Edmonton Business Consultant | Don’t Dropout When You’re Done School

Well, if your competition continues to learn and you don’t, they’re going to help perform it. They’re going to have a better product or service and they’re going to learn better ways to reach their ideal and likely buyers.

Yeah, I can see why with the two I can be and cause it’s not,

hi, thanks for joining us for another episode of ask for Sperl CPA today as the EBITDA business coach, we’re talking about how you shouldn’t drop out when you’re done school. So again, as the having a business coach, we’re saying don’t drop out when you’re done in school. So the quote that we have here today is, you know, from Michael Gerber, author of the myth, and he says, people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because they know, but because of their insatiable need to know more. And the statistic that we have are 50% of all Canadian businesses go out of business in five years. And the story that we have our business owners who the graduate from university or a particular trade, and they think that the learning stops once they graduate. So, Michael, what are the questions that these business owners should be asking? When you are an employee who is responsible for your training?

So when you’re an employee, you’re working for a company, you can pretty much just show up to the work site and the employer will genuinely look after it for you. They’re going to hold staff meetings, Edmonton Business Consultant, they’re going to, you know, send you to off site training. Edmonton Business Consultant, you know, it’s really guided for you. You’re not really responsible to pick and choose, you know, someone is at the top. It’s kind of, you know, shooting that down more. It’s whether it’s, you know, training material that they give you, whether it’s your in house workshops or whether it’s, you know, training offsite at third party providers. But generally the employer is guiding the trainee, not the employee. Do continual education requirements, focus on business or technical training. I would say the vast majority of any continuing education requirements. So a lot of, you know, uh, professional degrees or in a lot of trades have a requirement to do certain amount of continuing education.

But the overwhelming majority of that continuing education is technical training. It’s geared towards the technical work of that tree or that profession. It is generally not geared towards the business of that profession. And even sometimes when I have experienced some of that training with where they do veer into the business of that profession, a lot of times the business is being taught from people who are good at the trade or, or that uh, you know, technical aspect. But they have no experience whatsoever of actually running a business in that area or you know, um, or else generally, a lot of times they wouldn’t be teaching it. If they had a good business, they wouldn’t have the time to teach it. Edmonton Business Consultant, so you have to be careful that, you know, don’t just think that you’re continuing education, he’s going to give you the business training that he needs.

Likely it’s just giving you the technical training that you need for your, your specific profession or trade. What’s going to happen if your competitors continue to learn and you don’t. So here’s the thing. If you, you know, you finished school, you, you dropped out of school when you were done and your competitors don’t drop out of school, they’re going to get, you know, they’re going to get better. They’re going to learn new tricks. You’re not going to learn those new tricks. They’re going to get faster cause they’re gonna get more efficient. They’re going to find better ways to approach the customers. They’re going to have ways to, you know, insert that wow moment with their customers. Edmonton Business Consultant, so if your competition continues to learn and you don’t, they’re gonna help perform you, they’re going to have a better product or service and they’re going to learn better ways to reach their ideal and likely buyers.

Do good employees tend to execute proven systems or change things on the fly? Yeah, so good employees are generally the employees who can execute those proven systems. You know, the owner as the expert comes up with a way to, you know, do the task at hand, uh, in a more efficient manner or a higher quality manner and they pass that onto employees. And good employees tend to be able to execute that over and over and over again. They don’t necessarily change things on the fly, Edmonton Business Consultant, because a lot of times when they change things on the fly, they’re not as experienced as the owner. So their output won’t be that good. Uh, and even if they are, you know, at the same quality as the owner, now you have one employee doing one thing and another employee doing the other thing and the customer doesn’t like that very much.

Edmonton Business Consultant, so good employees tend to be the, the ones that you can execute proven strategies over or an over is the owner then responsible for researching organizational improvement? Yeah. So if you want to get better, you have to realize that you’ve tasked these employees with executing the same thing over and over and over, uh, to a high standard. Uh, but it’s your job as the owner can improve those processes. To learn how to do them better. Edmonton Business Consultant, you know, to always say, add of your competition, uh, that’s your job as the owner. Should you view learning as an event or continuing spot in your calendar? I think as a business owner, you should view learning as a continual spot on the calendar. If you’re a business owner, you should have specific times in your day, in your weekly, you know, repeatable calendar, a monthly repeatable calendar, uh, that specifically give you the freedom of, that’s when you’re going to learn.

Because if you don’t do it and your competitor is losing is, is learning these things, you know, they’re going to beat you to it, right? And you can’t look at it as a onetime event. I can’t just learn and graduate from school at this time or you know, 10 years in this, I do attend this training session. There’s a lot of stagnation occurs between those periods. So you have to be continually improving. In order to do that, you have to have specific times blocked out in your calendar because if you don’t do it, it’s not going to filter down to your employees. And they’re not going to get better. Do top levels. He owes, tend to read more than the average person. Yeah. When you, when you listen to these guys and they have these really high level CEOs, the, the, the Bill Gates and the Warren buffets of the world, they always talk about how much they read and this book after book after book, and you know, the stats are that the average CEO reads far more than the average person.

They’re always learning because they’ve accepted that responsibility is that is their responsibility. You know, their employees or are tasked with executing the systems over and over again to a high standard a, that’s why they bring them on. Uh, but then they have to accept the responsibility if they want to improve those systems that the employees are executing, they’re the ones who have to drive the bus on that. And if they’re not continuing to learning, if they don’t have that time blocked out into their calendar, they don’t read more books, they’re not going to be equipped to teach those people who are looking for them for leadership. How does scheduling, learning help you avoid shiny object syndrome? So, you know, learning is great, but it can also go the other way too. People can focus too much time on learning. So they’re always adopting a new strategy, Edmonton Business Consultant, that rather than executing what they had planned to do, they’re still learning to see if there’s a better way.

At some point you have to stop learning and you just have to get down to work. You have to put pen to paper, you have to write the system or processes, you have to implement it with your team. Um, you have to, you know, just start doing so by scheduling learning. You know, that hey, I can afford to learn at this time. Uh, but it’s not coming at the detriment of the time required to actually execute any strategy, uh, because if all you ever do is look for a better strategy, you’ll never actually complete the strategy. Um, so at some point you actually just need to start, um, start executing. And so if you have that time blocked off of when your learning and when you’re executing on a strategy, Edmonton Business Consultant, it will avoid that shiny object syndrome where you’re always just chasing a better way.

Why do you need to schedule the time to pass this knowledge on to staff? Yeah. So the, you know, you can go one way and just, you know, adopt that shiny object syndrome. You’re always looking for the better way. But then there’s the other thing where you as a business owner, you can figure out that better way. It’s a proven way and now you actually need some time to pass it on to your staff. So, cause if you just learn it but you don’t actually give that knowledge to your team, you get smarter. But you probably get frustrated because your employees haven’t read what you read. They haven’t consumed the material that you’ve consumed. So if you don’t educate them and they’re still executing it the old way, it’s your fault. Really. It needs to be a scheduled time for the learning, a scheduled time to train the team on what your improvements are and a scheduled time that you’re actually executing.

And you know, it tends to be that, that schedule time, you know, I like to have that scheduled time. You know, first thing in the morning with the team, you get all the team together, you get that standing huddle, uh, first thing in the morning around with the team and we’ll start at a shift in any other business. And then once a week, I think once a week is the gold standard for you. If you can get the entire team to gather and go deeper on to a little more of an in depth topic, Edmonton Business Consultant, that’s going to work. And again, it’s a scheduled time each week cause if you just try to get the team together, uh, kind of Willy Nilly, they all have other stuff plan, they’re meeting with customers over here, you know, they have something planned with a supplier over there and you can’t get them together.

So you have to actually set that time together. When the team is going to meet and you’re going to pass on the learning to the team, should you generally make radical changes or incremental changes? My, you know, the, the success that I’ve seen and you know, they’re really starting to touch on a lot in the book called good to great. It tends to be that incremental changes over time when, so that people who radically change overnight, um, you know, it’s a, it’s very difficult to, t is very difficult to implement and it’s very difficult to have effective systems in place if you can completely, you know, blow up what you’re doing and start going in different direction overnight. Um, B if you, if you do, you know, radically go a different direction overnight, a lot of times you have to change more than one variable.

And when you change more than one variable, you’re not sure which one worked and which one did it. So, uh, I think it’s that incremental change over time that’s more manageable and easier to implement. And that goes along with the fact that you can only learn so much over time too. So if you only have so much time set aside for learning, it would be impossible to make, you know, to radically change things overnight. Uh, but a lot of people underestimate how much they can change. If they make incremental changes, if they make changes every week or even changes every month of their, their processes, they can move the business a very long ways and you know, they can do so in a controlled manner with a unified approach with systems and processes and teams trained, uh, to the new processes as well. Um, so I, I would, you know, caution, anybody thinking of making a radical change and think, you know, can they, can we break this down into smaller increments? Tends to be a better way. So I think that’s what we have here today. Thanks so much for joining us. Again, as always, please hit the Lichen subscribe button. So we continue to deliver you tips on how to beat the odds at business. And please us with comments below so we can respond back and use your input for future videos. Thanks very much.