Podcast Ep 143 | Planning to win in 2023 - Execution - (4 of 5)

What exe­cu­tion deci­sions do you need to make to win in 2023? 

2023 looks to have major chal­lenges that are slow­ly devel­op­ing. And this is espe­cial­ly so when con­sid­er­ing your strat­e­gy and how it might be impact­ed by the chang­ing envi­ron­ment. One of the most impor­tant ques­tions to answer to best pre­pare for 2023 is how can I main­tain con­sis­tent finan­cial per­for­mance if my cus­tomer’s needs or spend­ing changes?

“Peo­ple are always excit­ed about the games in sports, but it is all the dis­ci­pline and habits built in prac­tice that dri­ves winning”

This week we dis­cuss how to main­tain con­sis­ten­cy through exe­cu­tion and how can you win in 2023 through the exe­cu­tion lens. 

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:12

Wel­come to the growth whis­pers pod­cast where Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence, that’s myself and my great cohost con­tin­u­al­ly talk about build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. Why? Because we like to, and we believe in it. And we think build­ing an endur­ing great com­pa­ny is a noble, won­der­ful and amaz­ing thing to do. And build­ing a com­pa­ny for a few years is maybe a dif­fer­ent game to play. But today’s show, we want­ed to start off by wish­ing you a hap­py new year, we are now offi­cial­ly in 2023. And I hope I’m sure it’s gonna be an inter­est­ing year. And I hope it is an awe­some year for you both at work and in your life as well. Kevin Lawrence, again, my co host, Brad Giles here, kick­ing off the show. So Brad, what’s the word, phrase, word or phrase of the day for you?

Brad Giles 00:58

Hel­lo, Kim. It’s good to be here. And hap­py new year to our lis­ten­ers. I hope that 2023 is treat­ing you as it should word of the day. I guess we’re Neil, you know, you get to this time of the year and you real­ly, it just can’t help. But maybe not, you know, set new goals or big goals, but just feel a sense of renew­al. Like, okay, I’ve closed out last year, every­thing is done. I’m in a rest peri­od, per­haps for many peo­ple, and I’m begin­ning to look at the next year just renew­al. That’s mine, what are yours Kev?

Kevin Lawrence 01:32

I was its sim­plic­i­ty. Sim­plic­i­ty is one of the most impor­tant things in busi­ness in life. And usu­al­ly, there’s a few sim­ple things that mat­ter most. And keep­ing it real­ly sim­ple. You know, even in our goal set­ting tool that we use, it’s, you know, the top one or two things in any giv­en time­frame that relate to your work or for your­self or in your life. So sim­ple. And keep­ing it real­ly sim­ple and sim­ple is hard. You know, and so yeah, it reminds me that quote I’ve shared before by Mark Twain, you know, would have writ­ten you a short­er let­ter, but I did­n’t have the time. Because sim­plic­i­ty is hard. Sim­plic­i­ty. It takes mas­tery and a bunch of extra effort. And it keeps things easy, eas­i­er to scale eas­i­er to win all that oth­er stuff. So sim­plic­i­ty. So sim­ple. What would you use? Renew­al? Renew­al, sim­ple renew­al, city of renew­al, or renew­al some Ma’am, I don’t think those mash togeth­er we could, there’s prob­a­bly a great way to mash them togeth­er. It’s not com­ing to me right now. Well,

Brad Giles 02:30

it plays into the theme of today’s episode, which is like renew, focus on exe­cu­tion and make it sim­ple. Yes.

Kevin Lawrence 02:39

And as we know, with sim­i­lar sim­plic­i­ty scales, we’re just talk­ing about this episode of exe­cu­tion. If it’s not sim­ple, it’s real­ly hard to exe­cute con­sis­tent­ly, repeat­ed­ly by lots of dif­fer­ent peo­ple. So you’re we’re con­tin­u­ing the series we have about set­ting our­selves up to win in 2023. And as we’ve cov­ered in the last cou­ple episodes, you know, we’ve gone through 2022 and 2021 and 2020. Today, we’re kind of strange years. And we’re look­ing for­ward. And we’re excit­ed to be look­ing for­ward. But you know, we want to be pre­pared to max­i­mize most what unfolds over the 12 months of this year, and, and the com­ing few years and, and depend­ing on where you are in your seg­ment, there’s all kinds of inter­est­ing stuff. So today, it’s all about exe­cu­tion. And I’ll start off with a quote. In one of our ses­sions that we have with Jim Collins, he said at the end of the day, cre­ativ­i­ty is part of human nature. It’s actu­al­ly pret­ty com­mon, pret­ty easy. But dis­ci­pline is the mas­tery. And he has a quote that suc­cess comes from relent­less exe­cu­tion of the bor­ing basics, par­tic­u­lar­ly those that fit with­in your hedge­hog prin­ci­ple. So that’s what we’re talk­ing about today is relent­less exe­cu­tion of the dis­ci­plines that real­ly make a dif­fer­ence in your busi­ness. That’s pret­ty straight­for­ward. Yeah. And we’ll go ahead, Brian,

Brad Giles 04:03

it’s, it’s inter­est­ing. I spent a lot of time many, many years with entre­pre­neurs. And I’ve been an entre­pre­neur start­ed many com­pa­nies, right. The things that make you suc­cess­ful as an entre­pre­neur is your cre­ativ­i­ty. Okay, yes. But that cre­ativ­i­ty needs to be fed. And it needs to be fed in a way that you need to keep being cre­ative. And the brain that cre­ates that busi­ness, that entre­pre­neur­ial flair, does­n’t like the bor­ing basics. And then that’s the real chal­lenge. And that’s why exe­cu­tion is actu­al­ly so hard because the entre­pre­neurs who build these busi­ness­es, once they get a bit of momen­tum, they’re like, oh, that but I want to go and do some­thing fun and they they chase the shiny objects that kind of pop up and it can be a real chal­lenge. It can be and that’s why a lot

Kevin Lawrence 04:57

of entre­pre­neurs don’t scale. There is a are a mas­sive major­i­ty of entre­pre­neurs that starts off, they don’t get past a mil­lion in rev­enue. Nev­er­mind 10 Because they are incred­i­bly cre­ative, but they often lack the dis­ci­pline or haven’t fig­ured out how to hire the peo­ple who have the dis­ci­pline to be able to run and dri­ve those things over and over and over again.

Brad Giles 05:20

Yeah, and it’s fun, it’s fun chas­ing the shiny things, it’s fun to,

Kevin Lawrence 05:23

you know, it’s not very, it’s not very prof­itable. And it does­n’t, it does­n’t build a great com­pa­ny, but it sure entertaining.

Brad Giles 05:30

But just under­stand­ing it mat­ters and under­stand­ing why exe­cu­tion is so fun­da­men­tal­ly important.

Kevin Lawrence 05:39

It isn’t your point is it’s and it’s hard for a lot of entre­pre­neurs and even a lot of real senior lead­ers don’t gen­er­al­ly have the brains who love doing the same thing over and over and over again, that’s a dif­fer­ent type of per­son­al­i­ty style. And even myself, that’s why I’ve got lots of peo­ple around me who are won­der­ful at con­sis­tent exe­cu­tion, where I am more of an ideas per­son and have that entre­pre­neur­ial mind, it’s a great, great way to look at it. So if we look at you know, if you look at what you know, watch­ing sports, and and what­ev­er it hap­pens to be, it’s won­der­ful to watch ath­letes do things real­ly, real­ly well. It’s very impres­sive. They make it look easy. But the real­i­ty is the rea­son that they can do it so well at game time or per­for­mance time, is because of the hours and hours and dozens and hun­dreds of hours of prac­tice and rep­e­ti­tion. Again and again and again and again and again. Again, that’s that relent­less dis­ci­pline to masterpieces.

Brad Giles 06:32

It is and I’m glad you brought up sports. There’s a there’s a com­mon say­ing that many peo­ple use when it comes to plan­ning and exe­cu­tion is the out­put of plan­ning, right? This isn’t how we exe­cute and that is it’s every­one has a plan until they get punched in the face. And it’s a cred­it­ed to Mike Tyson the box­er. And that’s fine. And it’s I love that quote. Yeah. It’s very cool to say that. And it’s like, yeah, we don’t need plans. Were too tough for that. Right. But when you actu­al­ly look at that sto­ry as a ref­er­ence point, he was being asked by a jour­nal­ist as he was going to that fight. Aren’t you wor­ried about Evan­der Holy­field, who you’re going to invite and his plans, like his plans are noto­ri­ous­ly good, and that’s why he’s got such a great win record. And of course, we know what Tyson said in response. He said every­one’s got a plan to like get punched in the mouth, a very tough kind of, you know, thing to say as a box­er, but he went on to lose that fight. Okay, that’s the bru­tal real­i­ty of it. But then there was a rematch. And the plan­ning won again. Okay, because Evan­der Holy­field went in with a plan. Now, his plan did­n’t include Mike Tyson in the sec­ond fight is going to bite my ear off. Okay, a bite a big chunk of his ear off and then on the on the on the, on the mat, and then bite the oth­er here. But it had his plan. And he exe­cut­ed and he stuck to it. And he won the sec­ond fight the rematch. So, so it’s all good. And well, to say these things and to say plan­ning does­n’t mat­ter. And exe­cu­tion does­n’t mat­ter. But exe­cu­tion is where the bat­tle is won.

Kevin Lawrence 08:08

It is. And you know, essen­tial­ly that Mike Tyson quote, I love that quote, I’m going to, I’m just going to for­get what you said, because it blew up that quote, in my mind, I looked at it. And I know that you’re right. I looked at it as it’s why you need to be will­ing to iter­ate and change your plan. I take it as I’ve used in con­text, you need to have a sol­id base plan and be ready to make changes.

Brad Giles 08:29

It’s not that you’re wrong. It’s that there’s a bet­ter iter­a­tion of that sto­ry, which is the Evan­der Holy­field­’s side, which is for sure to plan had his ear bit­ten off. He was play­ing, he stuck to the plan, he adapt­ed. And then he won.

Kevin Lawrence 08:42

I got it. I like it. Yeah. And I did­n’t have the rest of the con­text. I like the con­text I made up in my mind about the quote, made it sound bril­liant, but appar­ent­ly it isn’t. So my we’re always learn­ing. So you know, it’s inter­est­ing in all of these things, is that the dis­ci­pline is the hard part. The ideas are easy, easy. Ideas are a dime a dozen. And for a lot of peo­ple, they get caught up in ideas and cre­ativ­i­ty. And it’s not it was just an inter­est­ing note, I read this book about artists and cre­ative peo­ple. Do you know and we have this vision of artists and they sit and wait till they’re inspired to paint or to write it that is so far from the truth. It’s not fun­ny, all of these high­ly the suc­cess­ful and obvi­ous­ly, the unsuc­cess­ful peo­ple have no dis­ci­pline. Sure, they wait to be inspired, but they prob­a­bly wait their whole life. The suc­cess­ful ones had hard­core dis­ci­plines. The painters had to paint four hours a day, the writ­ers had to write 1000 words and it went on and on and on. Every sin­gle one of the famous high­ly suc­cess­ful artists or cre­ative peo­ple were hard­core dis­ci­pline. That’s why they were suc­cess­ful. They worked incred­i­bly hard, and incred­i­bly con­sis­ten­cy. So like we know cre­ativ­i­ty is fun, and brain­storm­ing and all that fun, but it’s exe­cu­tion. There’s Just as a side note on that, if you look at, you know, South­west Air­lines, which has been and con­tin­ues to be one of the most suc­cess­ful air­lines in the world, I was dri­ving down in us the oth­er day and so on fly over and always remind­ed that they’re great air­line, there are no cough. Some­body else invent­ed the con­cept. They took the play­book and actu­al­ly got the man­u­als from the com­pa­ny, and just exe­cut­ed what they had bet­ter than the air­line that they copied lit­er­al­ly Wal­mart, Wal­mart, Sam Wal­ton than it was this was great sto­ry about Sam Wal­ton. Olson want Wal­ton did is con­stant­ly went around to all the oth­er retail­ers and lis­tened and looked for their inno­va­tions, and made them hap­pen in his stores. I just lis­ten to this great sto­ry about how Sam heard back in the day about anoth­er retail­er who had a dif­fer­ent check­out sys­tem, there used to be depart­ment based check­outs, and this per­son have fared how you just chan­nel every­one through one exit, and there’s one cashier or one point of cash, and how there was great effi­cien­cy. So he took a bus in a day, it was a four or five hour bus ride he had to take to go to this oth­er town to go and see this. And that’s what he did his whole career, he just kept copy­ing the best ideas. You could say, it sound­ed as if that he did­n’t have a cre­ative bone in his body, he would just go steal the best ideas and imple­ment them. And again, that’s not you know, I’m gonna respect what he built. I’m not dis­re­spect­ing him. He’s, he just he was a mas­ter of exe­cu­tion. And it was even through talk­ing with some of these oth­er retail­ers, he start­ed to get the idea about how Logis­tics was going to be the core, because he could see it from talk­ing to these oth­er peo­ple. So again, he execution.

Brad Giles 11:41

That’s, that’s inter­est­ing. Two points. Very quick­ly. There’s a YouTube movie called Every­thing is a Remix. And it’s fas­ci­nat­ing. I don’t know if you’ve seen it before. But yeah, def­i­nite­ly worth it, check out Every­thing is a Remix. It just tells a sto­ry that there are no gen­uine ideas, you look at some­thing like Star Wars, or what­ev­er it is, like all of these things are stitched togeth­er from all of these oth­er ideas that are stitched togeth­er from oth­er ideas. The sec­ond point, the num­ber one hard­ware retail­er in Aus­tralia is a com­pa­ny called Bun­nings. And Bun­nings. Exec­u­tives Bun­nings orig­i­nal­ly came from Perth and Bun­nings, exec­u­tives flew to Amer­i­ca a whole, I would say not a bus­load, but let’s say five to 10 of them. And they would dri­ve into one Wal­mart, and then a Home Depot, they would take as many pho­tos as they can, and then get back in the car when they got kicked out and then dri­ve to their one to have as many pho­tos again, till they got kicked out and just kept on dri­ving, then cap­ture their images come back and just exe­cut­ed well. And now they’ve got I would guess, 70 to 80% of the retail hard­ware mar­ket, because they under­stood and they exe­cut­ed extreme­ly well.

Kevin Lawrence 12:51

Yeah, limb tru­ly, if you look at any well run com­pa­ny, high per­form­ing com­pa­ny, its exe­cu­tion. It’s not luck. It’s not cre­ativ­i­ty. So the root of it, there’s lots of basics of exe­cu­tion that we’re very pas­sion­ate about. And you know, and gen­er­al­ly they’re in kind of three cat­e­gories is exe­cu­tion of goals, or what’s impor­tant around goals, exe­cu­tion, hav­ing data so you can tell what is actu­al­ly work­ing or not like to give you a sense of you’re on track. And then meet­ings to help make sure peo­ple stay focused on it. So hav­ing goals, hav­ing data to help us we’re doing goals. And then hav­ing meet­ings where peo­ple align around what they need to do. It’s not rock­et science.

Brad Giles 13:30

And that’s where excel­lent exe­cu­tion comes from those three things. So if you’re look­ing into 2023, and think­ing, how can I win, like, that’s where we’ve got to get bet­ter. And that’s where the oppor­tu­ni­ties lie. Yeah, and

Kevin Lawrence 13:43

take some ideas. And we were chat­ting before the show. But when we go into com­pa­nies, and we need to go and help them improve their per­for­mance, gen­er­al­ly, the great­est impact is tight­en­ing up exe­cu­tion because exe­cu­tion gets loose. You know, a com­pa­ny that I’ve been work­ing with, through­out this year, real­ly good com­pa­ny doing a lot of things. Well, they had a lot of stuff, but they got a lit­tle dis­tract­ed along the way. And when I went back in, they said we real­ly need help weapon this thing back into shape. So I’m okay. I start­ed look­ing at the exe­cu­tion dis­ci­plines. There’s some quite a cou­ple ques­tions around strat­e­gy. When we looked at the exe­cu­tion, exe­cu­tion dis­ci­plines. They were gone. They had them, they, they were gone, and peo­ple were lost. And the meet­ings weren’t focused on the goals. The data was con­fus­ing. The goals weren’t clear. It’s like Well, no won­der they did they just stopped doing the thing. It’s like, if you stop brush­ing your teeth, you’re gonna start to notice some fun­ny things over time, right? Or if you stopped bathing, or hav­ing a show­er, you know, and bathing and brush­ing your teeth. Those are exe­cu­tion dis­ci­plines that cre­ate cer­tain results.

Brad Giles 14:50

Yeah, that’s what I always say. It’s like brush­ing your teeth. We got­ta keep doing it. Yeah, and you should­n’t ques­tion it. Like, this is how we exe­cute well, we got the right meet­ings, the right data, the right goal. Some priority.

Kevin Lawrence 15:00

So as some exam­ple, I mean, again, these exe­cu­tions, there’s all kinds of exe­cu­tions, that count of the goals of the tal­ent reviews, check­ing on the orga­ni­za­tion­al health, finan­cial reviews, quar­ter­ly retreats, quar­ter­ly cel­e­bra­tions, month­ly busi­ness reviews, week­ly exe­cu­tion reviews, all that good stuff. But one com­pa­ny that I that I have done some work with, and they were real­ly, real­ly doing well, but some­how on the par­tic­u­lar­ly on the peo­ple piece of it, they got focused on build­ing an amaz­ing cul­ture, and hav­ing every­one love com­ing to their job. And they lost their dis­ci­pline around peo­ple. And they lost the exe­cu­tion dis­ci­plines around peo­ple around the the strong dis­ci­pline on hir­ing, strong dis­ci­pline on when we make a pro­mo­tion, let’s dou­ble or quadru­ple check, we’re mak­ing the right move the dis­ci­plines around tal­ent reviews and assess­ing exist­ing tal­ent, it almost all dis­ap­peared, and became nice, sweet, but not an actu­al busi­ness exe­cu­tion review. And the team got big­ger than it need­ed to be less account­able than it need­ed to be wrong mix of peo­ple like all kinds of stuff. And these are good peo­ple, they just they took their eye off the ball on the exe­cu­tion. And next thing, you know, they’ve got seri­ous peo­ple prob­lems, and they actu­al­ly cre­at­ed by try­ing to cre­ate such a great cul­ture. But because they took their eye off dis­ci­pline or the dis­ci­pline of exe­cu­tion, they made the cul­ture worse.

Brad Giles 16:29

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the thing is, right, what is the out­put of poor exe­cu­tion? Go back to if you haven’t got the meet­ings, hum­ming, if you haven’t got every­body know­ing the right pri­or­i­ties and goals. And if you haven’t got every­one get­ting the right met­rics, what hap­pens is the prof­it does­n’t fall to the bot­tom line, right? So it’s a direct, because that stuff does­n’t get done. stuff does­n’t get done effi­cient­ly and effec­tive­ly. Correct,

Kevin Lawrence 16:55

that things slow down, they take more time, more mon­ey, or more mis­takes, like the machine slows down. It’s like, you’re dri­ving on the high­way at 120 kilo­me­ters an hour. And you take your eye off off the throt­tle. And actu­al­ly next thing, you know, you’re going 70 You have to just slow the whole machine, although peo­ple are still work­ing hard and think they’re work­ing hard. If you

Brad Giles 17:16

think if you’re in a com­pa­ny cri­sis, what would you do? Okay, we’ve got to have the right goals, we’ve got to have the right num­bers so that we know where we’re head­ing. And we’ve got to have the right meet­ings so that we can syn­chro­nize. So there’s no rea­son that you should­n’t be doing that all the time to exe­cute effec­tive­ly. That’s execution.

Kevin Lawrence 17:32

Yeah. It’s just hard to stay focused on and you know, what’s inter­est­ing, I’m just, you know, in Decem­ber cel­e­brat­ed with one of my clients who we built this com­pa­ny over 11 years, I’ve been a part of work­ing with him for 11 years and great orga­ni­za­tion, real­ly good peo­ple lead­ing it cared deeply strong pur­pose, great core val­ues, all the right things. But the real­i­ty is we had 45 dif­fer­ent 45 meet­ings every 90 days, over 11 years. Yeah, reset­ting the dis­ci­plines, we’d have the it was a dis­ci­pline meet­ing, a very awe­some cre­ative CEO, excel­lent exec­u­tives. But we would review how are we doing on the finan­cials ver­sus tar­get? How do we do bet­ter? How are we doing in terms of peo­ple in our key roles? How are they doing? How do we help them to do bet­ter or get bet­ter peo­ple? How are we doing on the oper­a­tional KPIs ver­sus expec­ta­tions? What do we got to keep an eye on? Where’s where are the gaps in the busi­ness. And we would go through this again, and again, and again, quar­ter on quar­ter on quar­ter. And over time, we made lots of mis­takes, lots of errors, and we nev­er have, it’s not like the team is per­fect. But we con­sis­tent­ly have clear, bet­ter strat­e­gy, bet­ter exe­cu­tion of the quar­ter­ly goals through­out the orga­ni­za­tion, bet­ter align­ment, stronger cul­ture, high­er per­cent­age of a play­ers on the team, and with the amount that this com­pa­ny grew is incred­i­ble, because it’s become an exe­cu­tion machine and the val­ue cre­ation over 11 years is dra­mat­ic. Yeah, right. And they sold a big part of it to a cap­i­tal part­ner. And it just it’s a, it’s I mean, it’s spec­tac­u­lar. But it’s you know,

Brad Giles 19:11

we have a very

Kevin Lawrence 19:12

good team doing very good stuff, with an incred­i­ble focus on exe­cu­tion that gets reset every 90 days with­out fail, and we get bet­ter and bet­ter and bet­ter and bet­ter and bet­ter. And, you know, but when you do the same thing over and over 44 times, and they were doing it before they met with me, prob­a­bly 60 times they have had that that hard­core quar­ter­ly dis­ci­pline for two days, a quar­ter, three days, every annu­al. And it’s kind of hard to not win if you con­tin­u­al­ly exe­cute. It’s hard. It’s it’s actu­al­ly it’s hard to lose.

Brad Giles 19:46

It’s hard to not win. That’s exact­ly right. Because you just come back and you reset. And I mean, you and I do it with our firms, and we get that same feel­ing that every­body does that we work with, which is yeah, like I’m real­ly clear. What I’m going into and why it mat­ters and where to go, yes, yeah, because we get lost in the quar­ter, stuff comes up stuff changes, we get dis­tract­ed, we need mech­a­nisms to help us help us stay focused on doing the jobs that mat­ter most. And that’s why we advo­cate coach­es, exter­nal coach­es, let’s be fair, because the exter­nal coach is the one that has the incen­tive to make the meet­ings and the dis­ci­pline occur. And that fun­da­men­tal cat­a­lyst dri­ves that, you know, there’s one,

Kevin Lawrence 20:28

right that are like the taskmas­ters, basi­cal­ly, to help peo­ple make sure they stay focused, and don’t end up on our cre­ative idea chas­ing event,

Brad Giles 20:37

which is incred­i­bly expen­sive. So there’s one team that I know of, and they were amaz­ing at exe­cu­tion, like just, they were absolute best prac­tice, if you wrote a book about them, they’d have to be, you know, one of their sto­ries would have to be in there. But then they dropped the week­ly meet­ings, I don’t know, they got busy or some­thing hap­pened. And and, you know, next thing, you know, they stopped exe­cut­ing well, and the num­bers just mas­sive­ly shift­ed. And then they’re like, oh, there’s a cri­sis, we’ve got to move. And it’s like, well, if you if you stop doing the week­ly meet­ings, you’re not going to be exe­cut­ing well, peo­ple won’t be realign­ing and resetting.

Kevin Lawrence 21:20

Yes, that’s human nature. So there’s lots of dif­fer­ent exam­ples, the main thing that you know, that we have a great year, this com­ing year or this year, is just to make sure that the most impor­tant exe­cu­tion dis­ci­plines are tight. And, you know, real­ly, if we were to dig into it, the things that we see that real­ly mat­ter, those quar­ter­ly meet­ings are crit­i­cal, where we’re review­ing the num­bers, the KPIs, the goals and the team, right. And that’s that those are, those are, in my mind, real­ly, real­ly crit­i­cal. It makes all the dif­fer­ence in the world. But for one of the com­pa­nies I work with, what they found for them is that the week­ly meet­ing was the hard­est one, the quar­ter­ly meet­ing, they got a they got an out­side coach, from my team that works with them. But the week­ly is where peo­ple often get lost. Yeah, and by nature, a lot of peo­ple’s week­ly meet­ing becomes a week­ly trou­bleshoot­ing or a week­ly dis­cus­sion meet­ing, not a week­ly exe­cu­tion meet­ing, mean­ing the week­ly meet­ing to make sure we exe­cute our goals. Right, that we get those most impor­tant pri­or­i­ties for that quar­ter com­plete. And peo­ple talk about all kinds of oth­er stuff. And it’s there’s always ran­dom oth­er stuff to talk about hot top­ics, all kinds of stuff. But if you don’t come back and get focused on your goals, peo­ple get lost and for­get, for­get what they’re sup­posed to do. And it’s hard to get them done

Brad Giles 22:36

well with sev­en Thir­teen­th’s of the way through the 13. Week, quar­ter, for exam­ple, we’re in week sev­en out of 13. How’s your plan going for that pri­or­i­ty? Or, you know, an update on where we’re at? Are we like­ly to achieve that by the end of the quar­ter? That’s what we’re real­ly talk­ing about what’s going on in the met­rics are the KPIs, we green across your KPIs is your team work­ing all of those, those come back in and realign and if we come back, and we all we’re talk­ing about is oper­a­tions and what’s hap­pen­ing on the projects, or the jobs or what­ev­er indus­try we’re in, and we’re not work­ing on the busi­ness at the week­ly meet­ing to track those things? Yeah, it’s gonna, it’s going to end in low­er lev­els of exe­cu­tion, and there­fore low­er lev­els of effec­tive profit.

Kevin Lawrence 23:24

And to be clear, from my per­spec­tive, the one thing that’s usu­al­ly wrong about most week­ly meet­ings, is they don’t spend 10 min­utes to review the progress of the quar­ter­ly goals that we have agreed to the top three to five goals, or pri­or­i­ties or rocks, what­ev­er you want to call them, that we don’t spend time on say­ing, Hey, What progress did we make last week? What are we going to do this week? And is there any­thing that we’re stuck on? We might need assis­tance with? That one thing I per­son­al­ly believe is the most impor­tant piece of that week­ly meet­ing, and most peo­ple miss it, because it’s a dis­ci­pline. It’s the floss­ing your teeth, of the of the busi­ness world, and a lot of peo­ple don’t do it well, and con­stant­ly need to reset on it.

Brad Giles 24:08

Yeah, yeah, indeed. Good. Good. Good chat. I guess what we’re say­ing here, then to, to begin to sum­ma­rize is if you want to win in 2023, you’ve got to get your exe­cu­tion, right. And that means that is, as you ana­lyze those three areas, if you got the right pri­or­i­ties or goals for the busi­ness for each per­son, for each depart­ment, for a peri­od, ag week, quar­ter year, have you got the right met­rics and data so that peo­ple can pre­dict and del­e­gate to the peo­ple make the right deci­sions? And then final­ly, we’ve got the right meet­ings now, you know that we advo­cate dai­ly, hud­dles week­ly, month­ly, quar­ter­ly and annu­al meet­ings in a very kind of struc­tured for­mat. What of those things are you not doing well? And then if you look To 2023 Which of those things can you do bet­ter or the oppor­tu­ni­ty to exe­cute better?

Kevin Lawrence 25:07

Pret­ty straight­for­ward, easy to say. And hard to do con­sis­tent­ly over and over and over and over and over again, and again and again.

Brad Giles 25:15

But this is how you get what you real­ly want it Yes,

Kevin Lawrence 25:19

and whether it’s in sport, as an artist, in busi­ness, it does­n’t mat­ter. Or if you’re, if you’re a wood­work­er, and you want to mas­ter a cer­tain type of wood carv­ing, it’s all the same relent­less exe­cu­tion. Prac­tice con­sis­tent­ly doing the few things that mat­ter. Absolute­ly, most.

Brad Giles 25:38

Indeed, very good. So this has been the growth whis­pers My name is Brett Giles, in Perth, Aus­tralia, and Kevin Lawrence, my co host here in Van­cou­ver, Cana­da. You can find us on youtube if you pre­fer to see our smil­ing faces just by search­ing the growth whis­pers and the YouTube and obvi­ous­ly like and sub­scribers if you’re lis­ten­ing to the pod­cast, we always like a new sub­scriber and wel­come them and wel­come any input you can find us and if you’ve got any ques­tions that you’d like us to cov­er, we’d love to do that. You can find Kevin at Lawrence​and​co​.com and you can find myself at evo​lu​tion​part​ners​.com​.au And of course we both got week­ly newslet­ters that are packed full of inter­est­ing things around this sub­ject. Thanks for lis­ten­ing. It’s been great to have your com­pa­ny I hope that you are enjoy­ing your new year, your New Year’s Day and I hope that you have a great, great day and a great break before get­ting into 2023 Have a good one. Look for­ward to chat­ting to you next week.