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. 

 

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 cafe.

06:43
Brad Giles
The cafe 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 cafe, 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.