Podcast Ep 158 | Living and working in your Sustainable Sweet Spot as a leader

Some parts of your role give you ener­gy, and some parts drain your ener­gy. Often, the parts that drain your ener­gy can be unsus­tain­able. When you were younger, you prob­a­bly had jobs that drained your ener­gy, and you quit those jobs, get­ting bet­ter jobs over time. But that’s often not pos­si­ble if you’re a busi­ness own­er, CEO or executive. 

Over time we want to give more time to things that give us ener­gy and less time to those parts that drain ener­gy. This way we’re able to work hard and sus­tain our ener­gy for the role. We would be tired at the end of the day, but our ener­gy for the role would remain. 

This week we talk about how to live and work in your Sus­tain­able Sweet Spot as a leader.

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.

00:13
Kevin Lawrence
Hey, and wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast, where every­thing that we talk about is about build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. I’m Kevin Lawrence here in Van­cou­ver, British Colum­bia, Cana­da. I’m with my amaz­ing co host, Brad Giles down in Perth, Aus­tralia. Brad, how’s Aus­tralia treat­ing you today?

00:30
Brad Giles
Fab­u­lous. Excel­lent. Wonderful.

00:35
Kevin Lawrence
Wow.

00:36
Brad Giles
Well, as a world, we’ve been through some inter­est­ing things in the last few years. So, yeah, you got to some­times just take it for what it is. It’s good to be here. It’s great to be not going through some oth­er stuff that we’ve been through in the last few years.

00:57
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah, we have. It’s been wild. Boy, we’ve lived through an inter­est­ing time in his­to­ry. I mean, for lots of rea­sons. Even that, I think about that COVID thing, it’s actu­al­ly about three years. Yeah, about three years, rough­ly since this whole thing hap­pened. And holy, like, what a world. It was fun­ny. It was on an air­plane. On air­planes, lots these days. Man, you would think that it nev­er hap­pened because 98% of peo­ple aren’t wear­ing masks. It’s like it was pre COVID, which is amaz­ing how resilient we are as a soci­ety. Any­way. Awe­some. Well, things going good here, too. Like, it’s anoth­er great day in Van­cou­ver and excit­ed to be trav­el­ing and spend­ing time with clients again, con­sis­tent­ly face to face and kind of appre­ci­ate it more and inter­est­ing. I’m real­ly appre­ci­at­ing air trav­el. Just still, I just find amaz­ing and bog­gles my mind some­times how I can get up and have break­fast and work in one coun­try far away and then land and have din­ner in a dif­fer­ent country.

02:06
Kevin Lawrence
I’m talk­ing North Amer­i­ca across North Amer­i­ca between Cana­da and us. Long dis­tances. It’s just amaz­ing. What’s your word of the day or phrase of the day or thought of the day or con­tem­pla­tion of the day or just what­ev­er it hap­pens? What do you got for us, Brad?

02:22
Brad Giles
I guess it’s integri­ty. There’s just been a few exam­ples across the radar in clients that we deal with where some sup­pli­ers per­haps, and cus­tomers haven’t real­ly oper­at­ed with the best integri­ty. Also across the news, with­out dig­ging into any par­tic­u­lar exam­ples, you are the sum of the integri­ty breach­es that you pro­duce or that you’re involved with, that’s how many peo­ple would­n’t mea­sure one­self. So, yeah, for me, integri­ty today, wonderful.

03:11
Kevin Lawrence
Well, I’m going to change mine because I had some­thing dif­fer­ent, and I’ve also had a client who had a big integri­ty vio­la­tion in their busi­ness. It hap­pens all the time. We find them all the time, and it adds up to the tune of mil­lions and mil­lions of dol­lars. But it’s not about the mon­ey. It breaks down a lot of trust and cre­ates a lot of issues and a lot of headaches. So mine is the speed of trust. Stephen Cov­ey’s son wrote a book called The Speed of Trust years ago, and I think I enjoyed the name of it bet­ter than the book was fine. The thing that stuck with me was the prin­ci­ple was bril­liant, which is when you have high trust, things flow quick­ly, and you don’t have to send the fol­low up email. You’re not think­ing, maybe I should con­sult my lawyer on this one before I take action, which was con­ver­sa­tion I had today.

04:05
Kevin Lawrence
Maybe I should be, let me talk to my lawyer first. You don’t have any of that. Things flow freely and eas­i­ly, and that is the speed of trust. It’s amaz­ing when you have a high trust rela­tion­ship and you got to be care­ful with them, because when you do have a high trust rela­tion­ship and you don’t have the right checks and bal­ances, some­times things start to get a lit­tle loose and peo­ple take advan­tage of it. It’s won­der­ful to have a speed of trust. You just need to have at least the light touch on the dou­ble checks here and errors. One of my clients calls it drilling test holes. You don’t have to inspect the whole wall or the whole struc­ture. You just do drill a cou­ple of ran­dom holes and see what you find. You can do it.

04:53
Brad Giles
We would call that trust and verify.

04:56
Kevin Lawrence
Thank you. Yeah, so the speed of trust is a beau­ti­ful thing, and we love it, and it’s reliev­ing, and it feels great. A lit­tle ver­i­fi­ca­tion tends to pay off, and often when there’s some of these integri­ty issues, we wish we did a bit more verifying.

05:10
Brad Giles
All right, so today we’re talk­ing about some­thing com­plete­ly unre­lat­ed to that, but still quite interesting.

05:21
Kevin Lawrence
You could trans­late it to per­son­al inter­nal integri­ty, but that might be stretch­ing it a bit.

05:27
Brad Giles
Yeah, I can see why you would say that. I can see why you would say that. Often the two of us come across sit­u­a­tions where lead­ers are, let’s say they’re a bit dis­grun­tled or they’ve had enough of their busi­ness, and yeah, they’re like, I just can’t stand it any­more, or I can’t take this too much. What we’re talk­ing about today is dig­ging into under­stand, why might we start to feel like that num­ber one? What is a sim­ple tool that we both use? I think a vari­a­tion of that is in your book, your oxy­gen mask. First kev around the ener­gy that you’re get­ting from your role from the day to day. See, I was on the week­end on an island called Rot­tnest Island off the city here. It’s about an hour’s boat ride off the city. I was sit­ting there, and I was watch­ing these very busy team of girls in the café.

06:43
Brad Giles
The café was pump­ing, and they were work­ing as hard as they can to get all the orders out and every­thing. I thought, it’s good ener­gy and they enjoy the ener­gy, but at some point, they’re going to fall out of love with that. They’re going to be like, Look, I just don’t love it any­more. And every­body goes through that over time. There might be things that you enjoy about a job or a role at the begin­ning, and even­tu­al­ly you may actu­al­ly come to loathe those things.

07:18
Kevin Lawrence
It is and so give an exam­ple. So, the open­ing sto­ry in your oxy­gen mask first is a sto­ry of a guy named Nigel and is a client of mine for years. And when I first met Nigel. He’s from North Van­cou­ver. He has a com­pa­ny called Aqua­guard. When he would go to his busi­ness when he’s work­ing, he’s like, I got to sell this thing. I want out. I’ve had enough. He would put his hand on the door­knob at the back entrance of his build­ing, and he’d feel like he was get­ting elec­tro­cut­ed emo­tion­al­ly because the busi­ness was drain­ing him so much. It was just pulling every­thing out of him. A long sto­ry short, he hat­ed it like you would­n’t believe. At the end of the day, went and made some changes, includ­ing him buy­ing out his part­ner, includ­ing, in the end, get­ting a pres­i­dent in place, and he still owns it today.

08:08
Kevin Lawrence
It’s a great com­pa­ny, but he was get­ting drained by it and a bunch of things need­ed to be fixed. And that’s what this is about. How do you set it up in a way where you thrive and you get a great return on the ener­gy you put into the busi­ness, and ide­al­ly, it even gives you ener­gy back. The prob­lem is, when you build a com­pa­ny, peo­ple get used to doing and deal­ing with all kinds of chal­lenges, doing a lot of things that they have to just grind on through. When the going gets tough, the tough get going that is need­ed. At a cer­tain stage, it’s not sus­tain­able if you’re get­ting drained and beat up by your work all the time. And that’s what this is about. It’s in chap­ter four of your oxy­gen mass first, and we just call it your sweet spot. Invest­ing in your sweet spots, putting more ener­gy into the things that you thrive in and find­ing ways to do the things you don’t.

09:05
Kevin Lawrence
Sweet spots defined as things that you love to do. And you’re good at it, actu­al­ly. You pro­duce results and final­ly the envi­ron­ment you do it in. So I’ll share an exam­ple. The last month has been hard for me. One of the peo­ple on my team I do a lot of col­lab­o­ra­tion with, he’s had some stuff come up in his fam­i­ly, so he’s had to not be able to help me near as much. Well, he and I col­lab­o­rate all the time on things, and helps me in our col­lab­o­ra­tion to get projects done because he does a lot of the exe­cu­tion. I do the strat­e­gy and the think­ing, and we team togeth­er real­ly well, and I’ve got lots of oth­er amaz­ing peo­ple on my team that I also col­lab­o­rate with. He’s the core per­son who gets the final prod­uct across the fin­ish line. Because it’s not just the work I do, it’s the environment.

10:01
Kevin Lawrence
The envi­ron­ment being col­lab­o­ra­tion with oth­er peo­ple, doing final exe­cu­tion. That works real­ly well for me. With­out that it was notably hard­er and it took a lot more ener­gy. It’s not good or bad, it’s just almost like a cus­tom tai­lored piece of cloth­ing. It’s set­ting up things so you can spend a major­i­ty of your time doing things that you love to do and real­ly thrive at, and only of time doing the things that are painful or you kind of will say almost suf­fer doing. That’s why a lot of peo­ple don’t thrive in their roles or sus­tain in their roles or burn out in their roles because of the drain that the job gives them for what­ev­er reason.

10:44
Brad Giles
Yeah, if you were, let’s say, in your teens or in your twen­ty s, and there was a job that was good when you start­ed, but it start­ed to suck, you would find anoth­er job. We feel that we can’t do that when we own a busi­ness or we’re senior exec­u­tives. What we’re try­ing to say here is if you don’t find a way to exit the things that you loathe or to out­source the things that you loathe, you’re going to end up in an exis­ten­tial cri­sis or you’re going to end up in some kind of cri­sis where you’re going to have to make changes. And it could be very expen­sive. For me, there was a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of accounts in my busi­ness. I don’t know why. I just did­n’t real­ly have a great pas­sion for that and match­ing receipts and all of that kind of stuff. And the oth­er one was diary appointments.

11:42
Brad Giles
As you prob­a­bly like your­self. My diary is like a four dimen­sion­al Jen­ga puz­zle, try­ing to slot things in every­where and it just drained my ener­gy because it was so hard. I want­ed to respect the peo­ple who want­ed to have meet­ings, but it’s just so tax­ing. I hired a book­keep­er and an assis­tant to enable me to do the work that gives me ener­gy rather than drains my energy.

12:14
Kevin Lawrence
It’s a great exam­ple, Brad, because in my case too, I can’t sched­ule. Jan­ice has been with me for 20 years on my team. She’s amaz­ing. She owns my sched­ule. One, because it’s so tight and chal­leng­ing, I’ll mess it up and I got to deal with time zones and all kinds of dif­fer­ent vari­ables, odds are, and it cre­ates a lot of stress and it is hard for her, but she’s good at it. To her it seems to be it’s like a game. I think the root of this is we all have dif­fer­ent things. The metaphor I say to peo­ple is real­ly if you’re going to have and this is just tak­ing a con­cept, you’re going to have a house that’s on 100 acres and it’s this mas­sive man­sion on a house, you’re not going to think about cut­ting the grass unless it brings you great joy.

13:01
Kevin Lawrence
By the way, a cou­ple of CEOs I have, they love to get out in their prop­er­ty, in their trac­tor and mow. That’s like ther­a­py for them. If it does­n’t bring you joy, and if trim­ming your hedges or weed­ing, if it does­n’t bring you joy and you’ve built a busi­ness that’s doing a cou­ple of hun­dred mil­lion, you’re not going to do it. So, okay, if you have end­less resources, sure, we want to take it back into just the real­i­ty of today, and even if you don’t have end­less resources, is that you can choose to do your role dif­fer­ent­ly. Not every CEO role is the same or struc­tured the same. Not every head of sales role is struc­tured the same. You can lever­age dif­fer­ent strengths of dif­fer­ent peo­ple to carve up the respon­si­bil­i­ties to help make it thrive. And that’s what this is about. This is play­ing with the Jen­ga that Brad talked about and find­ing a way so that you can, a major­i­ty of the time, real­ly enjoy what you’re doing.

13:56
Kevin Lawrence
There are times when spend­ing more can take care of it. We got that, but we’re just try­ing to stay at the prin­ci­pal lev­el. There’s always peo­ple who like to do the things that you don’t like to do. How do you find a way to trade? Now, whether you’re trad­ing with time, you’re trad­ing with­in dif­fer­ent job respon­si­bil­i­ties, or you’re trad­ing with cash, the chal­leng­ing part I want to be the point where peo­ple get hung up on this is that they don’t believe it’s pos­si­ble. They’re used to slog­ging it out for so many years that they don’t real­ize that it could and should be easy and joy­ful in terms of the things that you’re doing, although hard work, not talk­ing about kick­ing your feet up, so peo­ple don’t even see that it’s pos­si­ble. Peo­ple think that every­body suf­fers with what they do, and they don’t.

14:42
Brad Giles
Yeah, there’s a leader that I work with, and I remem­ber going to this meet­ing. We met at a café, and it was him and his wife. As soon as I walked up to the table, I could tell there was a neg­a­tive black ener­gy all around the place. He’d been deal­ing with HR issues, peo­ple, staff who’d been, let’s just say, annoy­ing and real­ly the wrong kind of peo­ple, tox­ic, all of the stuff that we know. And, and this had just been drain­ing him and drain­ing him. He said, I I think I’ve just lost the pas­sion for the busi­ness. I can’t see where our next growth is going to come from and I don’t even know if I want to do it any­more. This is not unusu­al for you and I kev to go into these type of meet­ings and too com­mon. In fact, I said, okay, so let’s just begin with what’s caus­ing it.

15:46
Brad Giles
What’s caus­ing this. We spoke about what is drain­ing your ener­gy. He straight­away went to the peo­ple stuff. Now, his answer was, I’m going to hire a gen­er­al man­ag­er to come in and to run the entire business.

16:00
Kevin Lawrence
Now let’s make the peo­ple that dri­ve me crazy some­body else’s prob­lem. I hear that one all the time. Let’s just push it over there.

16:09
Brad Giles
Yeah, but ulti­mate­ly you’ll still be account­able at some lev­el. There’ll still be some­thing there if you own the busi­ness. That was the answer that they’d come up with and they were work­ing on. I said, well, let’s look at what gives you ener­gy and what drains your ener­gy. What gives them ener­gy is the grow­ing of the busi­ness, all the excit­ing new growth oppor­tu­ni­ties. What drains it is the peo­ple side. What we did is went through this exer­cise, what gives you ener­gy, what drains your ener­gy. We doc­u­ment­ed all of these things, and what we had there quite clear­ly was a peo­ple and cul­ture man­ag­er role. Went to hire a peo­ple and cul­ture man­ag­er and today they’re in the process of hir­ing a peo­ple and cul­ture man­ag­er. It’s about under­stand­ing what is the role that I need to quit.

17:03
Kevin Lawrence
Per­haps it is. And every­body is dif­fer­ent. It’s get­ting the stuff that drains you inter­est­ing. Again, it often comes down to cus­tom build­ing your team and over hir­ing or hir­ing a notably stronger or dif­fer­ent psy­cho­me­t­ric or psy­cho­graph­ic psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file of a per­son. I had an inter­est­ing one, hap­pens to be about peo­ple in cul­ture as well. I had a CEO that I worked with that gen­er­al­ly did­n’t mind the peo­ple issues, but when it was legal issues and fir­ing peo­ple, they had a problem.

17:37
Brad Giles
Yeah.

17:37
Kevin Lawrence
Gen­er­al­ly when­ev­er the CEO got involved in fir­ing some­one, it turned into a law­suit. No joke. Yeah, because he was like and he’s an awe­some guy, I love the guy, but he had more law­suits for dis­miss­ing of peo­ple than I’d ever seen, almost on a per capi­ta basis. I final­ly said to him, why are you deal­ing with all these legal issues? Who’s going to do it? He goes, I hate deal­ing with it. It’s always a prob­lem, blah, blah, blah. I go, yeah, it looks like it’s a prob­lem. You got a lot of law­suits. Nobody has this many law­suits. You got a gift. Long sto­ry short, well, who could he.

18:13
Brad Giles
Get to do it?

18:14
Kevin Lawrence
He goes, well, blah, blah. I said, at the end of the day, what if you had a real­ly strong HR per­son? Could they han­dle well, I have one. Could they han­dle it? Yeah. How would you feel about that? Amaz­ing. I said, well, why are you still doing because I thought I had to. At the end of the day, hand­ed off this to the HR per­son who’s well suit­ed for this. They almost have no law­suits now, and he has way less stress because it dri­ves him crazy and he can invest his time into oth­er things. He was doing because he thought he had to. He had the per­son right there who could, which he gives it to now. The HR per­son gets advice from the lawyer if need­ed, if it’s a tricky sit­u­a­tion. They are no longer man­ag­ing it and no longer in those meet­ings. It saved the com­pa­ny a lot of mon­ey and a lot of friction.

19:12
Kevin Lawrence
So there’s lots and lots of exam­ples. Inter­est­ing­ly. There’s a CEO that I work with for many years in the Mid­dle East, and they had a spe­cif­ic area of the busi­ness they just did­n’t like deal­ing with, and they just made sure they had an extra strong exec­u­tive own that place. They took one part of the busi­ness and put it under anoth­er, and the exec­u­tive just han­dled it. Again, there’s no way that you must do it. There’s ways of mak­ing it suit you. This ties back into the episode from last week about hav­ing the right peo­ple in the right places. If you have the right peo­ple, it makes it a heck of a lot eas­i­er. Heck of a lot eas­i­er because then you’re not bur­dened by this and they can own their roles and you can have some flex­i­bil­i­ty, some­times even move things around.

20:02
Brad Giles
I like the idea of think­ing about it. You need to quit the com­po­nents of the role that you’re doing or out­source them so that you can con­tin­ue to add val­ue at your price point. If you own the com­pa­ny and to your pre­vi­ous point there, and you’re han­dling IR issues when there’s some­one who’s well qual­i­fied, you could get to do that with a lot less cost in legal suits, then you’ve got to make that move. We’re pre­dom­i­nant­ly com­ing at it from the angle of what do you love, what gives you ener­gy and what drains your ener­gy. It’s also about the return on your time, on your invest­ment of time.

20:51
Kevin Lawrence
It is. I would argue that the return on your time is a piece for sure, but the return on the ener­gy is the most impor­tant because that’ll allow you to sus­tain. It’s inter­est­ing why num­ber of CEOs have a chief of staff. The chief of staff role is that per­son who is the capa­bil­i­ty of an exec­u­tive who works beside you on your projects and coor­di­nat­ing things and mak­ing things hap­pen across the com­pa­ny. It’s also one of the CEOs I work with is very strate­gic and amaz­ing. Strate­gic CEO helps dri­ve cul­ture, helps get involved in big deci­sions, helps with recruit­ment and even sell­ing and clos­ing big cus­tomers or open­ing up doors for big cus­tomers. The chief of staff is man­ag­ing every­thing else and the chief of staff is just amaz­ing. It’s so much eas­i­er work­ing with him now that he’s got a chief of staff. I love the guy, but the chief of staff makes the big difference.

21:45
Kevin Lawrence
Again, for a real­ly vision­ary strate­gic, the chief of staff pulls it all togeth­er. Again, that’s anoth­er ver­sion that some peo­ple do to make it hap­pen. A cou­ple of the points, just to make sure we kind of back up a cou­ple of points say­ing num­ber point one is don’t sell the busi­ness just yet. Often peo­ple want to sell because the busi­ness is dri­ving them nuts and drains them. It can be fixed nor­mal­ly, it’s fix­ing peo­ple and expec­ta­tions. Two, you got to believe it can be done. You got to believe that you can have a busi­ness that you love. You just have to cus­tom tai­lor it and it might be struc­tured and have peo­ple very dif­fer­ent than you have today. We kind of talk about that a bit. Three and the exer­cise is to real­ly be aware of what you love and loathe or what ener­gizes you and drains you is the lan­guage I like to use.

22:34
Kevin Lawrence
The sim­ple thing to do is just make a list, start track­ing or look at your what are the things I love doing and don’t like doing for me? Writ­ing reports. Oh my gosh, I despise it. I will glad­ly pay some­one else to do it any day, all day, every day. If a CEO has a real­ly chal­leng­ing prob­lem, I’m in. I’ll do that before any­thing else. A mas­sive con­flict between two peo­ple send me I love big con­flicts. Those are fun for me. Peo­ple chal­lenges, brain­storm­ing, math, analy­sis, like deep analy­sis of a high val­ue, high stakes, like, I love it’s fun.

23:18
Brad Giles
Yeah.

23:19
Kevin Lawrence
On the oth­er side of it, you give me a piece of paper­work that has to be dealt with or oth­er stuff and I want to poke my eyes out.

23:29
Brad Giles
There are peo­ple who are the absolute inverse. Yes, and that’s the point. There are peo­ple who love the stuff that you don’t love.

23:38
Kevin Lawrence
Yes.

23:38
Brad Giles
And that’s who we want to exactly.

23:41
Kevin Lawrence
Lots of but the main thing is if you make a list of what you love and what you loathe and then with the things that you don’t love doing, do they have to hap­pen? Can you stop them? Can you get some­body else to own it? Or maybe there’s a core issue under the sur­face that needs to be get fixed. Most of the things, and it all comes down to the point num­ber four, is about peo­ple. Peo­ple are the solu­tion. Nor­mal­ly the biggest drain is peo­ple and not hav­ing the right peo­ple in the right roles. That’s the com­mon thing. Right roles or even hav­ing the right struc­ture for those peo­ple. Go ahead, Brad. I kind of jump that’s.

24:13
Brad Giles
Okay. To that point num­ber four, peo­ple are the solu­tion. Jim Kong says that your first ques­tion should be a who ques­tion. Ener­gy, we’re kind of say­ing, first of all, under­stand what gives you ener­gy, what drains your ener­gy? The first ques­tion, who can I get to take on the things that drain my ener­gy? That’s such a fun­da­men­tal ques­tion. But then the fifth one. I’m sorry.

24:36
Kevin Lawrence
Go on, Kevin. Let’s roll. Let’s roll.

24:39
Brad Giles
The fifth one. We’re not pay­ing this as much weight as we should, but this is our for­ev­er project. Super easy. When you’re a teenag­er or in your twen­ty s to quit a job, this sucks, I’m out of here. That is super easy. We feel like we can’t quit jobs when we own the busi­ness. What we’re try­ing to say is that you have to this is a for­ev­er job. You’ve got to keep com­ing back and assess­ing what’s drain­ing my ener­gy. How can I out­source that or get some­one else to do that bit so I can focus on the stuff that gives me ener­gy and retains my pas­sion for this business?

25:15
Kevin Lawrence
Yes. I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with the CEO maybe six weeks ago, and they were say­ing, I just don’t like what my com­pa­ny’s become. I go into the office to meet with the team that’s my exec­u­tive and lead­er­ship team. He goes, I don’t want to be there. I said why? What’s the issue? Well, I hired this exec­u­tive, and then they start­ed build­ing the team, and they brought some oth­er peo­ple with them. And what hap­pened? I don’t like this com­pa­ny. I would­n’t want to work here. Okay. In the end, because they brought the cul­ture from some­where else, and the CEO was entre­pre­neur­ial, and they brought in cor­po­rate. Long sto­ry short, I said, well, what do you got to do to build a com­pa­ny that you want to be part of?

26:03
Brad Giles
Because if you don’t want to be.

26:04
Kevin Lawrence
A part of your own com­pa­ny, that’s a prob­lem. He goes, Well, I’d have to change this. He named off three things you have to change. Okay, great. Well, what’s the one thing that will help you change all those things? Then he starts squirm­ing, I guess. I got a text week after. Okay, well, I told this one key per­son that they need to go and basi­cal­ly there was a key per­son who did a great job for a peri­od of time, but end­ed up build­ing a dif­fer­ent cul­ture than the CEO want­ed. I got a note from him more recent­ly, okay, I’m tak­ing back the reins in that part. We’re going to build this thing, and this is going to be a com­pa­ny I love. The root of it is that what was work­ing, worked until it stopped work­ing. And that’s the piece, right? You got to con­stant­ly tweak it.

26:55
Kevin Lawrence
Even myself, I’m con­stant­ly tweak­ing things and try­ing dif­fer­ent things, because as you grow, your job changes, you have dif­fer­ent respon­si­bil­i­ties. Some­times peo­ple say, well, maybe I don’t want to be the CEO any­more. I want to go back and I want to be the head of sales or some­thing. I’m like, usu­al­ly all that means is that it’s not fit­ting right. They got to res­culpt the role, rede­fine the role, maybe tweak some things. There’s always a way to make it work. You just got to spend the time to think about it and know that there is a way, although you might have to make some tough decisions.

27:27
Brad Giles
Yeah. If you feel like, I want to go back and work in sales, it’s because some­thing’s not work­ing. Where you are our anti­dote or our quick and dirty tool is. In your cur­rent role, what gives you ener­gy? What drains your ener­gy? Make that list, and that’s the begin­ning of build­ing the role that will give you ener­gy. Ongoing.

27:46
Kevin Lawrence
Yeah, it’s fun­ny. A clos­ing thought on this. My fam­i­ly often kind of makes fun of me because when­ev­er some­thing needs to be done, hold on, I got a guy or I know a per­son. I know peo­ple to do every­thing I have learned because there’s a very few things I love to do. I get to spend 90% of my time doing stuff I love. Close to 90% of my time in a week, both in my life and at work is in my sweet spot. That’s by design. I worked hard to find that. Yeah. I also have on text, it’s got to be 40 or 50 dif­fer­ent peo­ple that I reach out for to do dif­fer­ent things based on all my dif­fer­ent respon­si­bil­i­ties and where I work and where I play and where I live and all this stuff. I know peo­ple every­where, and if in doubt, I always ask peo­ple, hey, do somebody?

28:38
Kevin Lawrence
That right. It’s the who do you know that could and it just makes life eas­i­er so I can stay in my sweet spot, hav­ing a strate­gic view of what I want to hap­pen and find­ing a per­son to get it done.

28:51
Brad Giles
Indeed. Very good. Very good. If you want to live and work in your sweet spot as a leader, you’ve got to always come back to this ques­tion what gives me ener­gy? What drains my ener­gy? Good chat there, Kev. And the key point there as well. Don’t sell the busi­ness yet. Ask that ques­tion. See what can be done.

29:14
Kevin Lawrence
Yes. All right.

29:16
Brad Giles
I hope that you’ve enjoyed the episode today, talk­ing about ener­gy up and ener­gy down and how to get to that sweet spot. Ongo­ing. We would love it if you could like and sub­scribe in your medi­um of choice. Of course, you can also find us on YouTube. If you pre­fer to see our smil­ing faces. Just look for the growth whis­per­ers on YouTube. And you can find Kevin and I. We have a newslet­ter that we both do put a lot of effort into. In fact, each week you can find Kevin@​lawrenceandco.​com and mine@​evolutionpartners.​com.​au if you’re inter­est­ed in sub­scrib­ing. We’re always putting out inter­est­ing tips and things that we find about how to grow mid­mar­ket busi­ness­es and build com­pa­nies that endure. So I hope that. You’ve enjoyed today’s episode. We cer­tain­ly have and hope that you can join us again next week on The Growth Whis­per­ers. Have a great week.