If you truly want to buy margin in your life, if you truly want to buy margin in your finances and your time in your things you do outside of work, this is the only way to do it. You have to invest in putting in systems and processes so that you can scale the business so that you’re not critical to anything in that business.

Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. We’ll talk key learnings, cheat codes, hacks and principles that have served us on our journey in the hopes that they save you as well. I’m your host, Sam Donaghey. And today I’m joined by John BURNETT Fosler Motion’s founder and CEO.

Hey, John. Hey, Sam. How are you? I’m great. Thank you so much, John. Hey, thanks so much for being here today. So, John, today we’ll be talking about a topic that I know is really near and dear to your heart, building a business that you want to keep. It’s a topic that comes up often in your conversations with our team here at far slow motion.

And it’s really a driving force behind what we do as a company. You’re exactly right. And it’s the reason I started fast slow motion. It was something I learned about 10 to 12 years into my career that you could actually build a business that you love. A lot of times it’s driven. People are out there just wanting to be successful and people are trying to create businesses to make money or make a difference.

And oftentimes they get distracted on what really matters and why they set out to do what they did from the beginning. I believe you can create a business that makes a lot of money, makes a big impact, but also is what you’re called to do, what you love to do. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

You’ve got a heart for people. You’ve got a heart for small and medium sized businesses and helping people create those businesses that they love. How many times have you been in business where you didn’t like what you were doing? Early in my career, I got the great opportunity to work with a lot of smaller businesses. I was early on either part of the original founding team or early on one of the first employees, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

And a lot of times in those businesses we were focused on building great businesses and achieving our mission and our objective. And I was all in on doing that and not necessarily aligned to the market we were serving or anything like that. So I’ve been a part of the few where I love the people, I love the experience I got.

I loved all of those things, but I wasn’t necessarily passionate about the customers that we were serving or the market that we were serving. And I think early on in your career, you kind of got to do that. You got to get out there and experience some things and and figure out what you like and what you don’t like.

And what I really learned through that whole process is I love building businesses and I love helping people build their business the right way. I also learned that if you can’t build a business that you love is probably not worth the journey. Because if you’re just chasing it to get money or you’re chasing it for some altruistic reason, that’s great and there’s nothing wrong with those things.

But you will get burned out. You will want to quit. You will not want to push through the hard days and grind through the days that are difficult because you’re not passionate about it. You don’t have the purpose behind you to keep you going. How many times do we see that on a daily basis at far slow motion where we come in and we work with a client and we see them, we see their struggle and maybe we don’t see that passion.

I’m sure that it happens quite often. And how many times would you say we turn that around because we’ve worked with almost 900 businesses so far? Yeah, I think anybody that’s built a business before has fallen into this trap, and I think the more experience you get, the older you get, the more you realize that the journey is not worth it.

If you’re not doing something that you love to do with people, that you love to do it with serving customers that you want to make a difference with, and those customers you had them for validated your market value by voting with their dollars and paying you money. So I see more than anything. It’s a very common theme, but I see the most important thing is just being intentional and staying focused to who you are.

And what you want to become. We’re all going to end up somewhere. Very few of us end up there on purpose. And so that’s a lot of the things we try to mentor our clients around is like, let’s let’s focus on where you want to go and that’s implement processes and systems. That’s going to get you there and make sure you stay true to that.

And the reality of it is you need to be saying no a lot more than you say yes. And I think as entrepreneurs and business owners often get caught up in the shiny objects and the new things and the distractions of, you know, a big client that may be a bad client, but even though they’re going to bring a lot of revenue solving short term pain issues in lieu of creating long term pain issues, that’s a common thing that we see as well.

So I say more than anything, you got to stay really focused and disciplined so you can say yes to the right things and no to the wrong things. Jim Collins likes to think of it from the aspect of you need to shoot bullets before you shoot cannons. You got to try some stuff, you got to get out there, you got to see what works, what doesn’t work, and you have to stay true to who you are.

So you don’t want to go all in shooting cannons. You got to shoot the bullets first, figure out what you’re going to hit, how it’s going to work, and then you can then transition to making bigger batts and going all in on what’s working. So those iterative steps along the way that stay true to who you are, I think is really critical to success and some of the common pitfalls that we often see with our clients.

And I know that I’ve made especially and building businesses. So we’ve talked about some of the common mistakes people make for a business to grow the right way. What are the sorts of things that business owners need to be doing to make sure that they’re building a business that they’ll actually love and want to keep being very focused on creating goals and objectives, be very focused on their.

So like every year we come up with two or three strategic objectives that we’re going to work on and focus on, and we’re not going to focus on anything else. And that allows us to really get better at those core things, which is going to raise the water level, raise the foundation of excellence that we have in our business that we can then build upon the next year.

It’s okay if we don’t succeed at those. What we want to do is learn from those to understand what’s working and what’s not working. So I think focusing there and kind of taking the macro problem and bowling it down to two or three micro things that you can then focus on and then stay focused on that once again, with the objective of making sure you learn something and you improve upon it, you got to know who you are, you’ve got to define your mission, you’ve got to define your values, and you’ve got to align everything up to that.

Otherwise you will end up building a business you don’t like or building, becoming something you don’t like, and then you become trapped in your business and you can’t get out of it because you have real customers and real people working for you. Your only options to get out or to try to sell it or transition somebody else, and that’s no fun for anybody.

There’s right processes and systems that align up to those strategic objectives is what we really focus on. To do it the right way and stay consistent in the way we execute. How many businesses do you currently see out there when you first begin to work with them who don’t have these processes in place? Is it a surprise how many businesses are currently working on bad processes?

So when you start a business you do started on heroes. You’ve got to you’ve got to have great people and figure it out and you grind and everybody wears all the different hats and everything. But as you get to the next level, you got to professionalize that and stay disciplined. And we believe in a top down and a bottom up approach so that a lot of time US leaders are the main problem.

We’re not using the systems ourselves. We’re not encouraging our team to use it. We’re not pulling reports out of the system, we’re not using the data in the system, which is telling the team that that stuff isn’t valuable. And then on the bottom end, the people doing the day to day work, we need to make that those systems easy to use, those processes easy to follow the right hand.

These know what the left hand’s doing. Everything needs to be as consistent as possible to keep that data clean and accurate so that we can make wise decisions. When you make that transition, it’s painful because your culture was built a certain way and now you’re moving to more a professionalized, discipline based culture. But if you don’t do that, you will hit a limit or a ceiling as to where you’re going and you will start to lose a lot of the joy because your problems only exacerbate and get worse as scale and growth exacerbates those challenges and makes them worse.

And I think that’s why a lot of people get burned out. I think that’s why a lot of people get frustrated. I think that’s why a lot of people, you know, start plateauing, even declining in their growth because they didn’t make that transition to a more professionalized business model using good systems and tech platforms like what we implement at Facile Motion.

How did you learn to improve your own internal processes to get fast slow motion where it is today then? John First and foremost, it starts with a mentality shift early on when you’re starting and growing a business, it’s just you or a couple of people. Once you start understanding what’s working, you have to start making that a process.

It’s going to take you twice, three times, four times as long to do whatever you’re doing, but you need to document that and you need to codify that and put that in a system so that you can then track it. So which enables you to bring on team members that you can then train according to that process and then you can measure how they’re performing based on that process.

And then that’s how you start building up good data and you start building up consistency and you just iterate on that going forward. Now you don’t you don’t want to change process all the time. You want to analyze the data. And when things are not working, you tweak it. And when you make mistakes, you tweak it and those kinds of things so that you don’t make those same mistakes again and you just keep building upon it.

So it’s not something you build overnight. You don’t over engineer it. Perfection is not your friend. You want to get as close to right as possible. But I see a lot of it is that core discipline and those original employees and really the leaders, the organization not taking the time to focus on building the right process and then making sure it’s in the system.

And then they have to follow that process themselves, like nobody’s too good to not follow the process. Nobody’s too high in the organization to not follow the process. Everybody follows the process and everybody is driven to, you know, if they’re not following the process, driven back to, okay, here’s the process. So it’s like if somebody asked me a question or comes to me with something, the first thing I’m going to do is go look in our system and see where it is, what’s going on, so I can educate myself on what’s going on.

If I’m seeing things not in there, I’m going to drive them. Okay. Before we meet, here’s the process is documented. You need to go do it. What I’m doing is reinforcing the importance of the process and reinforcing the importance of if you’re going to scale this thing. Yeah, we’ve got all do the same things the right way, because at some point I’m not going to be there doing that job anymore.

Somebody else is or a team of people are and we’ve got to have it in a system so that we follow things and do things consistently. Is there a repeatable process for developing good processes? Once again, it’s more of a mindset around. The goal here is to work on the business and making it better as you’re executing within your business.

A lot of times we just get focused on selling or doing or whatever we’re doing and not taking a step back and saying, okay, what should we be doing? How do we scale this? Is this even a good idea? And kind of getting back to the theme of this podcast, of building a business that you love and enjoy, always have to take a step back and make sure you stay aligned with where you want to go.

And so these processes should always be aligned there. But a lot of times we get so busy that we don’t focus on those things. And my response to that is you’re never going to get less busy unless you take the time to step back and put those systems in place and build those things with intentionality that aligned to where you want to go.

And that’s how you’ll end up there and you’ll end up there on purpose and not by accident. So none of this is easy and that’s why a lot of people don’t do it is the reality of the situation. But if you truly want to buy margin in your life, if you truly want to buy margin in your finances and your time in your things you do outside of work, this is the only way to do it.

You have to invest in putting in systems and processes so that you can scale the business so that you’re not critical to anything in that business. And do these methods for building good processes work in any business or any particular industry? I like to say businesses are more similar than different. We work across all industries and work with a lot of different clients and we see a lot of commonalities and the core problems that they have.

The reality is if you get the fundamentals right, you can be successful in any business, in any market. And so many clients, you know, they think, Oh, our industry is way different and we have this, that and the other. That’s true. But there’s a lot of commonalities that if you do right and do well, that buys you the margin to then focus on those unique messes and solve those unique problems.

They’re so industry knowledge is important. I mean, we’re very knowledgeable in a lot of different industries and we, you know, to be true business consultants, we have to focus on those things. But if people will just focus on the fundamentals, it will buy them margin to be able to focus on those uniqueness and those differences there. And so we see that a lot.

So a lot of times we’re coming in with a client. The root cause of it is some of these core problems that happen across all businesses. And so we get those fixed and then people are now breathing and enjoying the journey and now they’re like, Oh cool, we can now focus on this or do this differently. And that’s where true differentiators start happening.

And they create a competitive advantage for themselves because they’re highly efficient. They’re able to not worry about those fundamental things anymore and they can focus on being different and adding even more value in their competitors can at a lower price point. And that really helps the return on investment here at Fosler Motion. What business process experts we help our clients professionalize their businesses with the strength of CRM platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot.

John What role does technology need to play in building good processes and ultimately in building a business that you want to keep? The reality is tech is important. It’s not the most important thing. I think getting your business processes right, following those consistently as we’ve talked about, is way more important than the tech platform. However, you need a really solid tech platform to make that scale.

Like you could have great business processes in Excel or on a Post-it note or something like that. It will not scale. So the great thing about today’s environment is we have a lot of really good tech platforms like Salesforce and House Fire that you mentioned that do scale. You’ll never outgrow it and they’re highly flexible so you can customize them to match your business.

A lot of times we hear customers like, Well, there’s this special CRM for my business in my industry. Well, the problem with that is, number one, you’re going to want to do some things a little bit differently than your competitors and the industry does, and you really can’t customize those systems. Number two is there’s more than likely there’s companies are either going to sell or go out of business.

You’re going to be left holding all this data and not having access to it or working with somebody you don’t want. Plus, it won’t take on other aspects of your business that you would like to put it all in one place and then you have to integrate. So we like these flexible CRM platforms where it’s much more than a CRM Salesforce and HubSpot will handle service account management, HR.

Some parts of accounting payments, things like that. So you can do a lot more with it. And unless you’re in the tech business, you don’t want to have a tech team or have to worry about complicated software implementations and stuff like that because you’re not an expert in any of that stuff and you’re not going to know too, how to hire people, how to retain people.

They’re super expensive and you want to focus all your energy and time on what you do to serve your customers and add value and makes you special. So these tech platforms are simply enablers. They’re tools that allow you to scale and grow your business the right way without you having to sacrifice your flexibility and not getting trapped into like one of these point solutions where you’re just subject to the vendor and what they want to do and how they want to do it.

So right now, the economic landscape is challenging in some ways. Over the last ten years of our economy. In the US, you’ve weathered a variety of economic shifts, including the pandemic. What’s the key to finding enjoyment in your company? No matter what the economic environment, focus on what you can control and staying focused on who you want to become as a company.

You shouldn’t let circumstances dictate those decisions. You need to pre decide who you want to be and stay true to that, and that gives you the freedom to say no. So a lot of these externalities, like the economy, the pandemic, interest rates, all that kind of stuff, I don’t know how to control in those things. And my job is to build a business that’ll work regardless of any of those circumstances.

Now, obviously there will be seasons where things do better and seasons where things do worse based on those externalities, but also fully believes if you focus on what you can control and you focus on getting better every day and you focus on improving your own business, it will create opportunities for you in the future to take advantage of.

No matter that the economic situation. And so the companies that are built the right way with good systems and processes and can make wise decisions based on data, not feelings, we’ll be able to take advantage of those opportunities, which means I can acquire more companies, they can compete better in the marketplace. There will be less competition in their space and so it’s a win win when you focus that.

So it’s very much that mentality of, Hey, I’m gonna keep my head down and do the right thing, plant the right seeds so that we produce the right fruit and right season. And that’s really what we advise our clients on. And then that’s what we do here at Fossil Motion. John, as always, it’s great to talk with you.

Do you have any parting words of wisdom for business owners who maybe are just starting out or who want to fall back in love with their businesses again? Well, it kind of pains me to use this quote, but it’s from Nick Saban. So we’re down here in the South. I am at least our teams all over. But he’s the head coach of Alabama.

I’m an Auburn fan, but I really admire the way he leads. And he has a quote that says, there’s two pains in life. There’s the pain of discipline and there’s the pain of disappointment. If you can handle the pain of discipline, then you’ll never have to deal with the pain of disappointment. And I think a lot of that what we talked about today kind of aligns with that.

Oh, if we just focus on those little things and we focus focus on being intentional about where we’re going to want to go, we’ll all end up there and it’ll be a lot less painful. But if you ignore those things, it’s going to be a painful journey and you’ll end up busy building a business that you hate instead of building a business that you love.

John, thank you so much for being here today with me. That’s a wrap for today’s episode. I hope everybody listening thoroughly. Enjoyed it. Please remember to go and subscribe to the podcast on any of your favorite platforms or you can find archived episodes are fast slow motion. Com slash podcast.