All right, good morning, everybody, and welcome to this follow-up webinar to our virtual 2020 Leadership Conference. I'd like to welcome you all and welcome Sean Rhodes back to AED. Real quick, Sean, before I turn it over to you, I just want to let the attendees that are live with us know that they can submit questions via the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. And for anybody that might want to watch this later, we will be recording the session so that you can watch it on demand at your convenience. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Sean. Thank you very much, Liz. I appreciate you. And for anybody on here, again, just like Liz said, this is more of a conversation. So we're running it in a slightly different format. And if we have the right amount of people on here, we may end up just promoting everybody up so we can see each other and chat. But by all means, if you have a question along the way, this is the session to enter them in on. That's why we're here. We're here to have a conversation. So if you come across anything and you think, you know, Sean, I want to know how that works at my distributorship, this is the time. So let us know. So this is around creating a pivot point. But more specifically, what you all told me during the keynote that you wanted to achieve more in. And so as we dive in today, it's really about, hey, how do we move this forward in 2020? It's about how do we make it happen for ourselves in 2021 and sales and training in HR and performance and communication, all the things. So from the keynote that we performed for everybody, this was the slide where I asked, hey, if we could achieve more in one area, what would it be? And the three largest areas that were repeated across channels was training, communication and employee development. So that's where we're going to put our focus today, really around specifically training. But how do we communicate that to our employees, no matter if they're in sales, if they're in our maintenance departments, if they're in our rental areas, wherever they are inside our distributorships. So that's where we're going to make sure we touch on building a training program, holding people accountable to using it, and then making sure that we continuously improve that training so that it's active, it's alive. And as the economy changes, as our distributorship models might change in the future, we take on a new line of products. How do we make sure that training adapts to that so that it's not something that worked five years ago, but is not going to serve us today? So training, communication and employee development is where we're going to spend a good portion of our time. So let's talk about creating a pivot point in training. Now from the keynote, you might remember I shared with you a story where a Fortune 100 company gave us a call and said, Sean, we're delivering training like gangbusters over here, but we're not sure if it's having an impact. And the question we encourage them to ask, the question I encourage every distributorship to ask is, if we deliver this training, how will our customers know? And so as we begin to look at training, whether again, talking about sales, talking about maintenance, talking about our front desk operations, the first people that our customers might find, or even our marketing departments, because a lot of us are investing in social media these days now that we can't have so many of those face-to-face communications. First thing we're going to look at in training is how do we plan this thing? Because if all we're doing is saying, hey, it would be a good idea to teach our people this, but there's no greater strategy behind it and it doesn't fit into where we're trying to move our distributorships in 2020, it has a lot less likely chance of being adapted and adopted by our employees. So critical, as always, is that we make sure as we're planning our training, we're looking at it from the perspective of how will our customers know? And how does this training factor in to the larger goal that we have for our distributorship? Because if your training doesn't accomplish the customer-facing objective and the strategic objective, you might be pulling on opposite ends of the rope. And I'm sure we all have stories where it's like, hey, we were trained to do this, but yet our executive team wanted us to go in that direction. Well, that doesn't work out, obviously. So let's make sure that we're aligned both with our customer-facing objectives, how will our customers know once we delivered this training, and how does this training fit in? Second thing we're going to go over today is how do we actually perform in that training session in a way that holds our people accountable to use the training? And for a lot of us today, we're in the executive suite. We're not going to be the people that are going to be really fractaling this training out, but we're responsible for developing the training, at least at the strategic level, making sure our folks use it. How do we do that in a way where if we commit to Sally and Bob and Jim and John that, hey, we need to develop these areas of training across sales, marketing, and maintenance, how do we make sure that the training is developed? How do we make sure it's being executed? We're really going to help you out with that today, because I'm going to give you some models, a good spreadsheet idea to use, where you're going to be able to make sure your people actually perform the training and track results so we can measure, hey, how will our customers know? What impact is this having on our customers? And finally, we're going to be talking about processing our training. Now, you may think this is a little bit of overkill, because most organizations don't take the time to do this, but if we don't take a look at our training and make sure that it is actually having an impact on our customers, on our margins, on our bottom lines, the training definitely could use improvement, but also it has less likely to be adopted by our employees, make sure that they actually use it and they want to attend those training sessions and be active and approaching and listening to what they're being taught. So we're going to talk about this whole cycle. Now, in operational terms, this is the same cycle that companies like Honda, Toyota are using to continuously improve in their manufacturing operations. They take a lot of time to plan. Performance is actually probably the least amount of time they spend time on, and you know, it's there, but it's the least amount of time. Really a lot of emphasis is given on processing. How could we continuously improve this? How could we make it even better? And you remember from the keynote, we were sharing the story of the silent drill team where even if a great performance was given, they still took the time to ask, how could we make it better? And I encourage everybody to be able to do that with your training as well. So as we dive in today, the three elements of a great training objective. So this is where we're going to begin to fit this in to how will our customers know? So as you begin to develop training and as you begin to develop any kind of communication plan, any kind of employee satisfaction plan, whatever that might look like inside your distributorships, three elements that we need to make sure we include. First is that hack has to be precise. If we're not targeting a specific goal, a specific change in how our customers perceive us, a specific marketing objective, a specific return, a specific lead intake, specific conversion ratios, specific, specific, specific. I'm going to tangle my words there, but it has to be precise. And when we get into precision, we're talking about deadlines by October 31st, 2020, not by the end of Q3, which a lot of salespeople kind of get in the habit of doing, you know, we need to meet this goal by the end of Q3. A lot of salespeople will wait until day 29 of the last month of Q3 to really begin pounding that objective. Not best results, obviously. So when we talk about training objectives, we talk about any kind of objective. Precision is really the first thing we have to focus on. When do we need this thing accomplished by? When do we need to see results of that training by? Second thing we're going to be going over today, how do we ensure that we build profitability into this? Because the customer is one piece of the puzzle, but obviously we're only really concerned with how the customer perceives this because we want more business from that customer. We want them to refer us to their peers. We want to make sure that whatever training we are delivering is profitable to our distributorships. And we need to be able to measure that as well. That has to be equally as precise as the date that the training is delivered on and when we begin to see results from that training. Third element of a great training objective has to be on purpose. Now you could probably tell from the way that I present, the way that I run my business, you know, like touchy feely employee engagements, probably not top line in my priorities, but I know enough about people to know that if we don't build purposefulness into our training, if it doesn't have some greater objective to it, it's got a less likely chance of being adopted. And obviously adoption, retention, and use is the biggest thing we're focused on with any training objective, no matter what department of our distributorships it's being applied into. So we need to make sure that as we roll out these training programs, new training programs, new training objectives, or even just new objectives in general, we need to do this distributorship wide, whatever that might be, that we include a purpose piece of this. And that way it really engages people emotionally. Robert Cialdini in his book, Influence, mentions the law of reciprocity. Well, that really digs into emotions. If we are saying, Hey, I'm happy to give you this, happy to add value, that makes people more likely to want to give back and add value to us, whether they're our customers or whether they're our employees. Let's talk about objectives here. How do we really formulate a solid training objective? And let's, let's bounce it up to the strategic level of our distributorships at first. Okay. And then we can, of course, if anybody has any questions, I know we've got some new joins to the program today. This is the time to throw them in. This is the time to ask questions. This is the time to engage. I'm happy to have conversations with y'all one-on-one, but this is the format that AEB has really done a great job of providing so we can have a conversation. So feel free to throw a question in. We'll hit pause on what I'm talking about and we'll dig into your specifics. Happy to do it. So let's talk about training objectives. What does it look like? Well, precision was the first element, right? By December 1st, 2020. Like most of the leadership in any organization, I'm happy if a goal was achieved early, but it cannot be achieved later than this because what, why? Well, January 1st, 2021, we've got other objectives that are rolling out that are predicated on this thing being accomplished by December 31st. So if we really get into project management, project mapping, and strategic planning, we quickly discover we have objectives that are stacked on multiple timelines. Service has to reach this number so that our maintenance people can achieve that level of service so that our new, our technical college hires can begin this program. There's all kinds of project management in a really thick organization that is stacked on top of one another. That's why deadlines are so important. And I'm going to show you toward the end of our talk today, how to begin tracking those deadlines as a leader so that you can look across departments, across your distributorship and know who is the one person I need to reach out to, to make sure that that thing is on track. So if it, you know, December 20th is rolling around, we're all about to disappear for Christmas break, assuming we're all back in the office, of course. I know I need to reach out to Jane. I know I need to reach out to John because that thing needs to be done by December 31st and I haven't gotten a word that it's completed. As a leader, this is imperative for all of us because we don't have time to track down three dozen people inside our distributorships to get an update on one objective. We need to be able to go to one person to do that and we're going to talk about what that looks like. But around the area of precision, let's make sure that all of our training goals, all of our strategic objectives have dates tied to them. And if you really want to get precise about this, you could even put timelines on it. Like if you're going to end an objective on a Friday, if that's the deadline, try to have a timeline on that. Like, hey, by 4 p.m. local time that Friday, because after that you can get it done at six, but now it's pushed into the weekend because nobody's checking email, right? So let's make sure that precision is really tied into every training objective we have. Talk about profitability, because especially with salespeople, but really across your distributorship, even the folks in your maintenance bay understand the more profitable your distributorship is, the more successful they can be. Because if nothing else, the better equipment you can provide to them, the more compensation and benefits they can have, the more incentives they have to get equipment repaired and out back to the customer early. Let's deal with a basic objective to track. And I know that, hey, for 30% margin increase, now I might have your attention because that's what we're going to walk through how to do today. And everybody's like, Sean, 30%? You have my attention, sir. All right. I'm glad about that. This is just an example. Maybe your margin increase might be 2%, but whatever it is, tie it back to profitability. And if you are not the CEO of your distributorship, not the principal, but you're trying to convince your executive suite to get on board with an initiative that you want to start, tie it back to profitability if you want to get their attention. How do you do that with a training program? Ask how will the customer know? If the customer knows that we can improve their turnaround time on equipment maintenance and repair by 20%, what does that look like over the course of a year of doing business with them? An extra five days of their equipment being on site, what does that allow them to do? How much can we benefit from that? Begin to dig into the metrics of any training program you have in mind to create, tie it back to profitability. Really great way to get executive buy-in on something they might look at and say, do we really have the time or the need? You can increase my margin by 30%. You have a blank check in my company to go do what you need to do because that's a big increase. So tie it back to profitability. And again, you can achieve that by asking how will the customer know when this training is delivered, when this program is rolled out, whether that's a marketing objective or initiative, whether it's training program, whether it's an HR effort to hire new people, get them in from the technical college, whatever it might be, tie it back to profitability. And finally, purpose. This is really where you can begin to achieve success because it engages people at an emotional level. And you know better than anybody how this affects your individual customer in your region because each of us are dealing with different types of equipment sales, different types of customers. Some of them have contracts with transportation and road repair. Some of us have contracts with utility providers. I mean, there's all kinds of different business models inside of AED and our individual distributorships as far as who our customers serve. So if we need to be able to tie this back to purpose, we're trying to improve equipment sales and deliver more value to our customers through this training objective, through this rollout that we're doing, whatever that might look like. A new marketing push, a new training program, trying to get people 20% more efficient in our maintenance department so they can get equipment back out to our customers, whatever that might look like. So the total objective, if you were going to present this at a training program, would be, hey, everybody, the purpose of this training, by December 1st or December 31st, 2020, we're trying to increase margin by 30% here at our distributorship so that we can improve equipment sales and deliver more value to our customers. Now, the deliver more value part of that phrase could really be tailored into your customers so that we can get our equipment onsite 20 extra days for our customers. So they have 20 more days of use of their equipment. Because of the rental repair program we're putting in place, because of the leasing program we have rolling out now, whatever that might look like that's tied into what you're doing strategically with your distributorship. Being able to lay out a training platform like that, that lets everybody know when this needs to be accomplished by, why we're doing it, both from a profitability level to distributorship and from a customer satisfaction level. You can do those things inside of a training objective. Now you have people's attention, they understand when it needs to be done by, they understand why it's important to the distributorship and why it's important to the customer. So this is something that most organizations miss when they talk about, hey, we're trying to do this training, why? Why is the biggest question that we hear when we're inside of organizations and distributorships and asking people, is this important to you? We're going to spend time, we're going to spend four hours today rolling this program out. Biggest question, why? How's it going to benefit me? How's it going to benefit the distributorship? How's it going to benefit the customer? You can address all of those things and of course, you can tie the achievement of a training objective into an incentivization program, pay bump, pay increase, SPF for your salespeople. Now it gets even sexier. All right, so there's a lot of different ways to make sure your training is implemented and that communication, whether it's a training objective or a new customer satisfaction program you're rolling out, whatever that looks like. Lay it out in this format and I guarantee you're going to see better results. But once we have our objective in place, it doesn't mean that we just give it to our people and say, go forth and prosper because I guarantee they're going to run into speed bumps. Any change requires an investment of time, capital, and resources. So we need to assess, hey, what stands in the way? Now the picture that you're looking at right there of the big boom going off in the middle of the night, that's a mortar system. So something that we share in some keynotes is that before any of the troops that I was able to study stepped out of the front gate, they took the time once they had their objective to ask, hey, what could stand in the way of success? What are the threats we need to be made aware of? And one of the biggest things for a foot patrol was these type of weapon systems, which was a mortar. Now if you're unfamiliar with what a mortar is, it's a tube that you drop a projectile bomb into basically. The thing thumps out of the tube and it's designed with one purpose and that is to really ruin the lives of somebody that's on a foot patrol. So if I'm conducting a foot patrol and I'm taking troops outside the wire, do I want to know if my enemy might have a couple of mortars that they could use against me and my people? Absolutely, I do. Because there's a couple of things I can do to prepare for that, disperse troops on the patrol line so that if a mortar attack does come in, it doesn't destroy all of us at once, right? A couple of things we can do. So while that sounded a little violent for you on this early on a morning, but hey, this is what we're talking about. How do we develop these analogies and so we can assess what stands in the way. Whether I'm rolling out a training program or a strategic objective or a customer satisfaction increase survey, whatever it looks for you. So when we look at what stands in the way, great to be able to whiteboard this with the team that's responsible for executing your objective. So if you're pulling your maintenance people into a room for more training, you've given them their objective, it's precise, it's profitable, it's on purpose, ask them, what could stand in the way of success in this? Get their insight because they're on the ground, they're customer facing, they know what could potentially be a speed bump and whiteboard it. Now with a very simple objective, hey, you know, we could really fractal this out. We could ask customers, all right, what could stand in the way from our customer's perspective, our facilities, service turnaround time. Family is a good thing to even factor into this because if you have half of your people disappearing for a Christmas holiday, that might affect your results, right? So family, kids, medical leave, vacation time, working from home now might be something that you factor into success in any of your objectives. The weather, of course, we know is going to affect our client's operations. If the road is frozen, they might not be able to get equipment out there at the right amount of time and get their job done. How does that affect how we can serve them? Looking at that, looking at staff issues, promotions, incentives, recognition, assignment, recruiting, training, I know is a big issue and recruiting new people and getting them into our maintenance space. So if we have an objective and it's to increase our turnaround time by X, asking your people, hey, how could recruitment potentially harm us or help us? If we get five new people that are skilled in, will that help us with our goal? How can we involve HR? Without getting the input of your people here, you're often creating training programs inside of a bubble up in the ivory tower of a distributorship and we all know, you know, that's not really the best way to go about doing business. It doesn't set us up for the greatest amount of success. So being able to ask our people, what stands in the way or what could stand in the way of that objective? And of course, don't leave your leadership team out of this. With our leadership, who's looking to retire in the next year? Could that affect this objective? What challenges might we have with communication given the fact we're all working from home right now? Are meetings going to stand in the way of this or do we need to establish a check-in just because this program is that important to our distributorship? Do we need to stand up a Friday morning meeting around this issue or new initiatives? This is a big issue for leaders and strategic objectives. We're all dealing with a lot of initiatives, especially in the midst of COVID-19. Where does this rack and stack in priority with everything else we have going on? Because as we all know, if we don't give priority to something, it means nothing is a priority. Priority A, B, this is priority number C. All right, well, at least everybody now knows where does this fit in the order of execution for us in our distributorship? This new objective, this new training program, this new goal. We don't take the time to do that. Suddenly you've got people pulling on opposite ends of the rope. Bob thinks XYZ is a priority, Sally thinks ABC is a priority, and suddenly the objective you spent so much time developing doesn't get done at all. Make sure you let your people know where this racks and stacks. But all that comes from the basic question, what could stand in the way of this achieving optimal success? We're still not ready to roll this out, though. I'm giving you everything you need in order to make sure that you're shoring up every possible gap that could get in the way of success with whatever training objective, whatever communication objective you're rolling out in your distributorship. Just because we've developed a really great objective and goal, just because we've assessed what stands in the way, doesn't mean we're ready to go. All right? Again, if you're adding on to us, you're just joining the webinar, if you have questions around how this might apply to you, drop them into the question window, drop them into the chat box. Liz is monitoring those, so you can definitely make this a conversation if you'd like to. Next piece of this. Once you've established what could stand in the way, identify what your top issues might be. All right? And again, you know, to map 20 things out, 20 things are kind of hard to attack and tackle and make sure that we don't have that actually get in the way of success. But ask your people, what are the top five things of the 20 possibles we've determined that could stand in the way of this thing being successful? What are the top five? And now ask, for each of those top five, what that might be, what could lessen the threat of that? What could mitigate or eliminate that threat? And ask your people, what could we do? What could we bring in? What resources might we bring to bear, even if it costs money, which, you know, you might not have the budget, but at least find out, hey, if we had an extra 10K here, we could really make that work better. Okay. Fair enough. At least now you know. But without asking, you'll never find out. So just a basic, you know, map of what might be available to you as resources, relationships with other distributors. I know in a time of workforce retention and development, where we don't all have all the staff we need, maybe you have a distributorship partnership with someone else in your region or in another state, they're willing to lend you some resources, either in equipment or in manpower, great. But without knowing we might need that, it's impossible to begin the relationships to establish that ahead of time. Other leaders in your industry, other executives, other leaders of sales, other leaders of customer service, oftentimes we don't know what we don't know. And so if I'm lining up an objective in my own organization that I know is going to face some challenges, one of the first things I'm going to do is reach out to the people that have a similar business model as me and ask, hey, I'm about to try XYZ. I think you've done something like that in the past. What do you wish you would have known going into it? Okay. And that way you can learn from the speed bumps that other people have hit along the way. And if you don't have those types of relationships right now, hey, begin to reach out on LinkedIn and start developing them. Just because we're in, you know, the same industry doesn't mean that we're all competing with each other for the same amount of business. It does mean though that, hey, and AED is great at facilitating this, who can I reach out to that's experienced something like this in the past that could at least give me a lay of the land and let me know what are the hurdles that I'm likely to face in this rollout, in this new training program, in this new customer service initiative, in, you know, standing up a rental department, whatever that might look like for you, your distributorship. Another resource you have, of course, technical colleges. I know we're all really focused right now on making sure that we're getting the right people into our maintenance department, setting up the pipeline, because we're all hurting for those types of folks. Why not reach into the technical colleges and ask, who do we know at that level that might be able to help? And even if they don't have people that are ready to enter our distributorships, you know, because they're just not trained yet, who are the people that are training them? What experiences do they have? What do we need to start letting them know that we might need one or two years from now so that they can start preparing those people coming through the technical colleges, getting the certification so that they can be as optimally prepared as they can be when they enter our maintenance department. And of course, AED, great resource. Ask the people at AED. Some of them have decades of experience. Hey, folks, we're trying to stand up this initiative. Who do you know amongst the members that's tried something like this in the past? Who do we know that has been successful in standing up something like this? That'll be a great resource for you in developing those peer relationships so that you can reach into the kind of mind experience bank of other people, get the data you need to be as successful as possible. And of course, you know, one of the resources you might have, think outside the box, like social media advertising. One of the biggest challenges we have, Sean, in executing this goal is that we don't have the pipeline of customers and we don't have the pipeline of people to work for us. Why not begin reaching out on social media? So ask your people about this. Again, don't plan for a really important objective inside of a bubble of just you and your office trying to map this on a whiteboard. Involve the team, everybody that's responsible for execution, get them together. And if you think that you have an objective that is really going to affect all 150 people in your distributorship, you might not be able to get 150 people in the room to do this, but they break them out into groups, and make sure that you're at least getting the top line of what you need out of each of those groups, so that when you do roll this out, they can see, oh yeah, I remember, I submitted that idea, and they actually took it into account, which means the executive suite is listening. How about that? It's a great way to engage your people when they see that their ideas were actually brought to bear. So what does this look like when we roll it out? How do I know as a leader that the 14 training objectives, or the 14 communication objectives, or the 14 initiatives that I'm managing that year are actually being done, actually being implemented, and how do I track that in a way that doesn't eat up every spare second of my time? Because as we all know, we're all juggling a bunch of plates as leaders. Great way to make it happen, and I'm going to give you the format, and I'm going to show you what it looks like in execution. Very simple four-part format for how you can hold people accountable, even in a remote working environment. Who is going to do what, by when, and then the missing piece that most organizations completely leave off planning is, how will we know? How will we know this thing has been done? Because again, a lot of us are stacking timelines on top of each other for a lot of important initiatives and projects, where if this thing doesn't get done, it's a bottleneck, it's a holdup for the next initiative being able to launch. So, simple layout of how this might look. Jane, who's going to make this happen? Now, we're big on advocating single points of accountability throughout any organization. What does that mean? Jane may be overseeing a team of a dozen or three dozen people to achieve this big objective, but as a leader, I need to know I can go to one person and find out, how are we on track? What resources do you need? If you're falling behind, how can I help? I don't have time to track down three dozen people and get each of their individual opinions on what's happening with this initiative. Single points of accountability over your team is going to be absolutely critical for you to be more successful as a leader in managing your time, in empowering your people, and in delegating. So, if Jane is over three dozen people, great. Jane knows she owns this objective, and because the objective is so precise, Jane's going to have a much easier time in executing it, because she knows by December 31st, 2020, we need to achieve X so that we can also have 30% margin increase, X amount of revenue driven into the distributorship, and improve the, you know, on-site time of our customers' equipment by two weeks, or whatever that looks like. Next piece, who is going to do what? Okay, we'll do what might look like in this particular scenario we've built for you. Identify areas to recapture margin. So, if our goal is to increase margin by 30% so that we can have an influx of revenue of X amount, hey, Jane is responsible for identifying 14 areas would even be better, right? Giving me a set number of areas where we could recapture margin and how much margin you think you could get in each of those areas. Not that we have to develop a plan for all of that today, because that's a pretty big rollout initiative that we've developed for companies, but hey, if we're gonna do that, give me areas where we could recapture margin in. By when? You notice that we have a very precise timeline on our overall objective? Individual objectives that Jane might be responsible for managing a team for still has to have a very precise delivery date, and that way I know as a leader, do I need to reach in and prod? Do I need to give extra resources? Move some resources from here over to there so that Jane has what she needs to get the job done? But by 1130 a.m. this Friday, I want areas to identify and recapture margin, okay? So, that's an idea of what that looks like. The magic key that if you take nothing else away from this session today that will really help you unlock performance in your people and allow you as a leader to recapture some time is adding this fourth element when you ask people for what needs to be done, and that's how will we know. So many times people will create great resources, they'll build a spreadsheet you ask, they'll identify the areas to recapture margin, and it'll sit in a file on their computers until the cows come home because they never knew what they're supposed to do with it, okay? And often you might get it shared at the next weekly meeting, but you really could have used that data six days ago when it was actually ready, okay? So, how will we know is the element to make sure you include in all of your planning, all of your training. An example here, Jane is going to send the the training team an email by 1130 a.m. Friday that includes five areas, 14 areas to recapture margin inside our distributorships. A precise objective like that is a lot more likely to be accomplished. You're giving precision every step of the way so that there's no ambiguity. What might this look like if you're not running a training program this tight or a communication program this tight? It might be like, Jane, when you get around to it, because I know you're busy, would you mind sending me a couple of areas in the distributorship you think we might do better in recapturing margin? I swear I've heard something similar to that across Fortune 100 companies when leaders are asking things of their people. And do you think they have the greatest amount of success with that vague of an objective? Of course not. Jane doesn't know exactly how many areas to recapture. She might send you one or two ideas and you really needed 10. She doesn't know entirely when that's due to you because she doesn't understand your strategic objectives, your priority list, so it might come by Friday. It might come by Friday next year because Jane's busy. And Jane might send it to you, but she'll send it to you via email and you really needed a phone call. You really needed it presented at your next weekly meeting. You really needed that done via a text message the moment that it was ready. Jane doesn't know because you didn't tell her, all right? So as we're developing these objectives, make sure that they're following this format and that way there's no ambiguity. You can look in your email at 1130 a.m. Friday, not see the email from Jane and know you need to pick up the phone and say, hey Jane, where's it at? How can I help? Okay, so doing those things are really going to help you drive home better communication, better training objectives, and help you keep your timelines on track so that you know if this isn't done by this date, here's how I need to pivot, here's how I need to adjust. Now you might think, Sean, hey that's a lot to download right now. Surely after this we're done, right? I can let Jane go do her job. Not yet because we identified a lot of threats, we lined up resources, but what we didn't do along the way and what most companies don't take the time to do is what happens next. And that's to actually lay this out in a way that you as a leader can begin to track things. Now what I've done is I've pulled a sheet out of my own lessons learned program, my own kind of strategic operating manual that I use in my company, and what I want you to pay attention to is the top line in blue. What you can do as a leader is lay something like this out inside an Excel spreadsheet. You can do this in Google Sheets, that's where this is pulled from. Maybe you have an ERP system that allows you to manage projects. Some CRMs have this capability if you're in sales. Wherever you are inside your organization, this is a great way you can begin capturing things. Whether it's a training rollout and that you develop a timeline, so you would lay the tasks on this list out linearly. This needs to get done by next week, the next line needs to get done by next month, next quarter. The third line is what we expect to have accomplished. You can share this across a team. Now if you're managing people remotely, this type of a format is going to be critical in helping you manage people that you can't see. Like we used to be able to just wander over to the next cubicle and say, hey Bob, how's that initiative going? How's that training program going? Can't do that anymore. So what I need to be able to do as a leader, because I'm managing multiple people as well, is be able to look at a sheet like this and say, have these things been checked off? And of course if we're coming up on a due date, like September 20th, and that check box is not done, that means I know I need to reach back out to Bob, I need to reach back out to Max, I need to reach out to whoever and say, hey we're coming up on that, how can I help? It's not, hey Bob, where is it at? Because Bob might be trying to juggle 18 objectives that he thinks all have priority. So instead it's, hey Bob, I see this is coming up due, how can I help? Can I help you reprioritize your initiatives because this is most important to you? You might not know it because you're dealing with a lot of things and you don't have the 30,000 foot view that I do. This thing that I'm asking you to do is actually the most important objective for you right now. How can I help you reallocate resources? How can I provide cover for everybody else that wants your time so that this can get done? So the way that I've laid this out is my lessons learned program, it's also a great way to lay out your training objectives or your communication plan with your people, or any objective really, any strategic objective in a linear format. It's what happened, okay, so remember from my lessons learned kind of layout that I gave you during the keynote with a rule of five, everybody brings five things to a meeting each week. This is exactly what that looks like. First, what happened? Second, what did we learn from it? Third, who's responsible? When's the implementable deadline? And the action to be taken that creates change. All right, so we're kind of diving more into continuous improvement or processing, but whether we're rolling this out as a future state, like these things haven't happened yet, but here's the order of operation that they need to occur on, or after the fact, it's the end of Q3, we're now assessing our success, we had these objectives, what did we learn, or hey, we had a banner year, we sold more than we've ever sold in the past, but because Sean recommended it, if we took nothing else away from Sean's keynote, it's even if we have a great year, we still need to assess how can we get better. This is how that happens. And so, as I'm leading this meeting, for instance, here's how it might look for us as leaders, I'm asking people, hey, you know, give me the date of your situation and what happened. So, for instance, if we go, you know, digging into this particular example, on August 5th, 2019, we needed a handoff, and here's the example, Rick and David situation. What did we learn from it? Well, we needed to actually train our inside sales reps that we needed to have an onboarding process, because they're just winging it right now, we need to lay out something so they understand the order of precedence. Who's the accountable party? Who's the single point of accountability? Now, in this case, it was two people, myself and my top sales leader. What's the implementable deadline? There's a date on there. When does this need to be accomplished by? And then finally, what's the action to be taken? What are we changing? We're standing up a project management process, we're, you know, changing our amount of discount on our fees, we're rolling out a new rental program by this date, whatever that might look like for you. So, whether you're, again, planning for the future, or whether you're taking a look backward, this type of a format or a process, because it's shareable, right? You could have everybody in your executive team eyes on this at the same time, even if you're working remotely, allows you to keep a strategic view over what's going on inside your distributorship, how the training program is progressing, how the communication rollout is going, how the social media marketing campaign is performing. There's kind of an unlimited application here. And again, this is lifted from the highest performing teams on the planet, how they keep track of a lot of moving pieces in a continuously changing environment. And I think if I think back correctly, probably got more than 500 of these stored up by now. 500 lines, exactly like what you're looking at right now. What that means is 500 simple changes that have been made as the economy shifts, as COVID-19 impacts operations, as we hire new people and let other people go, shifts along the way that allow us, like a plane that's, you know, taking off on a runway and is doing this the entire time it's in the air, it needs a guidance system. And the lessons learned program or laying out your objectives, like this format, allows you to be able to micro adjust in the midst of a constantly changing environment so that you can make sure, hey, we're doing the right thing, we're keeping our eye on the ball, and we are changing as the environment changes around us. So at this point, now that we've laid out what the objective is, what could stand in the way, what are the resources we can bring to bear to hopefully mitigate or eliminate those challenges, we've looked at what the plan of action is, what's the order of execution in this rollout, who's going to do what by when and how will we know, now is the time to ask, all right, what could go wrong. Now, this is a little different from assessing threats, because now we're in the mode of contingency planning, we assessed all the threats that we knew about in the early days, right back when we were kind of just getting this plan off the ground. But at this point, and by the way, all this can be done inside of one session. Just like I'm walking you through it inside of an hour of, you know, a pretty tactical plan can be rolled out inside of an hour with your teams. So don't feel like this is something you have to do, you know, a four day off site for if you're really dealing with a simple issue. Big strategic planning, yeah, that probably requires more time. But for something like a training program rollout, it can be done inside of an hour, we do it all the time. But at this point, we're asking, all right, what are the things that are outside of our control? Because, you know, assessing resources, that means we have some control. But what are the things that are outside of our control that could cause this thing to go off the rails? The reason this is important is if we don't take the time and planning to assess what could go wrong with the training program, what could go wrong with the marketing rollout of a new social media campaign, if we don't take the time when we're in a calm state to address that, when we don't get the lead intake that we're looking for from that social media program, and suddenly the marketing managers breathing down our necks, and we don't know what to do about it. Or, hey, we're not getting the amount of sales that we expected by this point in the year. And your VP of sales is like, dude, you're way behind on your quota. Conscious and logical thought kind of takes a backseat because most of us revert to a really interesting emotional state when we're in times of stress. And we've kind of spent the entire year in a period of stress, which is why you see a lot of people on social media losing their ever loving minds for things that might not have really triggered them back in 2019. But we're all in a hyper emotional state right now, not going to change in the next couple of months, unfortunately, maybe November 4, depending on what side you stand on, you might feel a change. But hey, we're all in an emotional state. So it's important before we set our people loose on the objective that we take the time to ask, hey, we've assessed resources, but what do you see is potentially going wrong here? And especially if you have a group of people helping you plan, you're not doing it inside the bubble, which again, we advise nobody to ever do with an important plan, bring in other people, even if it's just a second set of eyes, ask what could go wrong in this. And how we lay that out is through a contingency plan. Now, contingency plans don't have to be complicated. Right? When I was studying fighter pilots, the thing that we really found interesting when we were, you know, talking them through what could go wrong on in the middle of a really tactical objective mission, $32 million aircraft flying over a mountain range and an engine flames out. The pilot is not expected to know what 48 things need to happen in what order, because that's impossible to figure out, especially if you're in a high stress environment. What they are taught to do is the first three things that need to happen. And that's what we really dig into when we build contingency plans for any training objective, any communication, any strategic rollout. So let's say that by October 31st, our margins are not on track. This could be because we're trying to increase margins by 30%. We expected a average 10% increase per month over the next quarter. So by October 31st, we're not at 20%. We're actually 18.5. We've done better, but we're only at 18.5. So the question is, how will we know that that contingency plan needs to go into effect? What's the trigger? So for a pilot with an engine flame out, it's looking over at the wing and seeing that the engine is on fire. That's the trigger effect. But for us, we need to establish what trigger effect is in place. So for you, it might be if we haven't hit a 20% margin increase by October 31st, contingency plan goes into effect. Trigger effect, okay? Very important we establish that, because otherwise, you'll spend time creating a contingency plan, and no one knows when it needs to come into use. So December 15th rolls around, you're only at 21%, and you're like, we could have done something back in October. And oftentimes, that's the case as a leader. We know, if you'd have let me know earlier, we could have, you know, readjusted fire here. We could have done better. So we need to make sure our people understand, hey, when does the contingency plan go into effect? What's the triggering mechanism? By this date, we haven't achieved X. Pull out the contingency plan. Let's roll with it. So if you have active shooter drills inside of your distributorship, some of us do, because we have that kind of environment, or we're large enough. Same process here. An active shooter drill is a contingency plan. Somebody rolls in and performs Action X, pulls out a weapon, starts firing. What are the first couple of things we need to do to keep our people safe and notify law enforcement? Again, it's not, here are the 48 things to do in a specific order. You're under fire, and I can tell you this from personal experience, 48 things ain't happening. All right? But I know what the first three things are that need to happen if I'm in a crowded place, and somebody pulls a gun out and starts unloading. Okay, and hopefully you do as well. Get to safety. Okay? So with a contingency plan for a much less violent scenario, we don't have the margins we're looking for. October 31st is the day. How do we know that this is going into effect? Which again, very simple breakout of our accountability plan. Who will let who know by when and how? Jane is going to let the sales department know, the HR department, and the executive team, because Jane's the one managing margin. That's a complicated phrase, managing margin. She's in the finance department. She knows margins. If October 31st, we haven't hit this deadline and this amount of margin increase, she's going to let these people know by October 31st. And how? How is she going to let them know? Because if she sends an email out and everybody's headed out for a vacation, and they really needed to know that day, maybe it should be via text message. Right? Maybe it should be, you know, during the weekly meeting. But make sure you define how will we know this contingency plan is in effect? How are we going to communicate it? And then the next thing, of course, is what are the first three things we need to do about it? The reason that this is so important that you not dig into the, you know, 48th level of what this plan needs to do, you're going to identify probably five or six contingencies that might go into effect. Now for a lot of us, it's hey, you know, what if an early winter storm comes in, and freezes us out, we can't get our equipment out on the road, our customers aren't turning in equipment, that might affect margin. What are the first three things we need to do about that? readjust fire, you know, as far as our margin goals, we need to make sure that we're salting our lots so that the customers that do bring equipment in can get it across the ice, whatever that looks like for you, right? And it may be, you know, unique, depending on your geography and your situation. But look at for each of your contingencies, not the 48th level, hey, three things, what are the first three things that need to happen here. And that way, everybody can begin executing on them. So for a lot of organizations, one of their contingency plans that we're training them on right now is what happens if you have to shut your facility back down? Simple enough, because we all had to do it back in April, if you recall, couldn't have more than like one person in a facility. Now it might be, you know, no more than 10 in an area, whatever that looks like for you in your state. Well, how will we know that facility shutdown is in effect again? And given the fact we had to do this in April, what are the things that we wish we would have known that we should have done immediately? What are the first three things? Send a message to the employees, let HR know, let our customers know that we're having to shut down, which means they might not get their equipment back on the original schedule that we promised them. Things that we learned we really should have been doing back in April, but we just didn't know. There's no excuse now. If we experience a facility shutdown, what are the first couple of major items we need to make sure we take care of in a specific order? And again, if you know, you need to plan to the 15th level, at least get the first three knocked out. And that way the, you know, the people that are involved, you can develop sub plans for them. But the reason this is so critical as it applies to training, as it applies to employee communication, is that so few people take the time when they're in a calm state to ask the question, if the train starts to go off the rails, we might not be able to keep it moving at 45 miles an hour down the tracks, but how do we make sure it doesn't go crashing down the mountain? Important to ask that before the crashing down the mountain after effects start to occur, because logical thought goes out the window, okay? So given the fact that we've talked about all of this, always try to build in times during these workshops for individual questions, communication, and we do have, you know, maybe about 12 or 13 minutes left. What I'm going to ask Liz to do is take any questions, and if you have a question, if you're willing, let's bring you up on the screen, assuming you have video or you'd like to ask me in person, and this is definitely the time to do that. We always try to build in this time. So happy to dig back into anything that we've covered so far, or any of your specific situations or scenarios, and we can walk you through, what does this planning process really look like in that area? So Liz, please unmute yourself, and let's let's dig into any questions anybody has. Sure, just one so far. If anybody else has a question, please feel free to throw in in the Q&A, like Sean said, we can promote you, so you can ask him yourself, but what do we do to carry this forward into 2021? So the important thing to look at is not what our 2019 goals were, because all of that has been thrown off track by COVID-19. Instead, it's to take a look at, all right, given the fact that we have this amount of revenue that's been coming in, and for some of us it's an increase in revenue, which is great, isn't that a wonderful place to be? But for a lot of us, we've taken a revenue hit. We need to understand what the runway we have for our distributorship is, if we're in a state of, you know, less than optimal revenue. For some of us, that might mean we're not operating in the green, we're in the black. For some of us, it might mean, in some areas, Sean, we're actually in the red right now, because we have these overhead costs, and we're just not receiving the amount of revenue we need in order to, you know, keep everything moving on the track that we've planned. So take a look at what your runway is. Given the fact that you have X amount of revenue that you're predicting between now and the end of Q4, so by December 31st, how do we make sure that we're optimizing our goals, making sure we're, you know, keeping costs cut as close as we can to the bone, still able to keep as many people employed as possible, so that as we begin planning for 2021, we're operating on a realistic expectation of timeline. What I see a lot of organizations doing right now, and we're in touch with about 400 different industries we're actively receiving data back from, is a lot of people are making the assumption that on January 1st of 2021, it's going to be like it was back in 2019. So what they're doing is they're basically counting 2020 as a loss leader, and they're going to put it on the shelf and hope that things get better. Probably not the best idea. So look at, if we have to repeat 2020, as far as revenues go, as far as employee turnover goes, as far as workforce retention goes, whatever that might look like for you, if 2020 is replicated in 2021, what are the things we can begin doing today? The planning process. We can walk through everything I just talked about to make sure that we are learning from what happened in 2020, optimizing operations, optimizing profitability, and minimizing expenses, so that if, you know, 2021 ends up being like this year, how do we make sure that we're at least keeping our distributorships as profitable as possible? Without taking a look at this year and looking at how do we replicate that in 2021, knowing what we know now, we're almost by default going to be looking back at 2019 and 2018. I hope and pray every single day that we get back to 2018-2019 levels of business and profitability. Believe me, I do. But I also have to be a realist and say, if 2020 has to repeat, what did I learn this year that's going to help me better succeed in 2021? All right. Thank you, Sean. We don't have any more questions at the moment, so I just I want to thank you for joining us today. Thank you, of course, for joining us at our virtual virtual leadership conference just a few weeks ago. Is there a way that we can get a hold of you if anybody has any any questions or any follow-ups? Absolutely, yeah. Normally, I would have a slide that would say this, but I'm happy to give it to you. It is Sean, S-H-A-W-N, at Shoshan Consulting dot com. That's S-H-O-S-H-I-N Consulting dot com. And my phone number, direct line to me, don't have to go through an assistant for this, is 813-833-5059. So, if you have any questions that you feel like would better be handled one on one, please give me a ring. I don't keep a meter running on that. I'm happy to do it for members of AED. And, you know, everybody, you know, our fervent hope and prayer is that next year in Las Vegas we all get to run into each other in person. I know Liz is hoping that, and so am I. So, if there's anything I can do for you between now and then, please take the time to reach out. I'm a resource for AED. It's a relationship Liz and I have already established. If I can help your distributorship, I want to be able to do that. So, let's make sure we keep the communication going. Alright, well, thanks again, Sean. We really appreciate it. Absolutely, thanks. Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.

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