill down on decision quality, I think is huge. And I do think that while the problems get bigger, I think that you can build confidence in your ability to make decisions at higher stakes by just improving that process over time. Yeah, I agree. You know, Jim Collins in his book Good to Great talks about this word picture of musket balls and cannon balls. And the ideas in the old naval warships that if you had a limited amount of black powder, that you need to calibrate your trajectory against the enemy ship by firing musket balls because it's just a small amount of black power. It's like a little test. And then once you get the calibration dialed in,

then boom, fire the cannonball with your sacred resource of black powder. There's ways to do this in business. There's ways to do this with decision making. You mentioned in poker, the feedback loop is really tight. And so you're able to make a lot of decisions and learn at a really high rate. what have you found that you can do in business to learn at a high rate, test fail, test fail, test succeed? Oh, let's do that again. That's a question that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, and I certainly don't have any perfect answers for it, because to me, the challenge of doing this in business is that the feedback loop is so long and so murky in the sense that it's very hard to get a direct correlation between decision quality and outcome. The outcome could happen 18 months later, two years later, five years later, and it could be impacted by dozens of factors, both beyond your control and within your control. And so it's really hard to read the tea leaves and see through the static to understand ultimately what the decision quality was and whether decisions were good. Now, that said, I think a decision journal is a very useful tool for doing that.

I think if you want to accelerate it and get some rapid fire reps in, it's certainly not practical experience, but the case methodology, which is what they teach at all the major business schools, is a good way to do that. Get some business cases and just go through and don't look at the answers and say, oh, you know, because it's basically a big business problem, right? And you say, here's what I would do. And then you can see the answer and see what they actually did and, you know, maybe what the right answer, quote unquote, could have been. And so that's another method that I think is helpful. But, you know, fortunately, I've had the benefit of just working with a lot of different businesses. And so I can see all these little laboratories and all

of this stuff, which has been tremendously useful to have 20 tests running at once as opposed to one test running at once. Well, the 20 test, I mean, this goes back to the idea of coaching and why it's valuable to have a coach that can bring you exposure to a lot of problems that have been tested, you know? And so being alone and being isolated, it's like, it's super high stakes because it's your business. And then you've only got this one data point. And if you've got a long tail of a feedback loop of 18 months, you're not learning at a very

high rate, but you could at least get somebody else in it with you. And a corollary of that that is really interesting is that most problems aren't unique, right? And so once you realize that, you can transform. the way that you approach a lot of the problems you're facing. Now, we all can tell ourselves a story about why it's unique, but the reality is you could boil it down, probably 80, 90% of that problem is totally generic and has been experienced by, I mean, you listen to Dave Ramsey's show. Everybody calls in like, Dave, I've got this very special problem. The answer is like 90% of the time, sell the car, right? I mean, it's sell the car. That solves 80% of the issues that people have.

Yeah, when you think about that and understand that, right, and that comes back to wisdom and building the perspective to really handle decisions more effectively, once you understand that a lot of problems are similar, a great mental model for making better decisions is to figure out who else had your problem and how did they solve it, right? Or what are some of the ways that they solved it? And that could be everything from historical case studies, hiring consultants, interviewing people, having a mentor who's gone through what you want to achieve. There's lots of different ways to answer that. But really, once you give up the belief that you're a beautiful, unique snowflake, that's the only person on earth who's ever had this problem and realize that

thousands and thousands and thousands, if not millions of times businesses have encountered and overcome or not overcome this exact issue that really empowers you to think about, okay, there are some ways I could think about solving this. Yeah, I mean, Proverbs says there's nothing new under the sun. If you really take that to heart, you know, somebody has experienced what I'm experiencing, How do I get access to them? That's the essence of our coaching program, Entree Leadership Elite. And so you work with a coach, but you also have a mastermind with eight to 12 other business owners, similar-sized business.

And every month, you've got a space to get on a Zoom conversation with them and kick around. Here's the biggest challenge I have right now. And every time what happens, I mean, the coach will give some advice and some framing, but there'll be someone in your cohort who's like, oh, dude, two years ago, we dealt with that exact same tax situation. Here's what we learn with our CPA. Here's the thing that you need to ask your CPA, and all of a sudden, boom, and they have this magical breakthrough. And it's just there's a collective knowledge that we have to put ourselves in to really make better decisions.

And it's a lot of boring that's talking about as the underlying principle. What do you do, like with your group, how do you keep yourself as a leader plugged into other sources of wisdom and knowledge when you're busy running? I mean, you're feeding into a lot of the businesses and entrepreneurs that you can. guys have invested in. How do you make sure that you're getting fed and that inflow is coming into you so you can pour out into others? Fortunately, I mean, one, the science of success has been a hugely helpful vehicle for that because if nothing else, it's enabled me to interview 300 of my favorite authors and experts in any topic area that I'm interested in. I'm like, let's go find somebody and interview them about that. So that helps me feed my own knowledge.

But beyond that, I mean, I'm a voracious reader. And I, you know, I mean, I'm constantly reading about all kinds of stuff. And one of the themes we touched on briefly earlier was this idea that range is really important. Right. And that book by David Epstein, fantastic book. But it touches on these notions of you want to pull from kind of weird and disparate and broad sources a lot of the time because you're going to get some piece of inspiration that you might have never. seen before if you're just reading the 17th book about the industry that you're in, right? And so finding diverse and broad sources of information is really important. And that includes fiction

in a lot of cases. And I think reading fiction, reading, I read very widely and I read all kinds of stuff and I'm constantly reading like four books right now. And to me, that is a really important way of feeding your mind. And I'll say something that, you know, one of, to me, one of the pillars of wisdom, one of the pillars of knowledge and comes back to how do you teach yourself to make better decisions is to build on knowledge that doesn't change or changes very slowly over time. And try to master the, Elon Musk calls it the tree. If knowledge is sort of a tree, you want to master the trunk and then the big branches before you get into the leaves. And so I spend very little time on what I would consider ephemeral or rapidly changing types of information. Things like,

I virtually don't read the news. I consume very little news. I spend virtually zero time on social media. And I spend most of my time, I just finished reading a book from, it was written in 1960. You know what I mean? And now certainly not everything I read is that old, but it was a classic book that is super well-aclaimed and it's a, you know, this big history tone, basically, and it's really interesting and has a lot of lessons. And so to me, it really comes back to feeding your mind quality information and information, and this is the way that the brain works, is a really interesting component of human knowledge is that because of the way neural connections and so forth work, the more you know, the more you can know. And knowledge, you don't have a cap on how

much information you can learn in your brain. The more knowledge you have, the more you have an existing neural structure that new knowledge can clump onto. And so building, and if you build with those big tree trucks and those big thick branches and those big principles, then it's easy to glom information on because if you understand some of the cores of, let's say, psychology, human behavior, right? And what influences people and causes them to make certain kinds of decisions and whether those are buying decisions or whatever, those principles, like Robert Chaldeenie's book influence, that's probably one of the best marketing books you could ever read. It's a psychology book. And that's a hundred times more useful than reading 10 blog posts about, you know, nine

Facebook hacks that can triple your optimization rate, like that kind of stuff, is much less helpful when it really comes to building knowledge. Why do you think we underest, to make things that are closer to that tree trunk. I was with somebody the other day, a business owner, and they were going on and on about this book that I had not heard of. I said, oh, my gosh, it's this and this and this. And they were telling me about the author and just this unique angle that he has on perspective. And then I said, I got to get this book. And what is it? He said, well, it was written in the 80s. And something in me was like, oh, well, it can't be that good. Like, as if because it was written 40 years ago that it's less valuable. Like, we tend to really

gravitate towards new and novel somehow being better, like at the bleeding edge of, why is that? I mean, you touched on it earlier. It's evolutionary psychology essentially, right? I mean, we're drawn to new, flashy, novel, interesting things, and we take for granted a lot of the art that's hanging up in our house that we walk by every single day. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really a discipline to get deeper into the trunk, to go back and not be distracted in the flashy world of all the things on social media and the news. That's really swimming upstream. I mean, 99% of our society is whatever's fed up for us that day in our social feeds is really what dictates what we consume. Yes. And that's been, I mean, I'm sure you've heard of things like

the social dilemma and that kind of stuff. But I mean, as I've both interviewed experts about these things on my own show or whatever else and just started to learn more about it, the less time I spend on, I mean, I have a five minute aggregate cap per day on social media on my phone. And that's across. So that's like two minutes on Twitter, two minutes on Facebook and one minute on Instagram and I'm out of time. You know what I mean? And so to me, it's really important. Yeah, it's whatever it's called on the iPhone. I forget. Yeah, I've done the same. I had to do it. I thought initially, oh, I'm just going to be disciplined and only check for 10 minutes a day or whatever. And, dude, you look at your stuff and it's like, oh, I was on there for an hour.

Yeah. Like, you just don't realize. You just suddenly, you black out and you black back in and you've been scrolling on your Facebook feed and you're like looking at somebody who, you know, you met at a conference five years ago and they're like, you know, their company and you're like, what are they, you know what I mean? And it's just like, you have to pull out of it. It's really good accountability. I mean, for people listening that haven't done this. I mean, you can go into your screen time settings and set an actual limit. And it pops up and it says you're out of time.

Your budget is expired for the date, right? The meter has expired. I guess you can manually override it, right? But at least that prompt to say, oh, okay, I'm done. That was my five minutes for today. It's a big deal. If you really want to get hardcore about it, I'm not even this hardcore, but you can have your spouse or your significant other, whatever, set the password to get out

because it's not the same as your phone password. So if you really want to be super hardcore, you can have somebody else set the password so you can't get in. I'm hoping my wife doesn't listen to this episode. She doesn't even have that information. Just delete that part out. Yeah, exactly. In many ways, I mean, that same idea is really a common thread that goes through a lot of what we've talked about today, right? this notion of taking some time to be proactive, right? Whether that's journaling, things like that with the research in psychology calls contemplative routines, right? Time where you're stepping out of your life and you're saying, this is, you know, you're taking that perspective and you're

saying, this is what's important to me and this is how I want to spend my time. And then you create the framework and the guardrails, whether it's your business strategy or whether it's your your strategy to not spend as much time on social media. And, you know, we all know that social media is bad for us. And so taking five minutes to say, how much time do I really want to spend and setting those parameters for yourself is going to create a cascade through your life. And all these little positive decisions start to compound on one another. Right. I mean, it's the same thing as what we talk about, knowledge compounds if you build on the right foundations. Habits compound too. And great habits snowball. If you limit your social media to 10 minutes a day, suddenly you have an hour a day.

Now you can read an hour a day. And then you know what I mean? And then you start, it all starts to snowball together. Well, I mean, all this stuff is good, but none of it matters. And you're hitting on something really key here. And none of it matters if you don't start with something that you want, a desired future, a goal. Yes. And aligning behaviors with your goals.

Let's unpack that a little bit. Yeah. I mean, that to me is, it's incredibly, it's incredibly important. It's very simple, but it's very uncommon, which is mind-blowing when you really think about it. But one of my favorite exercises is to go through, take your calendar for the last month, two months, three months, whatever. If you want to get hardcore, you can go back as far as you want. But take your calendar, print it out, and then take your goals, right? Just the list of here's the things that I've set out as my goals.

And if you don't have goals, it's a whole other issue that we don't have time to address today. but take out your goals and take out your calendar and then just go through, get a couple different pens and every time you spent time on something that was directly related to your goals, you know, circle it in blue or green or whatever. And then every, you know, every time you did something that you thought was a time waste or low value or wasn't creating value for your business, mark it with an X. And I've done this with dozens and dozens of people and including myself many, many times. And I would say on average, probably max 20% of the time has ever spent towards goals. And the other 80% is just being wasted. And that's the people who are focused

on their goals. I would say a lot of people, it's two, three hours a week, maybe on stuff that they've said is the most important stuff. And so if you don't align your actions with your goals, you're never going to get to your goals. You have to, you have to, you have to consciously say, here's what's important to me. You have to take your activities and you have to make sure that your activities in some form or fashion are moving towards your goals. And I have a routine that I do every single week where I go through my goals and I go through what I'm doing that week and I make sure that my activities are aligned with it. And am I perfect at it? Certainly not. But that conscious effort channels into spending more time on what I've deemed is really important to myself and less time wasted on low value meetings or things that don't matter or busy work or social media or whatever.

I think you're doing something in that time you set aside each week that I've noticed as a common thread with all successful leaders. They all in some form of fashion do this. It may not be a weekly exercise. but they create space to audit their own behavior, whether it's a quarterly off-site or retreat or, you know, whatever, but they intentionally have time in their calendar to pan back and evaluate their own performance. And the ones that do that over time realize, okay, I've got stuff I can improve, and then they go back in the trenches and they improve it. And it's that iterative process of, you know, kind of sprint out there and then recover and pan back and audit. and then sprint out there again, pan back, recover, and audit. When you're not doing that and you're just sprinting, sprinting, sprinting, sprinting,

you never realize you're going the wrong direction. Yep. It's so, so, so critical. And you're right. I used the phrase earlier, but in a lot of the psychology research, they call that a contemplative routine, broadly speaking. And contemplative routines are one of the most common things that you see across peak performance in virtually any field, whether it's everything from poker players, astronauts, athletes, business people, any endeavor, most of the successful people have very strong contemplative routines

where they're taking time out. I love that term, auditing their life, and they're figuring out what's working, what's not, how am I spending my time, and aligning themselves with doing more of what they want to be doing and what is creating results. Yeah, so good. Dude, we could go for hours on this. I know. I'm eating it up. I'm going to have to let you go. I know you got more stuff going on. As we wrap up, you know, hundreds of thousands of business owners listening right now. Many of them have had a really challenging season. Our country is in a crazy spot right now. But this is the backbone of our country's economy. From your vantage point, what do you want to say to them to encourage them, to challenge them? They would help us lock arms as a business owner community as we go forward and continue to face the adversity that we've been facing and come out as victors on the other side.

That's a great question. I would say, Give yourself a little credit. And, you know, you're capable of making the tough choices in your business. You're capable of doing the hard things. And sometimes, most of the time, you're not going to have all the answers. And that's okay. And even though you're the person at the top, it's okay not to have all the answers. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't make the tough choices and that you shouldn't push forward.

and I would really encourage you to take some time out of your day, whether it's half an hour or whatever, in the next week, and do some of the stuff we've talked about, whether it's auditing your calendar or thinking about your goals and whether your activities are aligned to it, whether it's thinking through a big strategic decision that you're trying to make. There's a lot of value that can be created by just carving out a little bit of space

for proactive contemplative reflection as opposed to just constant reactivity. Really, really good. good stuff. Matt Bodner on the Entry Leadership Podcast for the first time, hopefully not the last time. This was fantastic. Tell us more how we can learn more about you and your podcast because I know that's a great resource. Yeah, the best place to check me out is just at Successpodcast.com. And it's been an honor to be on here, Daniel. It's great conversation. I had a lot of fun. And thank you so much for having me. Likewise. Take care, friend. All right, guys, good stuff.

Now remember, if you're the leader, you are the decider. that's your job. You have to make decisions to keep the organization moving forward. If you're like me, we're tempted sometimes to procrastinate on hard decisions. We put them off or maybe you've done this one. I'm sure that'll take care of itself. Of course we know in business, things don't take care of themselves. As leaders, it's our job to make the tough decisions.

Now, we can delegate decision making to leaders, to other parts of the team. We can involve the team to gather information and collaborate on the decisions, but ultimately, as the leader, we have to decide. It's a muscle that we have to be growing all the time. This is a topic we spend a lot of time with our coaching team working with small business owners on how to make better decisions. So our coaching team has taken all the resources that they use, the exercises, the mental models, and the ways that they challenge business owners on their critical thinking to make better decisions. They've condensed all of that and put it into an incredible free resource just for you about decision making. So if you want to get this resource, it's a decision making checklist.

It's going to blow your mind. You guys are going to love this. Absolutely free. Just text the keyword decision to 33444. Again, text decision to 33444 or you can just click on the link in the show notes. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entry Leadership podcast. Hey, if you know somebody that would also enjoy this episode, send him a link. Share it with them. Thank you for doing that. That's how this thing grows and we're very grateful.

Also, you can watch interviews and highlights from the Entry Leadership podcast on YouTube. So be sure to check us out over there. Hey, if you're a small business owner between about two and 200 team members, we'd love to have a live conversation with you. Find out how the show's working for you, what we can do to improve. If you'd like to help us out with that, you can schedule a call with Tim the producer by clicking a link on the show notes. he'll get you squared away. Thanks for helping us out with that. Also, you can follow us on social media at Entry Leadership. You can follow me on Instagram at Daniel Tarty. This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited and mixed by Will Rudder. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and on behalf of

the entire Entry Leadership team, thank you for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like The Christie Wright Show. I'm Christy right. You know, it's so easy to feel stuck. You live life, just going through the motions, doing dishes, doing laundry, carpool lines, and a whole list of commitments that bring you no joy. We say yes to what everyone expects of us, and we have no energy or time for what we want. And let's be honest, most of the time, we don't even know what we want. Why do we live like that? God certainly never called us to. You know, I believe that the life God has for us is bigger and more

amazing than any of us realize. That's why I want you to check out the Christy Wright Show. Every week, we will fire you up to break through what's holding you back and inspire you to create a life you love and are proud of. Each episode will help you build confidence in yourself and the God that created you. To hear full episodes, just search Christy Wright wherever you listen to podcasts or go to Ramsey Solutions.com slash shows.