Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Next, the business plan. Who are we? What is our product? Or service or idea? Who are our customers? What is our market? Who is our competition? Where will we operate? How will we advertise? How will we market ourselves? What is our unique selling proposition? What is our business identity? What size will our company be? And what size will our company eventually become? How long do we plan to stay in business? How much money do we intend to make? Will we operate on a fiscal year or a calendar year? What is our corporate structure? What industry will we operate in? What are the strategies that will govern our overall operations? What are the tactics we will use to implement our strategy? What work needs to be done? And by whom? and by when? Who is on our advisory board? How will we build our executive team? These are some questions that you'll ask as you formulate your business plan.

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Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

The vision statement, where will we be in five years? 10 years, 20 years from now? Where will we be in one year? Where will we be in three years? What does the future look like for the business in our mind's eye? When we close our eyes and think about our business? What do we see? I know what do you see. Next, our values statement, what do we hope our business will be remembered? As what are we here to contribute? Who are we here to educate? What experience will people come away from? How will we empower our clients? How will we make our customers feel better about themselves and their lives and their businesses, if that's appropriate, by being part of our organization, whether they are employee or customers? What are we going to stand for? What are our priorities for our business?

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Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

So, identifying the issue, we are looking for the cause, not the symptom. It's good to know the symptoms, but we need the cause, okay? So I'll give you an example, all right? Let's identify what the issue is in this particular situation, okay? A client of ours just built a brand new state-of-the-art building in New York City, okay? Multiple floors that requires elevators. They had the latest and greatest elevator system go in. It is optimized based on how many people at what time come into the building, what floors they go to. These elevators can't be tuned to move any faster than they are. They can't be sped up, they can't be reconfigured, you know, to drop or go to certain floors or skip certain floors any better. It's been optimized based on the foot traffic in that building already. Elevators, brand new.

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Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Now this is gonna take discipline from you as a team member because, as their manager, because you can't allow them to come to you with just the problem. They have to come to you with not only the problem, well defined, and then more than one solution. So you can pick your max now. Your job is to have your team come to you, hey, we noticed this one problem, hey, there's a challenge with this one client. Hey, this client had a question or wants something new that I'm not sure we've done before. And when they bring it to you, they bring almost a little plan of how they would solve it. And as a manager, this can be hard because sometimes you're sitting back like, oh my God, stop talking, I could have fixed this halfway through your sentence. I already know what to do. You have to hear them out. So let's give them a format of how they can come back to you, how they can come back to you with a solution, and how you can coach them to take more initiative.

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Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one-minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

There's no way, especially as you get bigger, and there's no way anyone on the team is gonna like everything that's going on, you just have to advocate for the process. So in everything in your professional life that you don't like, are you guys familiar with the law of opposite values? You guys familiar with what that is? So have you ever heard the expression that you can't understand light until you know dark? You can't be cold unless you've been hot? That's the law of opposite values. In other words, if there's something that bothers you about the company or a process, that means on some level you like it. And if you hate something, there's something about it you love. Like the stronger the reaction, which means you hold the opposite strong reaction. So anytime you're like, oh, what did I do this for, this is stupid. You're like, oh, hang on. That means what do I love about it? So you just have to be able to make both sides of the argument. Like and follow this podcast so you can learn more.

My name is Carl Gould and this has been your #70secondCEO.

Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

So you've heard the term over-communicate. We have to over-communicate. That doesn't mean just talking more. That means being very, very specific in how we give instructions. Okay, and when we do the situational leadership, we'll talk about that some more because we need to stop being descriptive and we need to start being instructive. So as a manager, as a leader, that's what this group needs to do, right? So in other words, somebody's gonna go and if you were to say to somebody that's heading out to a job site for a client, say, hey, do a great job, do it the source one way, that's descriptive. There are 15 different or ultimately infinite number of interpretations of that. Now, you wanna be instructive, right? Okay, and when you get there, I expect a call as soon as you get there. Let's do a video walkaround. Here are our steps, here's our agenda and our script, and that's what we want you to do.

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Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

Anytime there's a handoff, so if you're in sales and someone's engineering, someone's on the service desk, right, those handoffs have to be managed tight and you always cover your teammate's back, right? So that's where, so we have to define how that box runs, okay, and that'll be one of our challenges because we speak American English, that's our challenge, our English is so bad. You try handing it off to somebody who actually knows English and you'll find out how bad you're English. My English is terrible. My team, Alex, is like, Carl, that's not what you said and I'm like, I remember what I said, but that's not what it means, that's the problem, right? So we will define how our box or how our lane works. What we need to do is make sure we can pass that off to others, right, to the workforce and we need to manage those handoffs. Those will be the areas that will be really important to us.

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Hi everyone, Carl Gould here with your #70secondCEO. Just a little over a one minute investment every day for a lifetime of results.

So if you're working on something as a team, whether you're the leader, you're the manager, whatever, doesn't matter. Take 100% responsibility for the outcome, which means if Nicole and I are working on something and Nicole has her tasks and I have mine, I'm going to take 100% responsibility for hers, she'll do the same for me, and what that is, that will give enough overlap that makes sure we're going to get this job done. So if she's struggling in an area, I'll jump in and help, but I'll be aware of it. Going back to the quarterback analogy, I need to know what every player on my team's job is so I can help if I need to. I'm not going to do her job unless she needs me or asks me to, she's not going to do my job unless she needs or asks me to, but we want to be aware of that. If we each take 100% responsibility for the outcome, there's a good chance the objective gets done, it gets done on time the way we need to. So we have to start thinking as a unit, right?

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