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Ch. 6 | What Are The Seven Deadly Habits In Business

Welcome to CFF-U Business Series!

Welcome back to CFF university. I love recording these videos for you as a client of commercial fleet. I absolutely love the game of business, the language of business, and you know, from my own days of starting commercial fleet, 26 years ago, I didn’t have a roadmap. I didn’t have a playbook that I could follow. And so that’s why we do CFF university. It gives you a structured format of if you do the things we teach in CFF university in your business, you will run a better business period. End of story. We have had hundreds of people come through our burn, the ships bootcamp, which is where this content comes from. Uh, my partner, judge Graham and I in that business have taught hundreds of people. And we have watched incredible results from our alumni group who simply do the steps that you’re being taught.

Deadly Habit #1 – Talking In Bull S**t

This Chapter is SU super important to me because I believe it is the secret sauce of business. I believe it’s the future of business. Everybody talks about, you know, businesses about revenue and profits and scale and growth. Yeah, I get all that and I agree with you, but that happens when you have culture. And I want to offer you seven deadly habits that kill your business. Now we’re going to get into in a few chapters more about culture, but I want to give you these seven things that if they’re going on in your business, you need to fix them. So let’s get into it.

We call these the deadly seven, the first, and I apologize for the language,

The first is called talking in Bull S***. It’s when your organization doesn’t tell each other honest truth, your managers are kind of afraid to bring bad news.

Telling People The TRUTH

You’re afraid to give someone bad news. People are afraid to tell you that they’re unhappy. And so you end up with this feeding frenzy of no one telling anybody the truth. Here is the evidence that this habit exists in your business. The evidence of talking in BS in your organization is that you’re having coated conversations. You’re just having a hard time telling people the hard truth. There is a failure to deliver bad news. That’s going on in your organization as well. People are simply afraid to tell you that they lost the deal, right?

The contract didn’t come through. And so, you know, you’re planning on this revenue. You’re looking at the sales pipeline of new deals that might be happening in your or accounts that your salespeople are calling on. And you think, oh, we’re going to land that. We’re going to land that because your salespeople are talking in BS and no one’s telling you the truth.

The Cure – Be Fully Transparent With Your People

And then they’ve lost the deal, but they have a fear to come and tell you. They don’t want to give you the bad news. Dude. You need the bad news as the owner, the cure is to move to full transparency in your organization. Allow people to talk. I want to know the good, the bad, the ugly, the warts I want to know. Is there lipstick on that pig, right? I want to know what’s going on. And the organization has to feel trust that if they bring you the good news or the bad news, rather, they’re not going to get their head back, get off.

The other, uh, cure is that people are required to tell the truth. Even if it’s ugly. Now the skills to go ahead and put these tactics into place to cure this number one habit is that you have clear and concise communication that is consistently disseminated.

Deadly Habit #2 – Living In Quicksand

People know what they’re responsible for. They know what their goal is. They know what the expectation is. They know what a good job looks like, and they know what a bad job looks like. So take the time to build out this roadmap, this description, this expectation process for your people, and it will help you cure the number one deadly habit. The second deadly habit is what we refer to as living in quicksand.

This means your people live in a fog there because you haven’t given them the clear roadmap. They’re not actually sure, like, is that my job responsibility? Or is that somebody else’s job, right? Or they go so far as to say, well, that’s not my job. That’s such and such job. Listen in an organization, people have responsibilities, but in the end, everyone’s a sales person. Everyone’s job is to make the company more successful.

Deadly Habit #3 – Need For Certainty

The cure is accountability. The ability to tell people this is your responsibility and then hold them accountable for the achievement. That’s how you keep people from living in a fog. And some of the skill set that is required is actually effective goal setting for people. It’s the ability to get people to commit to say, I will take that project on and I will see it to the end, across the goal.

The third is a need for certainty. Now, if you remember the chapter one that we went through in CFF university, we talk about personality testing. And this is where the need for certainty begins to develop because there are a lot of personality traits that force the individual to certain before they can take action. So you might be saying to yourself, why isn’t Jim taking more action and through knowing Jim’s personality tests, you would see that Jim has a high requirement for certainty.

Taking Action

In other words, all the eyes have to be dotted and the T’s have to be crossed before Jim feels comfortable taking action. Conversely, you might see someone that doesn’t need the I’s dotted and the T’s crossed. And he or she is always taking action. And that action is causing mayhem in the organization. But people who need certainty will do what we in Texas called cud chewing. They’ll just like a cow. If you’ve ever driven by a cow in a field and their jaws just chewing on something. What they’re chewing on is grass and the cow, isn’t smart enough to say, should I swallow this grass? Or should I spit it out? So you know what I’ll do, I’ll just keep chewing it. And it ends up in the corner of their mouth. And it just becomes this ball that in Texas, we call cud and people just chew cud. They just don’t know what to do. So they just keep chomping on it and they can’t make decisions.

Have Confident People

They have a need for certainty before they can act. Now the cure is to have people confident in their job. They got the reinforcement that they were doing a good job that their history says, you can do it. You are qualified to do it. You’re experienced enough to do it. And the company believes in you. The other cure for the need for certainty is to operate at a less than perfect affection level. The goal is not perfection. The goal is actually movement scale forward momentum. And we would suggest that if you can do 70% of the activities in your business, well, you can live with the 30% that you don’t do well. And when you share that percentage to people who have a need for certainty, they might actually chill out a little bit and say, I don’t have to have perfect.

Deadly Habit #4 – Participation In Game Of Thrones

And the skills needed to fix this habit is that the organization needs to have trust amongst itself. The employees have to have confidence in being powered and they have to have the freedom to fail every once in a while and not get their head bitten off. Number four, part two, it’s a patient in game of Thrones. If you’ve ever seen the series game of Thrones, you see that there are these different groups and they fight against each other all the time. It happens all the time in business. The perfect example is sales not getting along with marketing or operations, not getting along with sales or sales, not getting along with, with the shipping or it not getting along with operations or accounting, not getting along with operations. You’ve all seen it. You’ve experienced it in your business. And we refer to that as the participation of game of Thrones, it’s an us versus them mentality, right?

Working Together

And we have to get rid of that in the organization and how you do that is there is no I in everyone has to work together. And the skills to get everyone to work together are there has to be high trust in the leadership. The leaders have to be trusted by the employees that they’re not going to, um, lead demonstrate that the leaders have their back. There has to be a collaborative decision-making process in which people feel as though their opinions and ideas were heard, listened to, and if good enough implemented and empowered to put, to play super important, there’s nothing worse than having a great sales meeting. And then you leave the sales meeting and operation says, yeah, we’re not going to do that.

Deadly Habit #5 – “We Can’t Because”

The next one is, and we hear this all the time, especially in older businesses, we can’t because the good idea gets brought to the table. And the management team says, oh, we tried that. We can’t do that. We lead with the word. No. Now that idea is dumb. Not going to work well. You know, what is funny? New people, millennials, new hires have great ideas that are just as good as the old, uh, you know, veteran employee who’s been with the company forever. Or maybe you as the leader, maybe there are new things that you can be taught, right? The old dog can Learn new tricks. And the cure Is positivity, embracing ideas and new ideas and thought processes and a new way that you might be able to do your business. This happens all the time when there’s a generational change, a father or mother are now allowing their son or daughter to get deeply involved in the business. And the son or daughter has all these wonderful ideas, but the mom and dad lead with no crushes.

Deadly Habit #6 – Tolerance Of Mediocrity

The, the excitement, The second to last one is the tolerance of mediocrity. We have low standards in which good enough has just become good enough. That’s just kind of the way we do it around here. Yeah. But it’s not great. I know, but it’s good enough. Right? Got to fight against the tolerance for mediocrity all the time to cure, to fight against it is that you drive new standards. You require nothing less than great. Maybe it’s in the dress code. Maybe it’s in the cleanliness of your equipment. Maybe it’s in the tightness of your financial statements or your books. Maybe it’s in the conversations. Maybe your office, um, has just been lulled to sleep a little bit, by the way, maybe your office looks bad. Maybe you ought to just paint the walls and make it look a little prettier, clean the darn carpets. But you, as the leader can no longer tolerate mediocrity. It’s deadly to the, to the business.

Deadly Habit #7 – Failure To Deliver

And the last one is failure to deliver. People just don’t do what they say they were going to do. They, they dropped the ball. They made promises. The deadline came, came and went. And because of the tolerance of mediocrity, it’s a failure deliver. And so we can’t get any traction. We can’t get the company scale and we can’t get it moving fast. The cure Is ownership. You Took responsibility for that. You were accountable for that. We gave you the measurement, the metrics that made it a win or a loss, and you have to deliver on it. And the skills that you need need our regular and, and meaningful feedback. We simply have to sit down with people and say, did we get it done? And if we didn’t get it done, what can I do to help you get it done? Why didn’t we get it done? What tools or resources did you not have from the organization to complete? And if the answer is, eh, I just couldn’t get it done. That’s not good enough in a great company.

The Roadmap To Success – Recap

That’s the purpose of CFF university to give you a roadmap, to build a great company in the transportation industry. Those are the seven deadly habits. The graphic is yours. This is a Monday moment. You can put this into play on Monday. You can go to your group and say, gang, we’re no longer going to have the tolerance for mediocrity. We’re no longer going to play game of Thrones. We’re no longer going to be indecisive. We’re no longer going to have lack of transparent conversations. You fix some of this in your organization. You watch your company culture change.


About Commercial Fleet Financing, Inc.:

At Commercial Fleet Financing (CFF), our pros have given smart advice to fleet owners and owner-operators in the transportation, moving, towing or construction industries for more than two decades. With CFF, finding the right financing solutions is a phone call away and most borrowers secure commercial vehicle financing with ease. To talk directly with one of our finance pros and get started with credit approval in as little as two hours, CFF’s phone number is (469) 281-2962.

2022-08-17T16:34:22-05:00
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