5 Questions With Scott Beebe, My Business On Purpose
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There's a great saying that is so true. Either you run your day or your day runs you. Your chamber talked with Scott Beebe, owner of My Business on Purpose. He's a business coach, trainer, strategist who has been really successful in liberating business owners from chaos and giving them the tools they need to work on their business, instead of in their business.
Hilton Head Island-Bluffton Chamber (HHIBC): Let's talk a little bit about Business on Purpose, and what you're doing.
Scott Beebe (SB): We do one thing really, really well and that is liberate business owners from chaos. And the reason we do it is because we want them to make time for what matters most. We work with small business owners and their key leaders to help them build systems, processes, and then articulate all of their purpose using what we call our Business on Purpose Roadmap
HHIBC: You can hear anything about business these days without hearing about workforce, workforce, workforce. Everyone wants a magic bullet, but there’s not one. How can businesses solve some of these workforce issues?
SB:
The reality is, we can take two different approaches: the in-the-now approach or the principled, long-term approach. The in-the-now approach starts putting band aids on all sorts of problems, and not realizing that whatever lever we pull today will have consequences tomorrow, and then a year from now.
That's why it's really important to take a principled, long-term approach to things. We need to ask ourselves the question around personnel. What was good hiring practice, recruiting practice, onboarding, practice, engagement, culture practice? What were the good principles of those things before we had the personnel crisis?
So, when we think about personnel issues, is finding people hard right now? Yeah, it's horrible. It's really, really hard. We'll have a problem du jour here in about two or four years, or eight years or whatever. I think the question to ask yourself is, am I being principled? Am I taking a principled approach to personnel? Am I mapped out in my onboarding process? Are all of those things laid out? Because if they're not, it doesn't matter what strategy you have.
HHIBC: A lot of people right now are in reactive mode. They have a crisis right in front of them, and they've got to go, go, go.
SB: So there's a variety of different things that we can be talking about right now. A lot of people go "Do we do bean bag chairs? Do we do soda fountains in the snack room? Lunch on Fridays? Like, is that how we find new people?" No, they don't care. Culture is not something that is driven by beanbag chairs and ping pong tables.
Culture is actually a biology term. Whatever ingredient you put in the petri dish, when it is subject to heat, moisture, and light, it starts to grow whatever ingredients you put in there. So if you put these ingredients in the petri dish: unpredictability, frustration, last minute, lack of process, lack of clarity, lack of focus, lack of communication, well, eventually, they're going to meet the heat and the moisture in the light of business day to day, Monday through Friday. Guess what's gonna grow out: frustration, anger, irritability, confusion. But if we're able to put principle, process system repetition, predictability, meaning and relationships in the petri dish … Guess what's going to grow out?
HHIBC: What do you think is the biggest mistake businesses make when it comes to retaining workforce?
SB: I think it's leaders forgetting that people are just human beings.We have two elements that we leverage, and that we put into every single business. One is called the culture calendar that gets brought up in every team meeting. For instance, in our team meeting tomorrow, we're going to look down our culture calendar, and it's going to tell us it's Brent Perry's birthday this week. I would have forgotten that because I'm not good at remembering that stuff, but our culture calendar tells us that. It also tells us when we have our team meetings, when we have our coaches meetings, when we have our check ins, and when we have vision day. All of these things develop health and engagement, about real human connection and relationship, hard conversations, fun conversations, and more often than not just boring conversations.
The other thing that we highly recommend are team member check-ins, and ask them five questions. When you tell them, "I'm going to be asking the same five questions every other week," it gives employees a platform to be able to communicate with you and you a platform to communicate with them. There's times that you gotta have very encouraging conversations, and there's some times that you may have to have tough conversations. We've got to plan those conversations, the good, the bad, and the monotonous.
HHIBC: A lot of entrepreneurs by nature are big picture thinkers. They're 40,000-foot people and they're not great with process. How do you deal with talking with those types of entrepreneurs who maybe process is not their strong suit?
SB: Well, first thing we have to do is come to them and just say you don't have a choice, you decided to get into the entrepreneurial game, and you're running an organism, which is complex. And to be able to run an organism, you've got to make the time to be able to do it. And running an organization is a responsibility, just like raising kids. It's like being married or in a relationship. It's a responsibility.
When it comes to running a business, there are some things as an owner you just kind of get over. Business owners in mass, what we've found, is they would much rather own a business that they don't have to operate day to day than to own a business that they have no choice but to operate it day to day.