Jim Jubelirer - Have You Had Your Daily Huddle Today?

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Text family to 442-22 for this free information today. Welcome to the Exit Coach radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And don't miss our one minute exit. Coach tip of the day on exit coachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach, Bill Black. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. So glad you're with us. I'm very excited about our guest lineup and especially our first guest. Let's get right into it. My first guest is Jim Jubilier, and he's with Jubilier Results Group from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Jim is going to talk to us about how he talks with business owners to help them and works with business owners. I should say it's a lot more than talk about scaling up their business, and it's something that a lot of people are, are have a problem with and they're concerned with. So I'm very interested to get into that, Jim. Welcome to the show and thank you for joining us this morning. Well thank you I'm happy to be here, Jim, it's, uh, you know, it's not easy for people to scale up their business, and I want to get into that very quickly, but first I wanna ask you a little bit about you and your background. So could you share a few minutes about what your background has been and and how you started the Jubileer results group? Absolutely. Well, I'm the son of an entrepreneur who had a small business, so I, so I grew up on Main Street watching business after business school, I joined the computer industry and was involved with companies that were involved in very high growth. The year I joined Digital, my, my employer in 1986, I was one of 16,000 people they hired. And 7 years later they ceased to exist as an ongoing company so I saw the, you know, the, the highs and the lows of that. I spent a big chunk of my career as a service quality consultant and I created the voice of the customer program for GE, Fidelity, Royal Caribbean, a whole bunch of other companies in the 1990s. So I've always been following how business works and how people work, and I started my own business coaching firm 4 years ago that combines the best practices on both business development and leadership development. That's fantastic. Tell me a little bit about that, just a minute or so on the concept of the voice of the customer. Yeah, well, back in the 1990s companies were very operationally focused, and then service quality became popular when Toyota became a big company and Honda and American businesses were studying Japanese businesses. Listening to the customer became a very important process and companies invested. A lot of money in those programs and I created and implemented those programs. Well, you probably didn't know what you were beginning then, but now you can't do anything without a company wanting to know how they've done feedback is so important because of technology, because of the, the net promoter scores that companies use. It's very, very prevalent today, isn't it? Yes, I actually work for the company that created the industry-wide standard before Net Promoter became popular. So we had our own methodology that was widely used across the entire industry and then Net Promoter came in and kind of replaced that so I now use Net Promoter with my clients and help companies implement the net promoter score system with their customers. Terrific. OK, so tell us, uh, how, how do you work with your customers? What do you do for them? Yeah, so back to scaling up, I'm a certified Gazelles coach. Gazelles is a coaching organization founded by Vern Harnish, who wrote a book called Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, which 15 years going is still one of the top selling strategy books for small and medium sized businesses. And our new book is called Scaling Up, and it's all about really how to create that kind of momentum that's both profitable, but also so you can enjoy the ride. It's not just driving yourself crazy. So scaling up and implementing the gazelle's framework is a big part of what I do. I'm also an executive coach in executive education programs at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke, and in that capacity I work one on one with individuals who are middle managers in big companies and then also business owners and their teams. So I work in a variety of different settings, but in every case, the approach is the same, which Using a series of generalized success principles that work everywhere coupled with very individual strategies and tactics specific to the individual and the individual business, we hear that a lot from a lot of our guests that, you know, you can take a wide variety of businesses that look very different from the outside, but inside there's going to be some general common things that are always going to be important. So tell us about some of those and what they are. Yes, so people say, well, do you specialize in any particular industry? and I say yes, all of my clients have customers and employees, meaning they have people problems so what we do is we, we create, but my focus is really with middle market business owners of companies between 4 and 40 million, sometimes up to 80 million in revenue where the owner founder is still working in the business. And not enough on the business and the kind of tools and systems and accountability that I bring can really help them create breakthrough results. And it begins with building a vision for the owner where does the owner wanna go and how do they wanna make the business work for them, not them work for the business, and sometimes it includes life planning, financial planning it's a very comprehensive review. And then we transition that into, well, what are the long term strategies for the business as an exit coach you're working with people who are looking to maybe leave their business, and we like to say a business that's attractive to sell is one that's also attractive to own. Which means there's a good management team in place. There are repeatable systems and processes so it's not dependent on the individual personality of any individual person there's momentum in the marketplace there's satisfied customers, some amount of repeat business so we work across all of the functions in the company to really create that kind of momentum. Excellent, excellent. All very important attributes and. So where does a business owner start? It sounds like you have some great tools. So before even knowing if you want to go down this path, it's helpful to learn what else is out there. As part of the Gazelle's coaching organization, we put on a conference twice a year sponsored by. Fortune magazine with two days of keynote speakers, really, really the best and the brightest in the, in, in business and in and from other fields. So I say come to a conference, open up your mind, let's talk about how you might apply some of these concepts in your business. Another initial step is the upfront assessment. We have an online assessment tool and then I do an assessment and we, we paint a very clear picture of what we want to create. The goal with my clients is is to achieve a 3 to 5 times return on their. after the first year and a minimum 10 x 10 times after the second year. So I work, I only work with businesses that have that potential, that want to get to that potential and are willing to make the investment of time and effort and money to get there. Mhm, mhm. And how much time and effort do people need to spend on this type of planning? They're all busy running their own businesses. That's, that's the biggest complaint I have is I'm so busy I don't have time to plan. But with these kinds of returns they can't ignore that. What should they expect as far as a time commitment? That's a great question. So it takes time to free up time and so people's initial, some people's initial presenting symptom is oh my God, I'm too busy I couldn't possibly do this and I say well that's exactly why you do need to do this. So we sometimes start very tactically time management, efficiency, communications, meeting rhythms just to free up the bandwidth to take on more of the long range planning. Other people have a little bit more comfortable or sane existence but still no long range plan so we go off site usually for 2 or 3 days and work on the business and create 3 year targets, 1 year goals, and quarterly initiatives. Then we typically meet, um, this is for a larger company where the business owner has a management team, uh, working, you know, on the business with people reporting to them. So we'll work with the senior leadership team once a month to work on the implementation of the strategic plan and to make sure that accountability on action steps are being followed through. I'm all about leverage. It's not about time. So if you just implement one little thing and it frees up cash flow, well, that's free money then, you know, not all of this has to be hard. We're looking for the easy wins first. So we go through a process to really figure out where are the low hanging fruit, how do we harvest those, because small winds build momentum and then momentum builds big wins. I like that a lot. I really like that a lot. I think that's so important for most business owners who think. You know, they're so used to hiring on a project and then getting things done quickly, and this is something that needs to take time and small wins lead to big wins. That's a great, great analogy and I really like that concept. Now you say you combine the best practices in business development and leadership. Tell me more about that. Yeah, so it turns out that there's one characteristic that is more highly predictive of success than any other characteristic, and it's predictive whether you do well in school, whether you do well in business, in field after field, and that characteristic is called grit, not a very sexy word, but what it means is perseverance, patience, persistence, and optimism. And the way to build grit is by creating a growth mindset. Partly a growth mindset is coachable and trainable and partly it's innate. So the real fact of the world, and I know you, you probably experienced this with your own clients, some people are more coachable than others, and I don't work with the ones who aren't coachable, but the ones who want to grow and are willing to make that investment. Understand that they need to have their head in the game and they need to be thinking positively, speaking positively, and developing success habits in their own personal life around fitness, health, wellness, you know, financial stability, etc. So we go if someone really wants to achieve breakthrough results, we go after it on all those levels and we have a tool. It's called the one page personal plan. And in the one page personal plan you look at 8 areas in your life, your family, friends, faith, finances, work, play, and give, uh, philanthropy. And we look at 10 to 25 years from now, where do you want to be? What do you want it to look like? A lot of people don't take time to consider those questions. Then we go on to break it down to where what's the one year goal, and then in the next 90 days in each of these eight areas, what do you need to start doing and what do you need to stop doing? We find that the most everybody's. pay if I just do more, I'll get more done, which kind of works, but what you have to do is work on your stops list and your stops list is what do I need to delegate to others or what do I no longer need to do in order to free up my time to focus on higher and higher value activities. Wow, very great, very great information. So important. I hope our listeners. are paying close attention because these are, these are fantastic pearls of wisdom. We're giving them to you. Jim's given them to you in bite size, bite-size sound bites, but they're very, very important, very valuable. Jim, tell me a little bit about, about something. I've heard that in the Rockefeller habits that you, you talked about the meeting rhythms, so rhythms of meetings are really important. Tell us more about that. Mastering the Rockefeller habits was the first book that laid out all of the principles that we use in the Gazelle's coaching framework, and Verne. Has repackaged everything in his new book called Scaling Up, and if you only read one book, you can just read Scaling Up. It's designed to cover what was also covered in the original book and in the, the Rockefeller habits have been um implemented, we, we're currently working with 2000 companies and over 40,000 companies have downloaded our one page strategic. plan template. I have it on my website and Gazelle has it on their website. So this stuff is used widely. One of the main habits that has been shown to be very effective is making sure that the right people are in the right kind of meetings, having the right kind of conversations on the right basis. Too many organizations have too many meetings that aren't very effective. Most people leave feeling drained or discouraged, and at the same time too many organizations don't have enough information that's useful and impactful and inspiring, flowing up and down. So one of the things we pay close attention to is that senior management team meeting rhythm that starts with the strategic planning offsite. It goes to the quarterly planning session. The monthly management meeting, the weekly team meeting, and then down to the daily huddle. The daily huddle is one of our most effective techniques, and it's a huddle. It's not a meeting. In other words, you do it standing up and you go around the room and just talk about wins for the biggest win from yesterday, an area in which you're stuck and what your focus is for today. And we ask people what they feel like expressing, so they share a little bit about that, and it's all done in a very compact and effective time frame, but it's very powerful and very moving for the team to keep in touch and keep connected with each other. And when we talk about the team in that regard, let's say you have a 100 employee organization who goes to the daily huddle. Everybody wants to be part of a winning team, and we know from surveys by people like Gallup that 70% of people don't like their jobs, and it's partly because their boss never really got proper supervisory skills training themselves, and there's many other reasons, but I work for those 30% of companies where people love their work and so typically it has to start at the top. The business. The owner or the CEO has to lead this and has to model it, so the senior leadership team will have their daily huddle at 8:37 a.m. and it goes about 15 minutes and then each department manager will go to his or her team or department. They'll have their huddle at 8:57 or 9:07. And then depending on the organization it may go down one more level so we kind of have three cascading tiers of huddles to spread the information and to gather information up and down the chain. We do sometimes get queries about, oh well, I, you know, I run a factory and you know why would I have a huddle? Everybody has the same job every day, day in, day out. There's still things you can say about what your focus is going to be for today. So we've seen the daily huddle implemented successfully everywhere from the boardroom to the manufacturing floor. Fantastic. So we've only got about a minute or so left, unfortunately, because I'm really enjoying our conversation, Jim. I'm really enjoying your information. Tell us, uh our listeners, uh, how to get in touch with you and you have a little complimentary offer for them. Tell them about that. Uh, yeah, well, my website is Jubilier Results Group. I have a little bit of a weird name to spell, and the beauty of Google is you can misspell it every which way, but it's I'm still gonna come up in the search. Jubilier results group that has all my contact info and what I do with people is offer a complimentary 30 minute discovery session, just a quick flyby on the phone, what their business issues are, and we paint a very clear picture of what their opportunities are. And from there we determine what the next steps are as appropriate. Now you're in North Carolina, so do you work with people all over the place or specifically in your geographical area? Yeah, I work globally in the Duke program. We have people from all over the world, so I've had clients from 11 different countries. When we're implementing the business coaching framework, there is a bit of a hands-on element to it. So we meet in person, at least for that strategic retreat. The monthly meetings are sometimes Skype, sometimes phone, sometimes in person. So I have clients in a wide number of geographies. Jim Jubilier, thanks so much for joining us. Jim, I hope that we can get together again on the air very soon and get deeper into some of these topics because I know that you have a lot more to share with our listeners. Thanks so much for joining us today and look forward to the next time we talk. Great, thank you very much for your time today. We're going to take a short break. We're going to be right back after this, so please stay tuned. Just thinking about what will happen to your business if you're gone keep you awake at night? Will you get the price you need from your business to carry you through retirement? The BEI Network of Exit Planning Professions is the world's leading advisor network with the power to help business owners transition out of business on their own timeline and terms. Ask your most trusted advisor to create a BEI plan for you, or visit us at exitplanning.com. That's exitplanning.com. 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