Waking Up

This is the first episode in season 2 and I will be focusing on Transitions.
Transitions such as retirement, loss of a passion for work, getting a job or losing a job you loved. Whatever your transition is, this season of Pants Around Ankles Prevention Podcast is aimed at helping you transition successfully.
And I think the first thing you have to understand to navigate any transition is what the right mindset looks like.
I’ll share with you what that looks like in this podcast episode.

Yes, plans are worthless. So that's not the whole quote. The full quote by Dwight Eisenhower is, plans are worthless, but planning is everything. Now, I don’t think he’s suggesting that we don't plan. However, one of the ways that I see people ending up with their pants around their ankles when it comes to planning is when they plan and they plan and they plan… That's a problem.

If you're stuck in business and most of the people that I know that are viewing these podcasts or listening to them are business people, they tend to read business books. I get the fact that there can be merit that comes to you by reading business books if you're working on business problems but we've established that you've been doing that and you already have your pants around your ankles. So let me tell you why you're reading the wrong stuff!

Recently, I participated as a presenter at an event that was in my area of expertise and it was interesting to me because there were many people at this event that were already paying ME to help them get better. So why were they there? Here’s why!

When you're standing there with your pants around your ankles and you're thinking to yourself, “how did I get here?” The answer is you weren't paying attention. So how do you pay attention? How do you find problems when they're big enough to see, but small enough to easily solve? Fair enough questions. Today, I want to introduce you to a very, very effective tool that will help you PAY ATTENTION.

In the industry in which I spent most of my life the last 20 years, commercial roofing, many of the contractors are starting to discover that it's no longer enough to take a price they've put together and put it into an email and ship it off to somebody and expect to get the work. They're discovering that they actually need to sell it. This is something that makes most of these contractors very uncomfortable and many of them aren't very good at it! Here's an idea to help.

Most of my work has traditionally been done with commercial roofing contractors. I was recently asked a question from a commercial roofing contractor in regard to his service department. And the question that came in was this. Who's the ideal person to run our service department? Find out my answer in this episode.

In this episode of pants around ankles prevention, we've got a different approach because we had a question come in from someone who already has their pants around their ankles! The questions is: "It seems like we either have too much selling going on and can't get it all done or we have excess operational capacity and need more sales. How do you balance this?"

I'm pretty sure that you can relate to the experience that I've had when I have been driving a car down the road and I take my foot off the gas because when I take my foot off the gas, my experience has been that the car starts to slow down. So there's this expression that many of you have heard that if you're not growing, you're dying. I'm 70 years old, my body doesn't work the way it used to, so I'll go out and ride my bicycle. And what I've discovered, it takes a lot longer for me to build fitness than it used to. And if I take a week off because I have to travel someplace the other thing I discover is I lose that fitness a lot faster. This principle is applicable not only to your personal physical fitness, but also to how your brain works and how your business runs.

If you're like me, there have probably been times in your life, maybe in your business life, no, not maybe in your business life and in your personal life where you've wanted to make some changes. You've got some goals that you wanted to set. You've got some things that you were striving for, and so you, you really didn't know how to get there, which is probably a sign that's a worthwhile endeavor. And, and so you, you read about it and maybe you hire a consultant or you watch some videos online, again, read books or articles, and then you get the ideas about how to go about it and you go apply these ideas. Then it doesn't work ever happen. And, you know, often this takes some time. You know, in my first business endeavor as a a commercial roofing contractor, I did it for 14 years or 12 years or whatever before I decided it didn't work.