Welcome to the Scale With Speed podcast!

I’m your host, Matt Manero and I am here with my co-host Judge Graham. Anybody in Dallas, Texas, we want you to come through the Commercial Fleet offices here and we’ll make sure that Judge’s here that day too, and come and visit us, man. The podcast is called Scale With Speed. It connects to Judge’s book Scale With Speed, but it connects us to probably the most important topic that entrepreneurs and business owners face.

Dude, how do you move the business to the desired end game? Freaking fast? Yeah. And the beautiful part here about our exchanges judged did it. And I didn’t do it. So you, as the audience, you’re getting two really clean perspectives of one guy who built a business and exited that business very fast with nothing but an end game and a mission forward. And I built a business to survive and it just drugs on and drug on and drug on for a long time. Now we finally got there, but it just took too damn long, man. We didn’t scale with speed here. Commercial fleet.

You did. Yeah. I think you know, Matt and some of the other businesses you’re not involved in, it’s like, you don’t have an appreciation of one, what it takes, what the freaking effort. Right. And then the understanding that effort equals strategic effort equals time compression. Right. In that, if you have a project, right. Whether it’s a marketing campaign or it’s your new website, it’s your new branding in every day that goes by that it’s not completed, dude. You’re losing. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so, you know, the overarching theme, I think even for the podcast, and then, you know, specifically what we’re going to get into today is that we want to teach people to create this strategic urgency, urgency, so they can go freaking win, dude, cause people to want to win. They want the momentum.

Yeah. Which does bring us to today’s topic. And Judge and I on the podcast, we’ll be picking a specific topic. Our podcast will be personal. We’ll tell you stories from both sides of the fence, the good and the bad, but, but at the end of every podcast, we will give you a minimum of five tips. We’re going to call them Monday moments, things that you can put into play in your office on Monday, right? And every single podcast, we’ll, we’ll leave you with us with a strategic action plan at the end. But to lead up to that, man, we want to tell you some real-life stories, man, of what it looks like, so that you can either prevent it from happening, or you can relate to us when it is happening. Right. And you can pivot if you need to because we’ve been through it all.

And I get an amen on that. But man, do we have seen some shit for sure. We have seen some crazy, crazy shit in our business careers and you are too. So today’s topic is compressing time. How do you, how do you make this business go faster to get to the end game? And you know, judge, for those of you who don’t know, judge and are involved in a, in a business called to Burn the Ships, we run one and a half-day boot camps. And what we continually see is business owners who have no idea what the end game is. So there’s no requirement to compress time, Right?

If you don’t know it. Guess what nobody else in the damn company knows that either. Right? What you and I talk about so often offline is that business owners think that that, that means you have to be an asshole. And the reality is everybody wants the expectation to tell us where you’re driving the boat boss. Yeah. Because I want to be on that boat. Right. Or maybe I don’t want to be on that boat, but he’ll tell me where we are.

Yeah. And this, this idea of, uh, of compressing time, you know, you know, starting with one of those tips is listen, time kills deals. Okay. So, you know, whatever example you want to use. Um, but I hate the salesperson that gets on the phone and says, Hey boss, I had a great call. Freaking great call you close. No, it was a great call.

I sent him an email.

He said that he was interested in it to call next week because more than likely he’s going to do it, dude, that’s not a good call. Time kills deals. Right. A good call is, tell me what you’re not interested in and how can I fix it if he or she still pushes you off? When can we talk next week, Wednesday at noon, right? Like just, you have to create the urgency.

Yeah, man time does kill deals. Um, you buy something, um, and that salesperson on the other end, doesn’t get you the information you want in a timely fashion dude, for the real people that have money, they’re going to go buy someplace else or they’re out, they’re out there. They’re going to make the most, most people who are ready to buy have already done the research. And so they’re ready to pull the trigger. Do you know? Um, you got tire kickers and all that stuff too, but the people who’ve got the money they’ve already made the decision, your job is to give it to them quick, push the damn pen, sir.

So I’m in the process of getting into a new car. You know, my, my issue with the car sky

Keep trading them all the best shot. So,

Uh, it’s a guy that we’ve bought in from frequently. So I like him. Right. And he understands the pace that I want to move at. Yeah. But it was still too slow. Right. So we found the vehicle. We like it. I don’t like the wheels. It’s a brand new model. So we’re having to like the source, not that many people have manufactured. The wheels that are hard to find. I’m like, dude, just give me the wheels. Like, what’s the status? Where are we? How do we get with them?

Right. You’re going to G wagon. No, she would choose more for the kids. This is a, a GLS, the new GLS. Okay. Mercedes. Gotcha.

But um, I won’t like really cool wheels on it. Cause I, you know, for me we will finish the car and you know, he said, Hey, I’m going to send you some wheels. Like I want them now. Like you want to close the sale? Tell me what’s in stock. I mean, but you know, and I would say I’m the extreme of that. But back to this time kills deals. Tell me, Hey, you’re going to show me some wheel options that set my expectations. It’s going to be in 15 minutes, it’s going to be three or four hours. If it’s going to be two days, I’ve lost interest in the car because I want to, then I’m going to go find a different vehicle. Right. And now again, I may be an extreme of that. But if people aren’t thinking about that from a sales perspective, dude, you have a fish on the hook, right? You said, great example, you’re out fishing. You get something on the hook. You don’t go away. You catch the freaking fish, bring him in the boat.

Time kills deals. The other thing, time kills is progress and momentum. Totally. Right? I mean, dude, You should be winning Multiple times a day and you go And celebrating it. That’s right. And you’ve got to pick one. The wind means dude. And in a wind, doesn’t have to necessarily be what you We’re told. It is, dude. Wind can be, um, you know, we, we didn’t close it. A lot of deals slip, but we’ve made a lot of calls, right. Or we got a lot of quotes It’s out. It really, you got to pick what a win is, but you have to have won.

And when you don’t have a culture that pushes the compression of time, you can’t quantify the wins. It’s just like, it’s just like you said on the, I had a good call today

That doesn’t really qualify as a win. Yeah. Well, let’s, let’s use this podcast for example. Okay. I’m sure there are another seven things we could have thought of to say, you know what? We’re not ready yet. Okay. But, but what’s going to happen? And we’ve got two amazing guys in here that Z and Ramsey in the studio seeing Ramsey Helvin, you know, coordinating all of this. When we walked in, man, I had a couple of other ideas like, Hey, what if we animated this thing behind us? What if we had Facebook live going, whatever, what would that have done? If we wouldn’t have done the podcast, a couple things. It would have taken these guys’ morale. And just, just dude, boss, we set up all this stuff. Like what’s, what’s the deal. And then two, we wouldn’t have accomplished something. Okay. So now coming out of this, everybody’s going to be like, dude, we did the first one. You know, here’s what was great. Here’s what we’re going to prove. And what do we do? Matt

Progress, progress, or most business owners want this idea of perfection and they sacrifice progress because they think it has to be perfect. And dude, that killed

Momentum. Yeah. So that’s why we were on the schedule for the 10 o’clock start. And then all of a sudden I looked over at the judge this morning. I’m like, we’re ready. Why do we get to do a 10? Let’s go now. And by the way, it’s two minutes to 10. Yeah. And we’re already into the, into the podcast. Right? So, uh, you know, you, you got to understand that time kills progress and momentum, doing things slowly, uh, is not appropriate behavior in an organization. And let’s just get straight about it. Doing this COVID thing is making so many people justify slowness. Right. It’s okay. Hey, we’re still figuring it out. Yeah.

And let’s caveat because you know, everybody somebody’s going to go. These guys are crazy, right. They’re haphazardly right there. They’re just moving too fast. You need to have a plan that is, that is Bulletproof. And then you need to move fast to get to that plan and guess what your ass needs to build the plant fast. Now when’s the last time you carved out a half a day of uninterrupted focus to figure out your life and your business, take a half a day and then just freaking accept it fast.

You don’t mean the story we have here in this office is, is the amount of time that it took us to get the 36 million and the amount which was 18 years. And the amount of time it took us to get to a hundred million, which was 18 months. Yeah. I mean, people, people need to understand that

Let’s repeat that 18 years to 36 million. Yeah. 18 months to grow to a hundred because we finally sat down and said, what the Frick is the end game and how do we get there? What’s the robot? And that was, by the way, a three-year strategic plan that was laid out. And we executed fully to a hundred million in 18 months. That is the compression of time. Um, and by the way, here at the Commercial Fleet Financing, we’re, we’re, we’re in a flat year, over year scenario. Whether it’s COVID, whether it’s other things that don’t really matter, it just matters how you perceive that and it frustrates the hell out.

Yeah. And it should, but I mean, in fairness and you and I don’t excuse people, I mean, covert probably plays a little end to that, right? Yeah. A little bit. Hey man, there’s a lot of people who went into the coven to dude. Yeah. That comes up to this next point. Right? Time kills. Long long term.

Yeah. Dude, everybody needs to understand that, you know, compound interest matters. I mean, if Ramsey, how old are you? 28. You’re 28. So if Ramsey, if you started putting 500 bucks a month away right now, and I waited till I was 38, I’m 51. But if I waited till I was 38 and I started putting a thousand dollars away and for the next 10 years, you would have more money than I would at $500 because of time and the power of compound interest. So you actually invest less and make more, over a longer period of time. People don’t understand that. They think that you know, there’s always going to be a way to catch up. Dude. It’s very hard to catch up. You need to start executing on your income. Now whether you want to put it in the market or you want to put it in an index fund, it doesn’t matter. But you have to begin to allocate capital early. So you can benefit from time.

Yeah. It gets back to, I mean, even another analogy, like if you’re in your business now and you’re celebrating, you’re happy with, you know, small, incremental year, over year, that’s a problem, right? Because if you compound that over three years and you consistently stay flat or incremental, what’s the long term effect of that on a sale or an exit or even distributions and everything. So it’s just back to dude, you’ve got to crank, you’ve got to create momentum in the organization. Everybody’s gotta is fired up in, in, in racing. Right? I hate what’s the saying Matt. It’s a, “Hey, slow down little Stevie. It’s not a race. It’s a marathon” dude that is bad, bad, bad advice. It is a freaking sprint the entire time, get the endurance, get the right running shoes. And if you’re in an organization that’s in marathon mode, you’re just gonna, it’s a slow

Judge. You’re, your first company went from zero to sale in six years. Right? Uh, first one I failed.

So the sec, the second one. Yeah. W I would say it was a sub 600,000 in revenue, too big, pretty big exit in less than five years, five, five years,

Five and a half years. And, and that you, you would adhere, you would, you would give credit to that because of the urgency that everything took off,

Everything, everything mattered, every detail mattered and its lightning-fast speed of decision making and, and against the plan and, and creating momentum and urgency. Because what happens is when you have the right team and the right culture, and we talk about all this and inherently, you’re pushing against the right objectives and you’re creating, you know, needed urgency. Do people want to win? Yeah. Okay. Like the difference between, and I’m a football guy, right? Because I played college football and I love football. And my boys are playing football . You know, Nick Saban would be an amazing CEO. He is the CEO of football. Why are those guys so good, dude, he’s creating massive speed, urgency execution. And then that momentum leads to wins. And guess what? Those wins lead to getting great recruits. And it all

Compound college football is actually a better example than pro football. Um, you know, if you watch the last dance, right? I mean, the bulls haven’t squatted after they dismantled the team. Right. Uh, but yet in college, every year you have to put a quality team together. You’ve got guys that are transferring in, you’ve got guys who are transferring out, you got injuries, you got all kinds of stuff that gets in the way he got COVID that gets away. But nevertheless, saving keeps waiting. Yeah. He knows how to compress time. We have to do these things every single time fast. Yeah. But look, you touched on this time kills culture. Right. And, and, you know, we believe that like TA compressing time means like now, yeah. It doesn’t mean compressed time to write down that it’s going to take two months to do it. No means it means to do it now, what do we have to do to achieve now?

And when we do that, some people will freak out. Right. They’re not going to like that, but that’s the importance of the culture. Yeah. Dude is a fast part of your ecosystem. Right. And it is for everything you do. Yeah. For me, for sure. And I think you’re, you’re on that train now too. Well, I mean, I think I always was, but then it just in full transparency, I felt like in order to get a hold of myself and not be the Dick that I was as a man, I had to back off just a little bit in, through that backoff, we backed off on speed a little bit and we’re starting to creep back in. Um, and, and, and, and put that pressure on the organization again, because as I just said, we are facing a year over year flatness. Right. And I think a lot of that does have to do with speed. It doesn’t have to do with culture or market opportunity or any that’s what we’re management rate and stuff it just has to do with, I think we took our eye off. Hey, can we do it today? Right. Like, I know we’re going to do it, but how about we do it like now? Yeah. Well, let’s, you know, talk about that from a cultural perspective.

People want purpose, look at me, and listen to that. People want purpose and fulfillment. And so by having speed and going, no, no, no, we can just do it right now. It may create some angst and some chaos at first, but you get through it. And then everybody had a purpose. Cause you accomplished something. I mean, how many times have you and I been on a call or a meeting with, you know, different team members in different companies we have, or whatever, and said, Hey, we need to, uh, we need to get this done. Right? Little Stevie, you would write this, you know, this person would do that or whatever. And most leaders and organizations would then go, okay, tell me when you’re going to have it. And then go work off in a silo. You and I are like, okay, well, this meeting was scheduled for an hour.

Yeah. But I’m the perfect pupil because I thought I moved fast until I met you. And then in our burn, the ship’s venture, I quickly began to understand that my version of speed is different than yours. Like, Hey, that sounds good. Okay. We’re going to do that yet. Where are y’all going? Well, I think we’re done for the no guys. We’re going to start pushing out that content right now. Like, we’re going to write the copy now. Now we’re going to, should I call you to say this all the time? Should I get them on the phone? Yeah. All right. We’ll get them on the phone. Right? Boom, pop up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up momentum.

And then it’s done. And then back to this idea of, of, of purpose and, and having a culture, you’ve completed something, right? People want to win in by forcing that momentum in that speed, you start winning, right? You start going, man. I, that feels good. I worked out. I, I, whatever you account

Published something. I stole the basketball court idea. I’ve never seen an office with a basketball court until I saw pictures of your office and it had a basketball court in it. And I was like, okay when we remodeled this place, we’re going to put a basketball court. It looks great. Thank you. But what didn’t look good was the hoop. Yeah. We have the court. I want to shoot hoops. And I specifically bought a dunking backboard because I wanted to run competitions in this office where our guys can dunk freaking Slack. I love it. Here’s the problem. We, the way, the way they constructed the office, it’s basically a non-structural wall that the backboard would go on. And so the first handyman came in and he’s like, ah, you know, I don’t think I can make that work. So then we bring in the construction company and they’re like, Oh, we got to reinforce the wall.

It’d be like $8,000. We can’t do steel anymore. I was like, listen, I can’t look at this freaking back backward on the floor anymore. Right. It’s making me freaking nuts. Yeah. Scratch the dunk idea. And I went to Cynthia, the facility manager, and I said, get the backboard up. Guess what? That was what’s today, Thursday, that was Monday. Yesterday. She sends me a picture. She’s so fired up, the backboard done, completed. Who feels good about that? She feels awesome about really by applying speed, scratches the big picture, executes on it, gets it done. A very small example that I’m giving, but maybe it’s not because guess who went home that day and felt amazing. This was the mandate that came down on Monday. She found the guy on Tuesday, Wednesday cut, installed. She texted me the picture last night saying, Don.

Yeah. Well, and there’s also, you know, I think part of that is, is some empowerment. Right? And I want to, I want to touch back on. Cause I think, you know, for the audience listening, you said something really important. It’s sometimes you have to, not sometimes I would say a lot. You have to pivot to understand where you are to win. What I mean by that is if you’re not thinking like chess six or seven moves ahead, you’ve got to understand in the grand scheme of things, being able to slam that the chaos that’s causing the extra 8,000, I just got to make a decision and pivot on that one to get on, to move to other things, to move quickly. Right. So true. And that’s a small example, but that happens in, in everything.

Right. But, but you know, what else was beginning to happen? I guarantee it, nobody said this to me, but they’re like the fuck’s going on, man. How come we can’t get that backboard up? Yeah, totally fucking company.

The Buster balls on it. And I was like up here, like, you know what, the week and a half. And I’m like fucking goals on the crowd. Like, you know my OCD, fuck, I’m going to hang it up.

But I think to your point, man, we had to make a pivot. Some people might consider this a small example, but sometimes small examples can actually be huge, it’s a, it’s a perfect example of how the inability to apply speed infiltrates the organization. I guarantee you, people were saying maybe they weren’t saying it out loud. It’s subconscious. They were going to say this fucking company can’t even put a backboard up on a dam.

Totally. You only hit on this next one. Um, you put on here and I love this one time. Doesn’t heal wounds time makes wounds deeper dude. And that, that is so true. Right. And, and, and that could be used in a multitude of things, right? I mean, if you’re not addressing and having a fierce conversation, right. Then people faster and then they start to connect dots. That doesn’t make sense. And it just gets worse and worse. That’s one example of how time doesn’t heal wounds. Right? I mean, you’ve got to address things in quickly,

Dude. How about in the family situation? Let’s say you take a, uh, in law, right? There’s beef with an in-law and it doesn’t get addressed.

Um, and everybody knows it exists, but nobody wants to, you think the time’s just gonna figure it out.

Every birthday, it gets a little more complicated. Maybe they don’t get invited. Well, if they don’t get invited, then maybe I shouldn’t go. Cause then it conflicts with that. And due time didn’t heal that wound time made that wound deeper. And now you’re not celebrating Thanksgivings anymore. And you broke the tree.

You know how the fuck you’re not because it’s some point because the spider web of that is you start connecting dots that don’t even have a desk. And the other person is connecting the dots. And all of a sudden, you know, it’s like, y’all fucking hate each other. And, and there was never a reason to

One phone call that said, Hey, let’s fix a little bit of a challenge, fall on the sword, take it and move on. But time does not heal wounds. I believe time makes them deeper. And if you relate it to business, that’s everything we’re talking about. Dude, dude, you can recover from a fast, bad decision. Yeah.

But not a slow decision. Right. I need to know right now. And I would rather deal with the open-cut versus let it fester get bigger, get infected. Let me know what’s going on with this.

Yeah, dude. So, so let me just, just, just, just one last exclamation point on that, because I get so crazy over this, over this specific topic, sooner or later, you should be good enough to fairly quickly connect enough dots and collect enough information to be able to make the decision. If that process isn’t happening, you probably have the wrong people on the bus. You like to operate in our office because we have credit requirements. We’d like to do 90 10. If we make 90 of our decisions, right. We can live with the 10. We make mistakes. Yeah. You think it’s 70, 30, but the point is, it’s not 30, 70 guys. You’re not in the data collection business. You’re in the decision making.

Yeah. You’re in the momentum business, right? I mean, I think if you interviewed anybody that, you know, has some level of financial success, they would attribute their ability to make decisions quickly and empower people to create momentum. And ultimately all of that ties back to what speed. Yup. How it plays out

First to a market minimal viable product. The MVP mindset matters.

Yeah. In, in, in one more thing. [inaudible] when you say speed, dude, it’s organized speed. Right? Anytime we’re doing something together, whether we’re updating, you know, uh, you know, I love always doing website stuff. That’s like my favorite thing to do like our brand. But dude, when we go in to meet with our team, we’re freaking organized because we understand the importance of, if you bring other bodies in that it needs to get done fast. You need to have a copy. You need to have decisions. You need to pick your colors. You need to know those things because therefore when you empower somebody and you’ve given them the direction you’ve given them everything they need, it can get done fast.

You did. You opened, you opened today’s episode with this concept. I sort of glossed right over it. Mike Tyson punched one. After that, right after that, there comes a point in time in your organization. When you need to understand how much it costs you. Every time you turn the key to open the off. And a lot of people have no idea. And therefore, every time you turn that key and you’re not having behaviors that help you pay for the cost of turning that key, fixed expenses, lights, go on, computers, fire up, the staff arrives, health insurance kicks in dah, dah, dah, right? Yeah. Dude, you need to understand that stuff. And the way you overcome that to the negative is you allow time. Dude, you overcome that to the positive and you help to get return on your investment when you apply speed. Totally. It’s a great example. People don’t get that, dude. You should know-how

We should get it. When you look in the bank account,

You shut. But as a company begins to scale, judge, the crest of turning that key becomes extreme. So, so when people are on vacation and people are leaving early if you have 50 people in an organization, everyone starts busting out at fou