Josh Patrick 0:00
Well, nobody wants to make mistakes. I would rather do it right and do it wrong. So would you? The truth is, we make mistakes all the time. We continue to make mistakes in through our entire business career. So if we don't learn how to solve that issue, and we don't learn how to learn from mistakes, and make mistake learning opportunities, and ask the people who made mistakes, what did you learn? We're never going to have a great company, because everyone's gonna be hiding that mistake.
Steve Brown 0:35
Josh Patrick, welcome to the ROI online podcast.
Unknown Speaker 0:39
Amazing.
Steve Brown 0:54
So Josh, this is number two, you actually your reputation endured the last time being on my podcast. And so here we are doing it again.
Josh Patrick 1:05
Yeah, well, I guess your audience is a glutton for punishment, what can I say?
Steve Brown 1:10
I have to say, You're the only guest that actually put on his website. declaration that he's a curmudgeon. Yes. Where does that come from? Where someone goes, You know what, I'm just gonna put that on my website.
Because I'm a curmudgeon. Curmudgeons aren't always mean, they're just sort of crusty and say things that other people think but won't say. So being a curmudgeon is not a bad thing. In fact, I, my coach, people to do customer advisory groups, I say you have to have a curmudgeon in your group. And the reason is, nobody's going to tell you the truth until somebody speaks up and says there's a problem. And if you don't have a curmudgeon, everyone's gonna play nice. And you never really get any great information.
Yeah. So Josh, your company is SustainableBusiness.co and we're wrapping this curmudgeon into this. Okay, so sustainable business Co. You, you come in, and you help folks build a business that sustainable. And sometimes we got to talk about some of the hard things,
Josh Patrick 2:28
we often have to talk about some of the hard things. I mean, there's two general groups of people that hire consultants. The group is one group, which I really like working with, which is people who actually want to grow their business and make change and make it work. And then there's the other group that wants to have their ego stroked and they hire consultants to do that. I've had both types of customers over the years. And the customer that wants their ego stroked are not your choice. If you want to have a great business, personally and economically sustainable. I'm your guy.
Steve Brown 3:05
Yeah, so let's talk about that we, you know, you start a business, you get going, you're your own all the mistakes, you own all the good things, you get to a point and one day you start to maybe ask yourself, I think I need a little outside help. That's a hard, hard road to cross right there when you have to admit that you don't know everything.
Josh Patrick 3:28
It isn't it isn't. I mean, the truth is, if you look at World Class performers, whether they're actors or dancers, or musicians, or athletes, they all have coaches. Sometimes they're called teachers. But at the end of the day, they're all coaches. My job is not to tell somebody who already has a successful business, that they have to change everything they already know, everything basically have to do, it's really going around the corners and getting a 2% improvement here, a 2% improvement there. And when you start adding all those 2% improvements up so pretty soon, they're 1020 30%. That's a big deal. You know, I learned a long time ago, I can't come in and have you make a major change in what you're doing, because you're just not going to do it. And the truth is, everybody needs to have some good advice along the way. And none of us make it to where we are want to be by ourselves. We need help. Sometimes there's internal help, and sometimes it's external help and most often is both. Wow.
Steve Brown 4:38
So let's build on your authority a little bit. Tell us a little bit about yourself. You have a couple of companies, you actually know what you're talking about. So enlighten us.
Josh Patrick 4:50
The only reason I know what I'm talking about, I've made all the mistakes I help people not make. You know, back when I was in my early days, this is going back when I was 24 years old, in 1976. That's like, you know, another century ago.
Steve Brown 5:05
That's really
Josh Patrick 5:08
everything. Right? Right. And I was arguably the worst and most obnoxious young business owner who ever existed. And the reason is really simple. The worst thing that ever happened to somebody 24 years old, happened to me, I was really, really, really successful out of the box, I grew my business from $75,000 to 1.5 million in six months. Now, part of that was an acquisition of a bankrupt company. But still no, I went from having one part time employee to 25 employees in six months. And I thought I was God's gift to private business owners. And the truth was, I wasn't, I was just lucky. And we all are have a certain amount of good luck and a certain amount of bad luck in our lives. And those who are of us who make it past that we take advantage of the good luck, we manage the bad luck. And sometimes managing bad luck takes a couple of years. For me, it took four or five years. Because right after that great six months start and I had three years of pain, we made the worst acquisition I've ever made of all times, I ended up paying five times what the business was worth, it took me seven years to dig out of that hole. I was Attila the Hun his manager was never my fault. It was always someone else's fault. It's I would blame and justify my way through the world. I didn't know what the difference was between a cash flow statement and a profit and loss statement. That almost put me out of business because growing your business at fast cost a lot of money. And we were showing a very nice profit, but we had no cash. And after about two years of that everyone started calling me to say if you don't pay me tomorrow, we're going to cut you off. And on top of that I have a $200,000 investment that happened during that period, because I didn't know how to put good cash controls in place. Other than that, I was a perfect manager.
Steve Brown 7:11
So what what happened, what woke you up? What action did you take?
Josh Patrick 7:18
Well, running out of cash was one one thing that woke me up. I mean, there was nothing like, you know, after that happened, I had this mantra which I still have, which is happiness as positive cash flow. And that was a big wake up call. The other thing was I went to a new age seminar program called Money and You by a Marshall Thurber, and this was in 1983. And probably that seminar, major part of that seminar was understanding what personal responsibility was versus blaming and justifying. And I realized after that seminar that I was a justifying and blaming person. And we needed to move to personal responsibility. But here I made another huge mistake. We had said, Okay, we're going to have some core values in our company. And one of the core values I said was personal responsibility, but I was not exhibiting personal responsibility. So nobody in my company took me seriously. In fact, everybody in my company called me a great big liar, or a great big, fat liar. You might say, Oh, I wasn't fat, but I was a great big liar. And instead of saying, this is an aspirational value, which I learned from Patrick lencioni, about 10 years ago, I said, this is a core value. We can't say something's a core value when it's not a core value, because nobody will take you seriously no one believes anything else you say. So had I said was an aspirational value, and I need your help getting there. And I eventually did say that in a roundabout way. Nobody takes you seriously. But it took me six or seven years to make that move, where I want to actually really started acting personally responsible in our company, because they realized that they didn't, they weren't gonna be with us very long. So I started not only walking my talk, but also making sure that people did what they wanted to.
Steve Brown 9:21
So fast forward, and now you have two businesses, Sustainable and
Josh Patrick 9:29
Sustainable and Stage Two Planning Partners. Stage Two Planning Partners is a wealth management firm, where we help people going through financial transitions. My specialty, there is business owners who are selling their businesses. You know, on the Sustainable Business, My specialty is helping people get to a sale ready company, which means you have to first become economically personally sustainable. And then you can start working on the things that will make you attractive to others. Whether you want to transfer your business internally. externally, to your kids or sell to a third party, you're going to have to do things in your business to make it attractive to others.
Steve Brown 10:08
So you have, you're launching your second book, your first book, I am pulled up right here, Sustainable, a fable about creating a personally and economically sustainable business. It's a parable about the aardvarks. Yes, tell us little about it.
Josh Patrick 10:27
Do you know why they are? They are aardvarks? Why use aardvarks with their head stuck in the sand looking for answers all the time. And I don't want aardvarks I want people taking their head out of the sand. So we have to help the art of our Can we do that?
Steve Brown 10:44
So your first book is like getting your ducks in a row and just running a company successfully correct?
Josh Patrick 10:53
Yeah, cuz you're gonna I mean, if you if you create an economically and personally sustainable business, your business will be filling what we call the four buckets of profit. And you'll be having a good time, you will not get burned out. Too many business owners spend their life doing tactical stuff, because they don't feel they know how to delegate. They tried it, it doesn't work. They can't grow the business past 15 or 20 employees. And as a result, they're stuck doing those same old tactical things they never really liked, but they had to do to run the business. And after doing it for 20 or 30 years, you're just sick of it want to move on. Now, the most important thing you can do in that stage of your business is learn how not to be sick of your business, which is making the move from being a tactical owner, to a strategic owner. And we call these the roles that people play within their business. And there's four of them.
Steve Brown 11:47
Excellent. So then your second book, I'm gonna hold it up here for those that are watching on YouTube Sale Ready Company, The Sale Ready Company. It's a beautiful cover. And in this we catch up with our family after the first book, the owner, he's really kind of contemplating what's going to happen in the next stage, can he start to exit the business has he's got some folks that are in the story, his wife, she's got some preferences. He's got a jackwagon for sun, that's really annoying to everyone. It's got a couple of good employees,
Josh Patrick 12:29
by the way, by the way past annoying. The sun, the son is what we call a brilliant jerk. Somebody who is technically really, really good at what they do. And they drive the rest of the people around the absolutely 100% have bonkers to the point that some people are getting ready to quit.
Steve Brown 12:50
Yeah. And I've made that mistake I've hired. I've hired someone that wasn't really aligned with my company. But it was expensive in the way that I had good employees exit. I had setbacks, there was just a really, it was an expensive mistake. And I can start to see a little bit of this danger on the horizon here for your characters in this book.
Josh Patrick 13:19
Yeah, well, the truth is, anybody who's been in business for 10 years or more, has hired at least one brilliant jerk in their life. Because we get we we get just kind of sucked into the resume, in the technical skills we forget to look at the values that they bring to the party after value is I'm a Narcissus. They're not going to work very well, in my company. There are companies narcissists do really, really well in Oracle is a good example of that, as people come out of our Oracle, you know, in fact, Silicon Valley that's full of narcissistic behavior, and if that's what your behavior is, go someplace where you're going to be accepted. If it's not, then stay away from it.
Steve Brown 14:03
Totally. So in this book, I was shocked when I learned a while back at the high percentage of family owned businesses that are in existence. And in the problems that you're discussing in here, or rent or probably apply to most private businesses, am I wrong?
Josh Patrick 14:27
No, not at all. I mean, the truth is, we're talking again, business ready for sale, which means getting the owner ready to transition. And there's the economic side of that which we talked about in the book. And there's the personal side of that which we talked about in the book. So we've come up with what we call the two sides of a business. There's the personal side, and there's the economic side, the personal size, where satisfaction comes in. It will show your ego comes in is where your community you know, basis comes in. And then there's the exit Can you afford to live a great life? And eventually can you afford to leave your business and do you have the assets to move on, both of those need to be both are equally important, both really need to be paid attention to. If you don't pay attention to the personal side, you can get burned out, if you don't pay attention to the economic side, there's a good chance you won't make five years in your business. So both have to be vague. And it's not always 5050. When you start the business off the personal side is going to be way, way less than the economic side. As you get success, and you start going up those letters of ladders of economic viability, the economic viability is going to go down important is but the personal side is going to go up important importance. That generally happens when people get close to 50 years old. And they've been doing their business for about 20 years. Because the first 20 years, I find most people in business have no idea what I'm doing. There's no manual, they're not a franchise, they don't have a system, all those things have to be developed. And because business owners don't like coaches very much, or they don't think they want to get coaches, they feel like they have to do it themselves. And all that means is they get themselves in a whole lot of trouble. It takes them 20 years to figure it out.
Steve Brown 16:15
So how do I'm just wondering, so there this event that must happen with the business owner, where they finally All right, I'm open to a conversation with Josh, where generally what what's triggered that what's happened, help us relate.
Josh Patrick 16:35
Typically, it happens when they're burned out. You know, I used to I used to tell this joke, I was doing talks, you're still detoxing, like I used to open with this, hey, you're gonna walk in my office. And I'm going to ask you why you're here. And you're going to say I want to sell my business. And I'm gonna say when you go say yesterday. And when someone says that to me, or says something like that, to me, I know, we're not really going to sell the business, I know what we're going to really do is fix your relationship to the business first. And then we'll see if you want to sell it, in my experience has been over the years is that once we fix your relationship to the business, and we get you to be economically and personally sustainable, I'm going to come back to you and say, Okay, now we're ready to start looking at the sale ready side. And you're gonna look at me like, I'm nuts. Because you Me too much fun and you're making too much money. And you're gonna say, why would I ever want to sell this, I don't work very hard. And I'm making a ton of money. Never happened to me over and over and over. So I've gotten used to this happening. So I know that I'm really not getting your business ready to be sold, I'm getting your business sale ready with you. And I'm your thinking partner, you're not going to just do what I say, we're going to decide together, what we're going to work on and what we're not gonna work out because nobody has a perfect business. That's 100% sale ready, that wouldn't make it through due diligence without one or two things, we're going to have a serious conversation with a buyer about we don't have to fix it, we have to be able to figure out why it's not a problem.
Steve Brown 18:20
I never thought about having a dysfunctional relationship with my business.
Josh Patrick 18:28
There are way too many owners that do that they have dysfunctional relationships with their business with their employees or their spouse, with our kids. It all it all goes through and also depends on what generation you are. Now I'm starting to think about my third book. And my third book is going to be the generational issue, which is I don't want to get advice from anybody because I've been hearing from my own man for the last 15 years, and I'm sick of it. Or 40 years or 50 years or whatever the timeframe is years, you know, people who start businesses have to be pretty tough. starting a business from scratch is way harder, and taking over the business from your parents, or as a manager because you don't have to do the heavy lifting with no revenue, nothing coming in the door and creating something out of nothing. You just have to take that something and make it better, which is a lot easier than doing that but the people who created those first generation businesses, they generally are pretty tough both in their business and at home. And they tell their kids in no uncertain terms, what they need to do to fix things, whether it's their personal life or what they're doing in business, and they have a hard time separating their family life from the business life with a child and I do a lot of coaching with second generation is getting ready to take over a business and I can tell you is pretty much a 100% thing where the kids resent the parents and the parents resent the kids. We need to figure that fixed if we can do a successful transfer.
Steve Brown 20:11
That seems pretty ambitious, how do us step in and do the therapy and family business I could, I couldn't imagine a more a process more fraught with landmines then than that?
Josh Patrick 20:27
Well, there's a fair amount. Unfortunately, more than once, I've had to go to a parent and say, your child is not a good fitness company as best if they do something else. I in fact, I just went through that with going through the company right now. Where the two brothers literally don't talk. One of the brothers barely talks to the Father. And he's the one who really should take over the business. So what I'm doing with him as I did in the book, is we're starting setting him off with his own little piece of the business. And if he's good, he'll grow it. And if he's not, it'll, it'll fold and then the Father has to figure out what's next.
Steve Brown 21:11
Wow. So your books are our parables or stories? Why did you decide to write books about transitioning your business via parables?
Josh Patrick 21:27
The truth is, I did it because it amused me to start off with as one truth, the other Truth is, I find that especially blue collar, private business owners, number one really aren't readers. And the gain in the finish or how to book is almost impossible. But because the is a parable, which means is a story, it's easy to get sucked into the story of what's happening with his family. And as people are reading the story, they're gonna say, Oh, I recognize myself there. Boy, am I glad that's not me. Or a little bit of a mix of both. And it's certain points in the story. Every business owner is going to say, Oh, yeah, I know about that. How's this guy gonna get out of it? And they'll learn something about the getting out of it, that they can apply in their own business. And it's not threatening because we're not talking about their business. We're not telling them their failures. We're just saying, here's a story about this family. What can you learn from it? And people always take something learning away from a story. You know, there are people who hate the business parable genre. I mean, you know, I'm pretty good friends with one of the famous Internet people. And I asked him to write a blurb for your book. He says, it's a parable. I hate him. I'm not going to do it. That was my first book. My second book I wrote to him, I said, you still hate parables? He said, Yep. But on the other hand, there are people who are really successful writing parables. You look at the gold by, you know, gold, right? Or you look at anything Patrick lencioni has written, or Steve harbors, parables. I mean, these guys have written really good books that are really valuable, and have tremendous lessons in there. And it's easier to consume, because it's a story.
Steve Brown 23:28
Totally, I was admiring how you were able, as you're writing that, I could relate with the feelings of the receptionist, or the mom, you know, I could kind of imagine, you didn't have to write the details of their feelings, you kind of were able to fill in a lot of other details from your brain by understanding Oh, she's going to be real protective of the son.
Josh Patrick 23:55
Yeah, it's one of the good things about writing a book, or one of the things about writing a book, which I learned, and I got lucky the first time around, is having a good content editor is really important. And my editor would be keep hammering into me says, You only can be in the heads of two people, john, the patriarch, and Aaron, the consultant, everybody else has to reveal everything about themselves in dialogue. So when you do that, you're not confusing the reader. Now, if I let you get in the head of every single one of our characters wouldn't be long before you're trying to figure out who's on first.
Steve Brown 24:36
Totally. Yeah, we're having a great conversation. If you're watching on YouTube, or talking with Josh Patrick, his new book, The Sale Ready Company is out. It's what it takes to create a business someone would want to own. Hopefully, that would be you the business owner. So Josh, I've got some questions I want to ask Ask you along these lines. These are questions I hear often. And so I'm interested in what your answers. Are you ready? Sure. So you alluded to you, you talk to someone who says, I want to sell my company yesterday, but how long does it take to sell a company,
Josh Patrick 25:22
if you're lucky, and it's really fast, and you got a business is actually very, very sellable. It could be as low as, as little as six months, or as long as 10 years. I mean, it really depends on where you are in the road. And the other side of the factor is, you may not be able to sell your company at all, I mean, about 50% of the companies that go for sale, never sell. Wow. And those are companies that are sellable. If you go to biz by car biz, sell or biz, buy, sell calm, only about 5% of the businesses that are listed on that site ever. So
Steve Brown 25:58
That's pretty sobering.
Josh Patrick 26:01
Yeah, well, there's the reason you need to know how saleable your business is, if your business really isn't very saleable, there are other strategies that you can use to get yourself so you can leave your business when you want in the way you want. But yours is not gonna be through a sale. And in fact, even if it is through a sale, the business sale is not going to get you to financial independence, unless you're in the top one to 1/10 of a percent of all business owners. You know, let's say I sell my business for $2 million, nice amount of money. Not many businesses will sell for that much. But first of all, you lose 40% at the taxes and fees. So now I'm down to $1.2 million. And if I invest that, and I talked to a financial planner, they'll say, Oh, you can sell spend about 40 to $50,000 a year out that if my business is selling for $2 million, that means is making between three and $400,000 a year, meaning I'm probably living on about $150,000. So 50,000 is a long way from 150. So if you think you're just going to sell your business right off into the sunset, you're not.
Steve Brown 27:13
Ouch. How to sell your company to prospective employees, that's always a consideration.
Josh Patrick 27:20
That's a great a fact, I would say probably, then is the number one transfer method that private business owners actually use. One of my friends again, him john brown wrote the foreword for the book. He's also the founder of Business Enterprise Institute, and they train advisors, how to help people leave their business by doing exit plans. And john tells me the vast majority, the plans they do, are for internal transfers, not third party sales, not families taking over the business. But they are, in fact, the internal sale to managers is pretty darn similar to the transferred to your children because neither of them have any money. So we have to figure out how are we going to get this business transferred, in a way to these people in a way that they can afford to buy it, and I'm going to get enough Whitefield it's worth my time and effort.
Steve Brown 28:19
Wow. Well, so you mentioned about buying an existing small business? How, how would you approach that?
Josh Patrick 28:30
Well, you go out and you say, first of all, you want to find out what is it that you like to do? I mean, are you going to buy a franchise and start from scratch? Are you going to buy an existing business that is a franchise and go from there and use their systems? Are you going to buy a business as an existence right now, that has pretty good systems in place, and you plan to just go ahead with that, or you're gonna buy a business where you're gonna have to fix it, and make things you know, work and have systems when learn how to delegate and get recurring revenue, all the stuff you need to do to make a business work that's not very successful business not very successful, you're gonna have to buy for very little money. A business that's highly successful Are you going to figure out if you don't have a few $100,000 sitting around that you can put in, you're probably gonna have a challenge finding a business that's viable because the owner is not likely to want to take 90% of the sale on paper. And a bank is not going to loan you the money. But there are ways of doing that where I say I can come up with 20% or 25%. Maybe I can do a second mortgage on my house. There are people take money out of retirement plans, which I don't recommend for a variety reasons. But if you can come up with that, you know 20% in the way you could do it is up up with 10% down yourself which you own gets, the owner does 20% of financing but the subordinate themselves the bank, which means the bank is in first place, now you got 70%. And you get an SBA loan with a subordination. And now you got your money down. So you can actually buy the business, it's actually very doable, you just have to start thinking about, I'm going to have to personally guarantee number one, I'm going to be taking financial risks. And if this doesn't work out, it's going to cost me some real economic pain. So you wanted it, but it's much easier buying a business, even if you overpay for it a little bit, not a lot, and move on from there then trying to start a business from scratch. Because you have a business that already has cash flow of some sort.
Steve Brown 30:50
Excellent. So how would you buy a bankrupt business?
Josh Patrick 31:00
I probably wouldn't. What I would buy is what's called a zombie business. And a zombie business is a business that either private equity has not made successful, which is most of them. Or you might be able to find a division of a publicly traded company, where they've announced they're going to dump a division. And it could be a small division, it doesn't have to be when there's $100 million, might be two $3 million in sales. And they get to October, and they haven't found a buyer and it doesn't look like they're going to find a buyer. And then they'll start selling businesses for a bargain, because the market will penalize them if they haven't gotten rid of that business by the time the urine cops. Again, these are harder strategies do. I mean, you can buy a business out of bankruptcy, I guess, if you think or if you believe that there's something there to rebuild.
Steve Brown 31:59
So in your example, at the beginning, where you hit the home run immediately, what was the scenario there? You bought the business, you bought an existing business? What was the scenario? Why was it such a home run right away?
Josh Patrick 32:12
It was easy to fix. That was the thing. It was you know, even though the business was in bankruptcy, it wasn't in bankruptcy where they had to close their doors, they still had customers, there was still cash coming in. Their problem was a big theft problem, because they had no controls. So we put controls in place, and all sudden that fix the the leakage in the hole right there. And we had people who were doing, you know, 40% of the work they should have been doing. In the hours here we're spending, you know, they were paying their route drivers. by the hour, we made the move relatively quickly within the first two years only in the business, where we put everybody on commission first was base plus commission, though my full commission, a few years after that, we lost a few people who didn't work out who didn't want to work on commission. But we made a guarantee that nobody would make less money they were making the hourly. And in fact, most of them increase their pay by 50%. Because all of a sudden, instead of being in being unsuccessful, or on inefficient, they be started becoming relatively efficient. And over the years, we do things to make them more efficient. So they kept making more and more money. But you have to have the right people with the right headset in we had to lose a bunch of people on the way. Yeah.
Steve Brown 33:34
So you have that company was the owner out of steam worn out tired.
Josh Patrick 33:41
Yo Yo, he was definitely one of my favorite stories it was based he also was kind of a farmer. So when we took over the business, we went into his warehouse because ours was too small. I remember being there one morning and six in the morning, and I thought there was something staring me at the window. And I turned around it was one of Virgil's cows who was sitting there staring which is a bit disconcerting. So I had to pick up the phone and call Virgil, said Virgil, come over here and get your cow.
Steve Brown 34:15
This is in Vermont.
Josh Patrick 34:17
This is this was in upstate New York. Plattsburgh New York.
Steve Brown 34:21
Excellent. So if you're watching on YouTube, we're talking we're having a great conversation with Josh Patrick. He's the author of Sale Ready Company, the what it takes to create a business someone would want to own even if you have no intention of selling. And if you're listening on Vurbl, you guys be sure to subscribe. And either on YouTube or on verbal, it makes some big impact. Josh so what I always like to ask what's one question that you wish you can answer but all these all these guys that have these podcasts? never asked? ask you the good question, what is it that I've missed?
Josh Patrick 35:04
Well, that's, that's something that's tough for me to figure out. You actually asked some really, really good questions today, which is in the, it's really interesting. There are some podcast hosts. In fact, I would say most podcast hosts for business shows, really are not experts at running a business, they don't bring their own experience into the into the game, nor are they willing to be vulnerable about some of the false positives made over the years. In my experience, when you show vulnerability, you get a much, much better conversation going, then when you start saying, Oh, I'm the greatest host of all times. And I know all I'm so saying, I don't know, or asking what would happen if or, you know, looking for the good stories out there really makes a big difference, in my opinion. So it's hard for me to say, Gee, I wish someone asked me this. Because I'm moving in. I love talking about almost anything you can come up with, when it comes to what makes a private business. first successful and then sustainable. And finally sell ready.
Steve Brown 36:21
So I'm curious, like, what's the, what's the one area that most business owners don't want to talk about? They're going to avoid, avoid until you finally get them to, to admit?
Josh Patrick 36:34
Well, they're willing to talk about and not willing to do it. And that's that and that's delegation. The hardest skill, in my opinion, if you want a private business to learn, is how to be a good delegator. And most people give up. I mean, what they'll tell me, I'll say, okay, you need to learn how to delegate, or you need to start delegating. We they'll say to me, Well, I tried that didn't work. Now what happens, in frankly, the first 10 1520 times you had to delegate, you're going to do one or two things, you're going to abdicate, which just means you're going to give somebody something to do not giving any support and not doing any Checketts or you're going to be a helicopter delegator, which means you delegate something. And then 10 minutes later, you check in to see the progress in 10 minutes after that you check in to see the progress. And maybe you'll let somebody go for an hour before you check in. And you'll say to yourself, Well, if I have to check in so off because they're incompetent. And that's what the owners often thinking, My people are incompetent. I can't trust them to do this work. So I have to do it myself. Well, the truth is, we all make mistakes. And probably one of the things that business owners don't want to talk about is mistakes. Because mistakes are bad in their opinion. Well, nobody wants to make mistakes, I would rather do it right and do it wrong. So would you. The truth is, we make mistakes all the time. We continue to make mistakes in through our entire business career. So if we don't learn how to solve that issue, and we don't learn how to learn from mistakes, and make mistakes, learning opportunities, and ask the people who made mistakes, what did you learn, we're never going to have a great company, because everyone's gonna be hiding their mistakes. That was a problem I had, when I was first starting my business because I was playing to justify, if somebody made a mistake, they were gonna tell me about it, I was gonna yell at them. When I finally became a human being, or sort of a human being, when somebody made a mistake, instead of me yelling at them, I might want to take a deep breath. And I will say, okay, that's interesting. What do we learn? And often, they would say to me, I don't know. And then I, after hearing that a bunch of times, listen, I'm going to try something next time someone says that to me, which happened to be that very day. And I said, Okay, let's pretend you know what you learned. And I will make them pretend. And that was what they actually learned. I said, Well, that sounds like a pretty good lesson. What do you think we can do to make sure it doesn't happen again? And then I was starting to learn how to systematize a business. If you don't systematize your business, you're going to have the same mistake made over and over and over again, because you haven't given systems that support your people for doing it right.
Steve Brown 39:45
Excellent.
Josh, I'm really enjoying this conversation. Been a great guest. We've been talking with Josh Patrick. He's the author of the sale ready company. The what it takes to create a business Someone would want to Oh, even if you have no intention of selling, Josh writes a good book. Josh, When did you become When did you start to wear the title of curmudgeon?
Josh Patrick 40:16
Officially or unofficially,
Steve Brown 40:18
yeah. Well, I just was thinking about you when you were young, and you're telling me that story. I was wondering, when did you start to dislike I'm gonna, I'm gonna own that. When did that happen?
Josh Patrick 40:29
Oh, probably was about 13 or 14. I didn't, you know, consciously realize that wasn't what I was doing. It was just sort of I lived in the world. Yeah. I've always been one of those people who is a I've been accused of being a contrarian, a lot. where someone will say something in it doesn't make any sense to me. I'll say, I don't get it. I mean, what do you mean, is this true? Here's what I, here's what I know. And here's my evidence behind that. I remember I almost didn't graduate from my high school because it was during the Vietnam era. And I organized the teaching in my high school. And the administration brought in all these pro war people to talk and I brought in all these anti war people. And the aren't anti war people I brought in destroyed the pro war people. We just destroyed them. And did that sort of thing for basically for my whole life, I was in the band and one of the other parents of the members thought they would be a better manager than me. So they tossed me out and forgot to tell me, and then they had to come back because it couldn't get any gigs. And I wasn't when we got in the work. So those sort of activities have been with me for a long time. It's not something new. But probably when I was around 35-36. I said, you know, this is how we live in the world. I'm going to own it. So I started building myself as a curmudgeon Keller friendly curmudgeon, but still a curmudgeon. Yeah.
Steve Brown 42:04
That's obvious, Josh. So Josh, if someone is listening, they want to reach out to you have a conversation, what's the best way?
Josh Patrick 42:13
Just email me jpatrick@stage2planning.com. That's the number two. That's easy way to find me just go to our go to one of our websites and both websites does have a conversation was click on it and set the time for us to talk is free. We have to make conversations we do with people all the time that are free. And I always guarantee you're going to walk away with at least one piece of take home value that you can implement your business in your business when we get off the phone.
Steve Brown 42:44
Excellent. All right. That's Josh Patrick, his new book, go out and get it. It's Sale Ready, Company. Beautiful, cover what it takes to create a business someone would want to own even if you have no intention of selling it. It's on Amazon. It's on Kindle, for sure. I have it right there. And hopefully soon on. Audible.
Josh Patrick 43:07
Will be on probably no. September, October. The actual launch day the paperback is July 20. You can also go next week. Today is July 15, or June 15. And we will have our book website up very shortly. And that's www.salereadycompany.com really zoom, remember? Yeah. And if you buy the book there, we have a bunch of bonuses for you that you probably find relatively valuable.
Steve Brown 43:40
All right. Thanks, Josh Patrick, for being a great guest on the ROI online podcast.
Josh Patrick 43:46
Well, thanks for having me, Steve. I'm glad you brought me back as a repeat offender,
Steve Brown 43:51
repeat offender. I'm in that list too. That's a wrap
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
