My Business On Purpose

It’s an interesting time to hire right now, right? It’s changed in so many ways because the people we are trying to hire have changed! So let’s throw out a few fun facts about Gen Z, the group of people entering the workforce. Were born between the late ’90s and about 2008 They are shrewd consumers that value their identity and how that is shown to the world. Whether that is through their purchases, social media, or their lifestyle choices (IE, where they work), they are carefully curated in how they present themselves Pragmatic and financially minded This is a generation that has watched their families be affected by the recessions of 08/09 and watched them take those hits. Truly driven by financial pragmatism and security. They are shaped by the financial stresses their families and communities faced during those recessions         3. Value Spectacle over substance   They want a show. They want to be entertained and feel the excitement This past year, the university of Louisville got more 4 and 5

Remember the days where windows showed up like clockwork in 3 days?  Chemical arrived the next day?  Subcontractors called you back?  Schedules held true?  Material budgeting was straightforward?  Clients had empathy, patience, and treated you as the expert?   Remember the days when  your biggest headache was, “how do we find new business?” The British playwright Michael McMillan said, “You can't start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one.” As you come into this final 12-Week Plan LIVE event of 2022…this final opportunity to think deeply through the new challenges you will confront, the new mountains you will climb, the new opportunities you will pursue… you have a choice. Let me rephrase, you have to make a choice. Will you gripe, moan and mope about those mean clients, those non-committal subs or vendors, those irritating shipping delays, or those increased prices?   Or will you cut the strings of excuses, limitations, and barriers, and be free from the sludge and the mud of wha

We are 6 weeks from the end of the year. What does your team need to hear from you as you finish it out? Well, let’s talk about that today. Happy Monday y’all, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. We spent hours last week running what we call Prep Week with every one of our clients. Making sure they were focused on the things that matter heading into 2023!  We got all kinds of feedback, from “Yes, we needed that.” to “It’s so crazy, it’s already time for these discussions,” to even “Man, I’m really excited for next year!” And all of those statements are true. What we’ve realized is if we don’t plan intentional time in the year for some of these conversations, they sneak up on us and they get rushed or worse, never happen. The same can be said for your Annual letter. Many times, we realize we’re two weeks out from the end of the year, so we rush it and lose much of its impact. We write down a few thoughts that have little meaning, print it out, sign our name at the bottom and send it out. But that’s su

You don’t have to be a college football fan to understand this story, and yet it would help to understand that college football in the southeastern United States is akin to cricket in India, premier football in England, Formula 1 in Italy, and the carnival in Brazil. We barter, bet, scream, yell, curse, fret, cheer, cry, and hug strangers all in the course of a four-hour window on any given Saturday in the fall.   Betting college sports, television rights, and now the newly minted Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) rules have driven revenue in college sports to levels unthinkable just ten years ago. I was able to play football at the University of South Carolina back in the 1990s when assistant coaches barely scratched a living, and graduate assistants took a joyful vow of poverty.  All this sacrifice for the privilege of sleeping on cots at the stadium due to the hours required in hopes for a winning season and a chance to continue playing at one of a very few bowl games around the country. It is not the same g

I spent some time last week with a local business that had just finished redoing their core values. They spent a ton of time getting them right and a question came up. How do Core Values start to trickle down and truly affect your business? Well, let’s talk about that today! Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. What does taking the next step with those look like? How do we incorporate those into everything we do? They should inform every decision we make and every task we complete Does it push us towards Healthy Culture, Excellence in Design, or Healthy relationships? I want to talk for a few minutes about why all of this matters. Like why can’t I just come in and work hard and that be good enough. And yet I would argue that following these core values leads 100% of the time to being a great at whatever you do. Can you do it without your values, yes, maybe… but if we lean into a healthy culture, excellence in design, and healthy relationships both internally and externally, it leads to a quality pro

The priority of our work is to liberate business owners from chaos, and most of those business owners have between 2 and 50 employees. We get the question often, “are we in a recession?” Our response is usually the same, “does it matter?” Seriously, in your day to day life does it matter? Over the last two years, I have watched some moments of real irony.  We obsess over downturns in the market, a decline in business, and recessions or depressions. Just last week, anyone who had money invested in the crypto-currency exchange FTX (some reports put that figure around $1.8 Bn) lost it all.   $1.8 billion…poof. Was that a product of a recession, or recession like market movements?   No.  It was a problem of poor management and leadership. Throughout 2020 and 2021 the market was red-lining at high RPMs and many businesses had converted their business development and outbound sales departments into order takers trying to handle the inbound demand from a flood of cash pumped into the market now being spent on new ho

Believe it or not, every time a customer does business with you they come in with expectations both spoken and unspoken. So, how do we manage those and shape those to match what we have to offer? Well, let’s talk about that today! Happy Monday friends, Thomas Joyner here with Business on Purpose. Last week, my wife found a deal online. $79 bucks for your first visit. Introductory offer, book here. She ended up calling the office to make an appointment and was so excited to go. She sat down, went through the full experience, and absolutely loved it! About halfway through, the receptionist came over and brought her bill. $240!!! She immediately texted me and was pretty bummed. I told her to just show them the intro web page and ask about it. “Oh, that’s an old promotion. Sorry about that.” And that was it. No one told her as she was running up a bill more than 3 times what she expected. Nope, just added to it and didn’t even flinch. After her having a short conversation with the receptionist, they lowered it to

Bob Roberts is a larger-than-life Baptist Preacher turned global engagement pioneer and independent global diplomat whose best friends are with people far outside of his own East Texas tribe. Bob began mentoring me two decades ago with his words, his actions, and his time.  I’ll never forget the day he drove me to Barnes and Noble in the mid-cities of the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex and loaded me up with what today are foundational books in my personal library. Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy, and Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat were two of the books that he bought for me (still two of my top 5 all-time reads).  There were a couple of nuanced books that threw me off; a book from Henri Nouwen and another about the now renowned Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh. Perplexed, I dove into the books on global engagement as they spoke to my inner desire for circumnavigate-able adventure.  Nouwen and van Gogh would wait.   Twenty years later I picked up a book entitled Learning from Henri Nouwen and Vincent Van

If you are comparing your 2022 to 2020 and 2021 you may want to pause. Standing here at the early sunset hours of 2022 we are feeling a very real metaphor. It goes like this. During 2020 and 2021 many of our businesses were barreling down the business highway at 90 mph winding hot at 10,000 RPMs. Today, it already feels like a massive slowdown, and it has been.  Let’s not lose perspective, though… instead of going from 90 mph to 0…we are now riding down the highway at a more sustainable, more comfortable pace of 70 mph, and the good news is that we are only running at 5,000 RPMs. In other words, it is taking far less effort to go just a little bit slower and start to get some breathing room.  The problem is that our human minds have grown accustomed to the speed, breathlessness, chaos, and cash flow of the past two years and we don’t know how to mentally or emotionally throttle our expectations, let alone our spending habits. New norms have emerged over the past two years; pricing volatility, material, and lo

Amidst the chaos of a recession, there are many who see opportunity and possibility tucked away in a larger population that submits blindly to doom and gloom. We have always had a few business owners in the past with a desire to expand into new markets, and yet the drumbeat of expansion is ironically higher now in a tough, recession-bent market. These are trade contractors who are realizing that the purpose, people, process, and profit they have built has positioned their business in a place of strength while other like-businesses are suffering under the weight of volatile cash flow.  Growing markets need to have the same care and attention as growing new agricultural fields.  When left to grow without curation, a business can look like a garden that has grown past its boundaries. Our town right now is a bazaar example of this.  Its population has grown at race car speeds and yet the town services divisions are struggling to keep up.  Much of our physical landscape was designed to be beautiful and boundaries.

It’s October! As crazy as that sounds. And I’m curious…when was the last time you looked at the goals you set at the beginning of the year? Have you looked at them yet? Or are they collecting dust somewhere, or worse…did you even write them down? Let’s talk a bit about that today. Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. Thanks so much for joining today. I was sitting in a coaching meeting with some clients the other day and they were a bit dejected. Felt like they were stuck. “We’re not making any progress!” they said. “We’ve been trying to move forward on just keep fighting the same battles.” “Well, let’s look at that.” Here’s the best part. At BoP we do 12 week goals…small bite sized 12 week plans to keep the business moving forward. Instead of spinning your wheels for a year or more, you can stay on course and refocus every 12 weeks. So, we pulled up their 12 week plan. We had 3 goals written down with a minimum of 10 action steps to accomplish each. As we walked down their list of goals, they realize

Greedy Boomers are feeling frustrated and overrun by entitled Millennials, while skeptical Gen Xers are interviewing unaware Gen Zers who are scrolling TikTok in a job interview; and for the first time we are all working together in the same businesses. College sports is awash in generational misunderstanding. The newly minted Name, Image, and Likeness rules are in place and for the first time in our lifetime you are seeing college athletes representing the hometown HVAC company, or in some cases, an international brand like Alabama’s Quarterback Bryce Young who is already being featured in Nissan commercials. En masse the younger generations are all for this loosening of regulations, the older generations are on the spectrum between skeptical and opposed. In his new book A New Kind Of Diversity, Author Dr. Tim Elmore highlights these generational challenges saying, “the generation gap is more distinct because new technology creates subcultures. Hence, generations often don’t have to connect to survive.” When

Our family feels like it's been stuck inside for so much of the last month. Some sick kids, tons and tons of rain, brutally hot weather that we thought was finally behind us, you name it! And yet with the cooler temps yesterday we took advantage of it and took a long family walk. Something we used to do nightly that just had been pushed aside as life got in the way. The simple, little things! We were reminded of how much life this gives us as we played "I spy" the entire walk and had some sweet moments racing each other to the next mailbox.  I came home and immediately thought, why do we forget to do the little things? Because we know, deep down, the little things make the biggest difference for small businesses. Good morning everyone! Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. I was sitting in with a client a few weeks ago who had not been coaching with me for very long and I was asking them about what separates them from some of the bigger companies doing what they do?  “Well, not that much anymore!” As I

Thomas and I were doing our weekly check-in when we got to the last statement after I had asked him the Check In questions (Thomas walks you through the Check In questions here), “what I see and what I need from you.” At this stage of our business, my role is requiring more and more visioneering and more accountability to macro-level task items.  If my head gets caught up in too much day to day strategy, then we are not maximizing where I am most valuable to the business as an owner.   Note: for context, at the time of this writing/recording we are a team of eight with five full-time coaches and three focused roles to share clients connections, marketing, and administration/accounting. Thomas heard what I am seeing in him and the growth that he is heading towards in leading our coach team, I then shared a thought I had not spoken, but it made sense. “Thomas, I need you to run defense on questions, thoughts, and ideas that I could easily run with and get lost in.” Ownership is lonely, and ownership can be misu

Every year, each one of our heroic business owner clients has an opportunity to commit to PREP WEEK... it's the one week of the year (in November) where we walk business owners step-by-step through the priority items they need to spend time on prior to the upcoming year to ensure that their time and energy is locked and focused on their WRITTEN vision.   Here is how PREP WEEK works...

We have been misled about the idea of culture. After poorly thought out ideas of free-Friday-lunches, bean bag chairs in the break rooms, ping pong tables, open office concepts, and incentive compensation plans, team members are still disengaged and frustrated. We are trying to solve a pervasive, soul level challenge, with the oscillating fan of surface level ideas, rather than dousing the underlying flames of cultural disconnection with the quenching water of cultural satisfaction and engagement. Often we hear business owners complaining about the pending generational work ethic, or lack of, followed by a throwing up of hands and a resignation that “my generation is the only generation that knows how to work.” When speaking to groups of small business owners, this is a typical refrain, “nobody wants to show up and work.” My response, in a kind and forceful way, “no, they just don’t want to show and work for you… because you have already given up on them.” The great challenge of a sporting coach is to recruit

If I were to walk into your office this week, pick an employee at random and ask them where you’re headed as a business over the next year or so, would they be able to answer correctly? I’d wager they may be able to nail a few small things, but would probably fall short of where you’d like them to be. So how do we communicate those things and effectively put the bullseye on the wall for the whole team to chase after? Well, it starts with a team vision day. Let’s talk about it! Thanks so much for listening in today, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. About a year ago we sent out an employee survey to all of our clients. Just told them to forward it on to their employees, because we were curious how many of them could answer this question. “What’s the goal of our business?” And many similar questions like that. Just give them a chance to answer and see what came up. Now, it was fascinating to read the responses. Things like, to make the most profit we can, or to build perfect houses or even to make su

A few months back I was driving the most beautiful stretch of interstate on God’s green earth, I-26 between Orangeburg and Columbia…and I’m on one of those long stretches where it’s 40-ft tall pine trees as far as the eye can see and I start to notice some clouds stacking up in the distance. Cars just disappearing into it a mile or so out and here I am driving 70+ mph right at it. Kind of an eerie gray about it and I can’t even remotely see through it, what’s on the other side, what’s inside… none of it! And the closer I got the more questions popped into my head. And it was fine, it was a bad storm that we had to slow down for, but we made it through to the sunshine on the other side. And as I think about the state of business right now, that’s the collective feeling we get. We can see a long way out. A lot of us are booked months, maybe a year or more into the future. And yet there’s this big cloud out there and this buzz word we keep hearing, “RECESSION”. That for some reason no one can really identify wha

There’s a new generation of kids hitting the workforce. So, with thousands of options, how do we attract them to our business?  And how do we make sure we have enough runway in front of them so they don’t just jump at the next available job that pays a little bit more? Well, let’s talk about that today! Good morning friends, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. We met last week with about 125 business owners and key leaders to plan out the 4th quarter. One of the resounding issues that kept coming up was attracting talent in the trade industries. Now, about 70% of the businesses we work with are in the trade industries, so we asked them to go a bit deeper into the problem. Well, there’s this huge push for high school kids to go to college. Which is great! But, when they get a random business degree or marketing or some other generic degree in communications that they have spent good money and 4 years of their life on, they fully expect to be compensated at a higher rate and to find a job in their fiel

Marketing and I have a love-hate relationship. The results are powerful when the results exist, yet too often, the results are more aligned with vanity than they are with actual growth. Marketers are like business coaches (of which I am one) and gypsies, each profession has a low bar of entry and the results are often quantified and masked by generalities. I can’t speak for gypsies, but marketers and business coaches have real opportunity to move the needles for businesses IF the needle is well defined and well tracked. Our business coaching firm has been growing over the years as we work with business owners (75% of those are contractors or contractor-related industries) between 2 and 50 employees to help build systems, process, and purpose using our Business On Purpose Roadmap in an effort to liberate business owners from chaos so they can make time for what matters most. The majority of our business has grown through intentional word of mouth and direct referrals. Growth has not been haphazard, but also no