Investing in Employees

Investing in your employees -

Thinking about employees (dance teachers in this instance) and thinking about investing in them physically but more importantly emotionally. Everything a business does with its employees should be based off of #1, once you have that down you just start thinking differently.

1) Our teachers are our brand, we can talk all we want but they are physically it.

2) Must start talking to and listening to our employees. Individual coffee chat once a month is better than a group meeting each quarter because nobody walks away from group meetings feeling energized and important.

3) Write a hand written thank you note, 5 minutes, 43 cents. Less than an hour and less than five bucks per month for all employees combined.

4) Buy flowers or chocolates for all of the teachers and hand them out in front of students, public displays of affection are ok outside of high school.

5) Create a list of teachers strengths, than start to cater jobs towards those.

Simply Changing The World

Seth Godin had a really interesting video I watched a while back on Ted (here) about what we really do, he says we are simply changing the world. This is both extremely overwhelming (really, what should I do on Tuesday?) as well as extremely freeing (as it turns out that paperwork I always fill out that I complain is useless, is in fact useless).

We should not allow ourselves to get overwhelmed by the idea that we must change the world because we should tell ourselves each and every morning "I get to change the world". I quit my hourly job yesterday and the best part is that now I GET TO change the world. I get to get out of bed early and post this. I get to read some of the greatest minds in the world for free online for an hour while I drink a french press. I get to go work on the problems of my dance studio and my construction business and not just the in your face, huge fire of the day problems but the problems that when fixed make everything work better afterword and add joy and ease into peoples lives.

It is freeing because we have direction, we have a place to go. I would love to be part of a community where people are trying to change the world and then suddenly here I find myself. So often I have lived with a future mindset that it is all building for something, what I am doing everyday is a groundwork for a life I would like to lead. Yet, here I find myself with only partial groundwork laid and totally satisfied. We should all realize that trying to change the world is freeing, wishing we lived in a changed world is shackles.

So welcome to the movement, is this blog really a movement? Sure it is, and what you do everyday is a movement and I am both excited and privileged to part of it. I hope you feel as privileged to live your life each and every day as I feel simply to be a part of it.

I Feel Like Crap

Great people have bad days when they just don't feel good. This does not change that they are great people. If we build systems so that even when a great person is having a really bad day, either emotionally or physically, then we've created a system of consistency. If a dance teacher is physically hurting and cannot go full out they can still teach a class because the system is in place to move students down a path of benchmarks towards improvement rather than just watching the teacher and imitating. The same holds true for admin work. If our secretary has a headache she may not be a the same chipper person on the phone but she can still take down the appropriate message, get it to the appropriate person and make sure that everything goes through a set of checklists. Things get done no matter how we feel. I know this is the sign of a mature person, is this also the sign of a mature business?

Natural Systems

Systems -

I'm on a systems kick so just run with me a little. A tree can be any number of different sizes, different trees can differ in any number of ways, but almost all trees have something in common and that is that they mirror business perfectly. Lets take a common look at a tree. It starts out small and grows, it takes in water and CO2, performs photosynthesis and grows. It gains branches supported by a widening truck and grows. It gets hit by a storm and may loose a branch or two but, if it can stand through, it will continue to grow after the storm. Every leaf is almost identical, with almost identical process's happening inside of them, and yet some trees get to be very old and very large. The intriguing part is that even on these very old, very large trees the leaves are still the same size and still performing the same function at about the same level as all of the other leaves and all of the leaves from the past (no matter what size the tree is or was).

Sometimes we build business' that are only leaves, they act like grass and when winter comes they die, each and every year they go completely dormant. Sometimes we build business' that are like cacti, almost all trunk with no leaves, they plod on no matter what the conditions are like but they very rarely produce fruit. Then there is a good healthy oak tree. It weathers winter with a large base and expansive root system even when the leaves are doing nothing for it. It produces copious amounts of acorns year in and year out and is extremely scalable having the ability to grow to massive sizes.

I'm not trying to be all philosophical here, I really want to consider what type of business I am growing. If I need to eat then I need to plant a tree that actually produces fruit. If I have no time to tend to a tree I can just drop in a cactus and whenever it produces something it is a nice bonus. If I'm already sustainable I can plant a crop of grass realizing that I will get a fantastic, quick, return but it will all die as soon as winter comes. It is worthless to curse at a cactus and tell it to produce fruit, it is worthless to curse an oak for not giving out a crop in the first year it was planted, it is worthless to curse grass for dying every year.

What are you growing, do you know the structure, do you know the crop cycle, do you know the strengths and weakness's? It is worthless to try and get a leaf to grow into a tree or get a single leaf to supply for the entire system. What are your leaves? What are your roots? Make sure you know so you can inspect what you expect.

Inspiration

I used to be a killer. I ran a marathon once. I was an All American once. I sold 40k in insurance in one month. I remodeled a 4,000 sq/ft dance studio in 3 days only sleeping for four hours total. I once did a 360 skiing. Now, now is not a time I will look back on as a "once" moment. Why?

I think I've built my life around being a big moment guy, the problem is that moments come and go and yet here I still am, outside of the moments. I search around for inspiration, reading blogs, watching Tony Robbins, reading Zig Ziglar. The problem is that when I look back on those big moments I was not inspired, I was not fired up, I was simply achieving.

There were no Zig Ziglar inspirational quotes going through my mind when I hit mile thirteen, realized I had just run further than ever before in my life, and simultaniously realized I was only halfway done. I ran it with my brother, we both only trained a handful of times and said we did not care about our time we justed wanted to have done a marathon (dinner parties, interviews, etc.). It was around forty degrees (having warmed up to a balmy ten over freezing) by the end of the race and it rained the entire time. They handed us emergancy tin foil blankets when we finished. My brother pulled the blanket around himself and became very emotional, letting the gravity of what we had just done set in. I on the other hand kicked a trash can over and swore rather loudly in excitement. There was the inspiration, over four hours later. The next day I could harldy walk, my entire foot turned black and blue because I fractured my heal in the race. But when I crossed that finish line I knew I had just completed something and it could never be taken away from me.

Maybe we should all be working on completeing things that cannot be taken away from us rather than trying to find the inspiration to do great things. I've heard it said that we can only give what we have, when was the last time you inspired somebody? It has been a little while for me. I think it is time to go out and create some inspiration for both myself and as a gift to others. I hope you'll join me.

Creatives of the World, UNITE!

Link posted above about creative and genius. Must watch. Almost brought the dance side of me to tears but the construction side would not have it. Extremely inspirational in terms of how we go about "the process" of being creative. I could bust open a bottle of white wine and spend four hours talking about this one so hit me up with a comment if you dare.

Why Don't We Do More?

It seems like a question that I ask myself all the time. Why did I just waste an hour when I could be working? Why did I just spend the whole day being busy and got nothing done? Why didn't I exercise today? Why? I read blogs about productivity, I read books about productivity, I build spreadsheets about productivity (nerdy yes, effective no), but I just never seem to hit the end of the day satisfied. I believe there are two reasons for this.

First is the issue of happiness and satisfaction. For this I will not say anything whatsoever, just link to a video that really blew my mind recently. There are two videos done by Barry, watch the one on choice. The second video on wisdom is very good as well (link is the title of this blog, the videos are on the right of the new screen)

The video and choice and thinking are all landmines in my mind however, compared to the real reason we don't do more. The real reason is that we do more, continuously we do more. We have more time to work, we have more money to spend, we have more food to eat, we have more of everything. We read more blogs, we create more content and on top of all of it we are in a continuous loop of trying to get it all done faster so we can fit more in. One of my favorite things about our construction group is that we work at a pace that I would consider frantic, just below total mayhem but way above working fast. There is this drive to work as fast as one person multiplied by however many people we have on the job site. It's almost therapeutic to work that hard because it forces you to tunnel in and only focus on what you are doing. My guess is that many people work this way all the time as well.

Ok, so you say "This post is garbage, I read the title and hoped to get more done and now I've read it and your telling me I'm already there, thanks for the mountains of help!". Here is where I hope I can help you. You do one hundred things today and they will all lay flat on the floor and create this newspaper covering that, while it may hide the carpet underneath, is really no monument to the day you just put in. Then tomorrow you get right back at it and lay another layer of newspaper but the problem is that you never get anywhere because the paper is so thin and your trying to build up to the ceiling of your dreams but that ceiling also rises with every given day. So we try to lay more paper down faster and we do but in the end it does not matter. It does not matter because we are not building anything.

If you are a fan of monopoly you know that the only way to win is to build up properties owned, take those properties and build houses, turn those houses into hotels and try and get whole sections owned to guarentee people stop on them and generate passive income for you. Yet in life we are simply trying to go around the board faster, to get a promotion so that we recieve $220 every time we pass go, all the while every time we come around the board there is something new waiting for us in the form of rent, bills, etc.

So reaching the conclusion, my question to both you and I today is are we just laying down newspaper instead of building something up, are we just trying to get more rolls of the dice in on any given day rather than getting our passive income together, are we getting more done each day but realizing that a marathon runner can run the fastest twenty six miles ever run but if it is on a treadmill it does not mean anything. Figure out what you are doing, figure out if it is a building block and then realize that if you only set up one building block per day you are way better of than laying down a hundred sheets of worthless newspaper.