John Whitt - Your Business Success Blueprint

This podcast is sponsored by TalkSpace. May is Mental Health Awareness Month. In TalkSpace, the leading virtual therapy provider is telling everyone, let's face it, in therapy, by talking or texting with a supportive licensed therapist at TalkSpace, you can face whatever is holding you back, whether it's mental health symptoms, relationship drama, past trauma, bad habits, or another challenge that you need support to work through. It's easy to sign up. Just go to Talkspace.com and you'll be paired with a provider typically within 48 hours. And because you'll Meet your therapist online. You don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule. Plus, TalkSpace is in-network with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 co-pay. Make your mental health a priority and start today. If you're not covered by insurance, get $80 off your first month with TalkSpace when you go to Talkspace.com and enter promo code 80. That's SPA CE 80. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com and enter promo code. Hi everyone, it's Bill Black, the exit coach from the Exit Coach Radio show. You know, one of the biggest questions I get on the show is what exactly goes into a business exit plan and when should I start creating mine? Well, I always tell people that the best time to start was 5 years ago, but the next best time is now because you never know when you might need it. So we put together a free report that describes what an exit plan is and what you should know. You can get it free by texting exit plan with no spaces to 442-22. That's exit plan to 44222. Again, text exit plan to 44222. 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 exitcoachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach, Bill Black. All right, my, my next guest today is John Witt, and John is joining us from Business Wit. He's the founder of that firm, and let me tell you a little bit about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about something called your Businessess Blueprint, and I've been talking with John in and around town as I see him at a group called Provisors that we both belong to. This is going to be a very interesting interview. So grab a pen and a and a pad of paper if you still have any room left after that last interview. John, thank you so much for joining me today. Well, thank you so much for having me. Hey, it's, it's my, my pleasure. You know, we've talked about a lot of different things, and you have some really great ideas. Before we get into that, tell our listeners a little bit about you and your background and how you started in this, in this area of your life. Sure, sure. Well, you know, I spent 27 years in the corporate world working for multibillion dollar corporations, building project teams and business units up to about $500 billion a year. And in 2010, I decided to make a change. We'll talk more. About why I did that, but I had to make change because I wanted to be able to help more people, and I wanted to work for myself instead of working for somebody else. And so I did a lot of research on where I wanted to change, and I discovered the Brian Tracy Focal Point Organization. And Brian Tracy has been a mentor of mine for years and years and years, and the idea of taking the skills and knowledge that I had from my corporate organization. And integrating that with the process and the tools that Brian Tracy's team brings together, he's a noted business guru, 60 books, 2 million people. When I integrated my knowledge with that information and those tools, you know, I was able to put together a very unique service proposition for the small business owner. It's great stuff and uh Brian, everybody knows, well, I, I would assume everybody knows Brian Tracy, uh, how long has has that body of knowledge been, it seems like forever to me, but how, how long has that body of knowledge been um out there and being perfected? Well, so, well, two bodies of knowledge. Now there's Brian Tracy's teachings really burst on the scene in the 80s and that was the early beginnings of my corporate career. That's when I discovered him. And then the coaching space, the business coaching space is a relatively new model. I mean, coaching's been around forever, but business coaching really didn't start until the mid 2000s and and people recognizing that this is a real strong value proposition. And if you think about coaching, it's not so much it's a little bit of training, right? If you don't know how to do something, you need to know how to do it. But coaching in any one of the facets in sports is probably the most effective analogy. It's about practice and it's about feedback and it's about getting better. It's about getting really good at something because you can know how to do something and not necessarily be good at it. And in business you really need to be good at it to be successful. You can reference my golf game for that. Um, yeah, yeah, exactly, I know how to do it, but I'm not good at it, and I need a coach every once in a while to look at me and say if you just did this, it could, you know, you could do much better and in business it's, it's like a complicated chess game if you will, and you wrote a book called uh. What is it called? Checkmate winning strategies for translating ideas into money, is that right? Yeah, so, so yeah, no, it was winning tactics for translating ideas into money, tactics being the moves that you make on a chessboard. So I played chess when I was in high school, competed in the US Chess Championships in Philadelphia in 1976. My whole brain sort of works along that strategy, tactics model. And what I discovered when I'm working with my clients, we're trying to come up with new ideas for improving their success, improving their results. I say, you know, how about this or how about that? And they say, no, I can't do that. And the problem is it's not that they can't do it. It's just that they don't know how to do it. And that's a big problem in in the coaching profession in the sense that we don't want to let get in the way of life. Because we could figure out how to do it if we know what it is that we want to do. And so the book, the tactics for translating ideas into money, that's really a seven-step process about taking your idea or concept or whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish and and building your plan to answer all the questions, to go through all the steps and you know, create the change in your business that you're really looking for. Uh, it starts with attitude, uh, and we talk about without attitude, you're kind of done. You have to have the right attitude. There's, there's a lot of work and effort and energy in being a small business owner, and if you're not ready to put that in, then you probably should go work for somebody else. Um, and we talked about the willingness to learn and we talked about clarity and building teams and Validation of your assumptions and sometimes, you know, we don't want to go down all of the paths. We need to test them first and then we talk about project planning or scheduling um and ultimately managing change because there's no such thing as a straight line to success. It's a change model. You're off course and you have to correct all the time. And how important is it for people to have a coach to to be because it seems to me most business owners that I talked to don't really have too many people, especially within the walls of their business that they can talk about their fears and their their concerns with, because some people might be afraid that the business is going out of business. They should be looking for another. Job and others would say look, you're you're the wealthy boss. You know I've got my own problems. I don't want to hear them. So how important is it do you find for people to have somebody that can come in and just share this information and talk to them heart to heart about this type of stuff? Well, here's the thing, it's lonely at the top, right? You don't get to talk to your wife sometimes. You don't get to talk to. Employees, um, what's going through your head, um, being able to process that and dialogue that through with somebody else that understands where you're at and what you're trying to get accomplished and the things that you're going through um allows you to then process through the better solutions that are available for you. It allows you to get out of your head, you know, getting a separate person or somebody else to help you. Work and this is, it's therapy in a lot of different areas, but this is therapy for a business, right? So when you talk about, um, you know, you're, you're trying to achieve better marketing results or better sales results or better teamwork or, you know, what is it that, what are you afraid of? What are you concerned with, having somebody that's been there, done that, and has a system and a process for dealing with that kind of stuff, it's, it's pretty much invaluable, and I've been called a therapist many times. Mhm, mhm. Yeah, yeah, you're, I, I get why because uh like you said, they don't want to, they don't want to start an avalanche of fear or concern with other people, and that's the benefit of a lot of coaching and also I think the advent of these business peer groups that are out there. A lot of business owners just want someone who understands to talk to, and I get that. So tell me something. What's your most recent project that you're working on now? Well, so, um, we talked about business success blueprint, and that's really the, the building the plan. So when you have the idea or the concept or the new product or the new service that you want to bring to market, you know, how do you do that? What is that plan? And rather than, and I could go through a 3 month coaching period with somebody on a one on one basis. And get them to that particular stage. We would work together typically week by week, but what I did is I built a 5 week intensive training course, training and coaching course in the sense that I'm there so I can provide that feedback and those practice sessions for you, which is, you know, the addition of coaching compared to training, but it's 5 weeks, week one is is about. Creating your winning strategy. Week 2 is about the path of profits. It's all the metrics and the things that you want to work on to generate money. Week 3 is all about time. It's called the game changers, and it's all about, you know, how do you leverage your time, and I find that to be the biggest challenge today is being able to focus on what's most important and what adds the most value instead of getting distracted by a myriad of things and other interruptions. Uh, week 4 is about leverage. It's all about scalability. How do I move to the next level, um, once you've kind of maxed out your own capacity? And then week 5 is leveraging communication skills and strategies, whether that is motivating and inspiring your team or your service providers or your customers or your prospects. It's a 5 weeks, um, building an intense program. So it's really designed to be fast. It's designed to deliver those results right away. We get together. Once a week there's homework every week and it's really about getting there in a very fast time frame and that that's important because people don't, yeah, time is precious. Yeah, people, people want quick results and they don't want to spend a lot of time. How long is it? How long is each session roughly? You know, roughly runs about 90 minutes. There's 60 minutes of presentation material for me and then 30 minutes of kind of Q&A, and that the Q&A kind of wraps when and if I, if I just go straight through the presentation material, it's 60 minutes, but there has to be Q&A in between. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's fascinating. So you find that um are are those the components that most owners do do any owners say, you know what, I need to rearrange these or I need to customize it, or is it just like, here's a program, this works, let's go through this 5 in 5 weeks, that's not too long of a time they they probably feel like uh we can get through all of these in this fashion, right? Well, they can get through them all, and, but there is, you know, everybody's a little bit different. Every business is a little bit different. I mean, you could look at 4 different gas stations and they're all a little bit different. Um, and that's where the coaching comes into play. That's where you can ask questions of me during the webinar, um, and we can dial it in for your. Specific need and then there's also a Facebook group. It's a secret Facebook group, in other words, you can't find it unless you're part of a member of this group, but you can ask questions on there as well, and I monitor that on a daily basis so that so that we can help you internalize it for your business. We want to give you that opportunity to customize it. Now you've of course built your own small business practice. What are some of the lessons that you you've learned along the way that help you with working with business owners? Well, oh my gosh, the first most, so in the corporate world it's a, you know, I have very narrow focus, and I was really, really good at this, really, really deep, right, sort of 1 inch wide and 1 mile deep, and in the small business world, while I need that for my service, my coaching practice needs to be 1 inch wide and 1 mile deep, but I have to wear so many other hats, right? So I have to wear my accounting hat and I have to wear my marketing hat. I have to wear my sales hat. I have to wear this hat. And this, this craziness of all these different things that you have to take care of because there's nobody else, right, when you start your own practice, you're it. And uh so building the system and the process that allows you to do all that stuff without losing your mind, um, and also get the results that you need. That's the key. Um, to the success for me, what I, what I've learned, and focusing in on the fact that, you know, my, my job is to help other people find some way to help them. I know I market to certain levels and certain people, but somebody comes knocking on my door. I try to figure out a way to help them because that's that's the ultimate reason why I'm in this business. Yeah, and of course a lot of people like we've been talking about are in this state of change, and they're saying, you know, the world's changing around me so quickly. I've got to try to keep up with all of it. How do I do that? How do I get, how do I not get sucked into it so I have some life? I find that with a lot of people that are saying, I just want some of my life back so that the business is not running me, so I'm running it. What are some of the other key objectives that business owners say, you know what, you really helped me with this particular area. Well, the first objective, well, there's two primary objectives to you what I'd say there's 4 places like that I work on. One, it would be time, and that's what you're talking about right there. How do I have a life along with this business? Now I say I'm building a business and I need to make money, so I spend all my time in that area and I have no life. Or eventually I get a successful business and it starts working we're like crazy and all I can do is just keep up with this particular business and I have no life. And so figuring out how to manage it so you can have the life that you want for the reason. I mean, you didn't start a business because you. Want to have a life. Typically you start a business because you want financial and time freedom. And so how do we convert that? how do we convert that into giving you the actual time freedom that you, you want? And so, you know, certainly you have to generate money and that's the first most important thing, but you also want to do that with a system and a process that allows you to, you know, have the life that you want to live. And then when it comes to scaling, it's about your team. Now the team could be employees or it could be 1099s, could be service providers. That's your team. Everybody that services and supports your business, your team. And the more effectively you manage that team, and the more effectively they take care of their business, the more time you have to go do other things or whatever else it is that you want to do. And then, um, you know, ultimately, you know, understanding that an exit strategy, um, and building your business so that you can sell it when you want to or when you're ready to, to the right offer to the right business. So those four areas are, um, what, and I'll be honest with you, most people aren't thinking except they're thinking about money and they're thinking about time, and they're thinking about their team. Right, they're, they're driving down the freeway. They're not, they're not thinking about, you know, and the thing about exit is, I say it's like coming into a big city and you're on the freeway and it says, you know, Los Angeles next 12 exits. Which one are you going to get off of if you didn't plan ahead? You don't know, you might end up in the wrong part of town. So you might end up, you might not even be able to get off. Right, right, uh, next, next stop, Barstow. So anyways, uh, in, in your, you've developed a lot and you're always thinking about productivity tools and and training things you've put together a lot of materials for business owners, right? I mean, that's, that's something that's. That's what you do, right? Oh yeah, I have a very large YouTube channel, uh, just with Google or uh business with on YouTube and, and I've got several 100 videos on that channel that talk about different tools and tips and opportunities for improvement. Uh, you can sign up for my blog at businesswit.com. Very simply, there's a blog page you can see and I publish content and I was listening to your previous um interview and he was talking about video content, and I, I moved into the video space four years ago because I just think that's critical. And so, uh, if you're on my blog, if you register for the blog, um, you can see a lot of the different videos that I publish. I publish 1 to 2 a week, um, because I think that's what it takes to stay and nurture clients. Uh, it's also one of the things that I happen to teach my clients how to do. And then I have a new free training on productivity tools, and you can, you can register for that free training video. It talks about how to deal with urgency, which is a really nasty business, and then how to make do a better job of planning, which allows you to kind of slow the world down a little bit so that you can deal with it in a time sensitive manner. And that's at free training.business with.com and you can just register there and you'll get access to that email and We'll send out some other things occasionally that we think are going to be really helpful for you. And let's be real clear about that for our listeners, since this is radio, this business wit is patterned after your last name, which is business Wt.com. And it is a tremendous site with a lot of great tools. John is someone who sees the situation. I think, I think after every client engagement you're back going, Here's another need I found. I need, I need more for different situations, and you have a tremendous amount of information available for our listeners. So I hope that they will get in touch with you, John, and And again, the easiest way is probably just go to businesswit.com and it probably leads to everything else. Is that not right? Oh sure, you can, you can sign up for a profitability session if it's a complimentary discussion. You can sign up for the blog and take a look at, or you don't even have to sign up. You can look at the blog and then sign up if you decide that that's something you want. Um, again, you know, they're the old sharpen the saw concept, right? We always have to be learning, especially as a business owner. The old model of sales would always be closing. The model for business owners is always be learning. You always have to learn and grow. You always have to sharpen the saw, and we just try and provide tools to help do that. Well, and as we, as we travel around, we're both members of a large networking group called Provisors, and I hear other professionals say what a great job you've done for their clients, and that's a testimonial that you must earn. So you're doing a great job and I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some time with me and some ideas and tips for our listeners, and I, and I hope we can do it again because I know we, you know, we just tend to scratch the surface in the 1st 20 minutes, but I really enjoyed the time together. Thank you so much for joining me. You're welcome. I would love to do it again. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. This podcast is sponsored by TalkSpace. May is Mental Health Awareness Month. In TalkSpace, the leading virtual therapy provider is telling everyone, let's face it, in therapy, by talking or texting with a supportive licensed therapist at TalkSpace, you can face whatever is holding you back, whether it's mental health symptoms, relationship drama, past trauma, bad habits, or another challenge that you need support to work through. It's easy to sign up. Just go to Talkspace.com and you'll be paired with a provider typically within 48 hours. And because you'll meet. Your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule. Plus, TalkSpace is in-network with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 co-pay. Make your mental health a priority and start today. If you're not covered by insurance, get $80 off your first month with TalkSpace when you go to Talkspace.com and enter promo code S space 80. That's SPA CE 80. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to TalksSpace.com and enter promo code S80.