How to Stop Firefighting in Your Manufacturing Business - Harvey Leach

Hayley: I'm an MD of a manufacturing business and I'm listening to this and I recognize some of the problems in my team,

Harvey: Mm-hmm.

Hayley: what's the first thing I do tomorrow to try to change it?

Harvey: It was just diving into the mess of the day. where's this part, where's that part, the phone's ringing. It was just madness.

Phil: And it's very easy to say you should be building a boat, but when you're s trying to tread water in the ocean and you can see sharks around you, you're panicking, how do you start that process?

Harvey: there's a difference between importance and urgency. Answering the phone, chasing all the things appears urgent, but is it the most important thing to do?

Hayley: that firefighting, a lot of the time you are doing everything

Phil: And often we are driving without a map or a sat nav because we haven't got time to go and pick one up from the shop because we just need to get there. And it feels

Hayley: Yeah.

Phil: like the best thing we can do is to put our foot down and drive quicker.

Harvey: thing you need, is to create a way of getting better visibility of what's going on.

Hayley Baxter: Welcome to the What One Thing podcast. Great to be here. What I'd like you to start with is tell me the situation you're in that led to you discovering the What One Thing, or give me a scenario where you've gone in there and you've said they really need this What One Thing. So I think it was a personal experience that led me to it in a way. Because I had moved out of an engineering role. I was in the automotive industry for for Rover Group. And I'd taken on responsibility for managing the supply of parts up to one of the car assembly plants from the pressings plant down in Swindon. And quite frankly, we hit a new model launch that hadn't wasn't going very well. And I hadn't a clue what to do. I was getting buried in just trying to chase stuff every day. You know, I was just going round and round in circles with my team. Just trying to make sure we got parts out the door. And it just wasn't working. And I thought we need to fix this. There's something more fundamental going on. And luckily, my bosses recognized the challenge and asked a very experienced guy called Ron Barrett to come and help me along and act as a sort of mentor guide for me. And the thing that Ron helped me to do. Was to establish a very simple routine for the day that set us up for success so that we knew what we were doing, we established a level of control and discipline, and that effectively turned us around from what was a downward spiral into a steady upward spiral. So over the next several months, I mean, and it took a while because there was a lot to sort out. But we gradually got the performance right, the level of noise coming from the customer went down, and we got to the point where we could go, right, we're now in control. How do we stop it being like that next time? And I think as I look back on it, the lessons I learned through that period working with Ron were the real foundation. For everything I've done since, particularly since I moved out of the industry twenty years ago to set up my own consulting and training business. Everything is based on that foundational set of disciplines that I learned from Ron over those few months. So tell me before that happened, it's Monday morning, you've woke up at nine AM and you hit the office. What's immediately happening around you? What are you thinking? How do you feel? What am I thinking? How do I feel? I'm thinking I've got a lot to get done today. So the most important thing I can do is to spend a few minutes mapping out my day. How is my day going to work? So part of that discipline is to map the day. Yeah. So what does success look like? And the crazy thing is, the more time I spend doing that, the more I get done in the day. And yet I get it done quicker and with less stress. So before that change, what did that nine AM look like? Before that change, hey it was quarter to eight, but not nine AM, but there you go. It was just it was just I d I've never seen quarter to eight on a clock, I apologize. It was just g it was just diving into the mess of the day. You know, we just hit you know, where's this part, where's that part, where's that part, where's that part, the phone's ringing. It was just madness. we were just chasing our tail the whole day and it felt like by the end of the day, yeah, we'd we'd move we'd done some stuff, but had we made a difference? Had we moved anything forward? And I don't think we did. We j we just survived another day and we went home exhausted and stressed and tired and collapsed into bed and just came back in and to do it all the next day. You know, and it was it was ki you know, I did I had two months of it and it was killing me. And I just thought you cannot continue to do this. And it clearly is not where we wanted to be, anyway. You know, one of the reasons I'd been moved out of my end well added that to my responsibilities was can in the previous roles I'd had, I'd had that discipline and control and forward thinking, but I just didn't know how to apply it in a the fast pace of a production environment, which is very different from a a product development pace, which Yeah, product development's a much slower timescale process than day-to-day manufacturing. And I just hadn't couldn't adapt what I knew to that without some help. It's really interesting though, because I think that a lot so there's there's a lot there's a few things that resonate. So one is run it from just run it being a business owner, running a business, that firefighting. When particularly when you kind of first start and you you a lot of the time you are doing everything and then you grow and suddenly you've got a team and the person that needs to manage this business is a different person that than the one that could manage this business. And that firefighting piece, it does still happen a lot. But I think then as you go to that next level and you you know you've got an even bigger team, if you've got a team of 50 people and actually you're managing managers or trying to lead, you're not even managing them really, are you? You're leading a team that then should be leading another team and it's creating those levels. And I think sometimes what happens in that kind of situation is people are given roles because they're good. like Phil always says this, he always says you start a business because you're a good engineer, you're good at what you do. And then you become a business owner and you realise actually you've got no idea how to run a business. And then It's up to you what you do with that. But in a in a in a team that's bigger, in a business that's bigger, where you're somebody that's put into a role because you've been good at your job and you know, the business can see good things in you. But actually, I think sometimes what happens is the business doesn't know how to support that person in making that transition between being good at what they do to being good at being able to lead a team or lead a production line or whatever way you want to dress it up and this is exactly what that this is exact that is exactly what this is. I'm getting my words modeled up. Yeah, no, e exactly, Haley. And I you know, I think I've seen exactly what you've described with with organizations I've worked with in my recent consulting career. Small businesses that have grown from a handful of people, even just one person, they've they've employed people, they've got up to forty, fifty people. You know, and I remember asking w a business owner once, I said, When did it change? And she said, as the day we couldn't sit everybody in the one office, you know, as soon as they put a wall in, somehow the the the naturalness of communication that was working when they were a tiny team no longer worked for them. And so they needed structure and systems. You know, and I got involved A bit of a way down the line, they've been on a bit of a journey. But they were stuck in this situation that just seemed like they were scrambling through every day in the way I described. They hadn't got that control and system. And I think more importantly, they'd established roles. They've got somebody doing purchasing, they'd got somebody managing a warehouse, they've got somebody managing the two or three different areas of production looking after them. But it was like They didn't see how they all joined up and supported one another. Everybody had their own goals and objectives. it felt like they were doing a lot of the right things, but it wasn't joining up. So they didn't see, well, how does that puzzle piece fit with that one, fit with that one? And and what are the Why do you think Go on, Haley. Go on. Sorry. Why do you think that businesses do end up in that place? Why do you think they end up there in the first place? That's an interesting one. I think because they, as you said, the business gets bigger. And so you think, well, we need somebody to look after that, and somebody to look after that. And they bring people in with that technical skill. So they'll bring in someone with a purchasing expertise, they'll bring in someone who knows how to manage a warehouse. And nobody's done that bit of work to say, how does the whole thing work together as a system? You know, because they're solving the immediate problem. which you know, we it's taking too long to do all these purchase orders. We need somebody who knows how to do that, and somebody with purchasing will come in and they'll sort that bit out. But they've never done the step back and gone. How do we create how do we see this as a whole system that goes, how do we get to? For example, the one I I I will often start with is what's the journey from when a customer places an order to when we set ship the parts out the door? How does that journey work? And what part does each person in the team play to move that order through? Whether that be an information part or whether that be physical movement, they all need to fit together. And they just don't do that work. It's almost like you've got a cut on your arm and you s put a sticky plaster there and then you bump something and you put another and you've you know, you've like got all these sticking plasters and bandages and you've never thought, how do I actually lead a more a a safer lifestyle so I don't keep hurting myself? For me, it comes down to you take somebody and they do everything. So they're the sales, then the marketing, and they also produce the goods. Yeah. in whatever capacity that is. Then you subdivide it a bit more, and now somebody might be manufacturing the goods and answering phone calls and planning and plotting. And then when you take that role off them, I think there's often a feel of kind of your value's lost. Because why wasn't I doing a good job? Why are they taking this off me? Why is this new employee coming in and paid this? But just let's stop there because I think it's such a great example. I think every business goes through this. So tell us, Harvey, what is the what one thing that can take us from this chaos, from this where we feel like the burden every day, we're going in and we're doing the best we can and we're getting things out the door as quickly as we can. My God, it's pressure. But we're doing okay, we're doing okay. I haven't got time. What do we do? The w I think and I think I've come up with a different one thing from the one we started with, just from this convers this the way this conversation's gone, is actually to look at what how what how do all those bits join up? What does that picture look like? To show what how d how do the bits join up and then you get to the So what does success for each person every day look like? And that gets you to the daily routine thing. So it's I've cheated, it's two, but I think you need that big picture view of how the pieces fit together. Yeah. And they do fit together. So day one, I'm busy business owner, I'm through in the marketing department, I'm helping them out because they need that, and then I'm here, and then I'm here, and then I'm here. How do you detract yourself from it? Because everybody says to you in the most loving way possible, what you need to be doing is working on the business, not in the business. And it's very easy to say you should be building a boat, but when you're s trying to tread water in the ocean and you can see sharks around you, you're panicking. How do you start that process? What what would you do? Waking up tomorrow to make that change? H hundred percent. I agree with you, because that's exactly the position I was in. It was just every day chasing, answering phone calls from angry clients, the whole works. And to some for somebody to say to me, you need to just stop doing that and go and sit in a quiet corner somewhere and work out what to do next, I couldn't get my brain around that. Yeah. And my boss, bless her, said one thing to me. She said, if you walk away from your desk for 15 minutes. How much worse is it gonna get? It's pretty bad already. Is it really gonna get any worse? And is the thing that you'll do in that fifteen minutes gonna make it better? And I'm going no. And then she goes, but if you walk away from fifteen minutes, and by the way, don't take your phone with you. if the client customer site gets angry, tell them to talk to me and I'll explain why you're not answering the phone. So she gave me permission to walk away from the noise. In that fifteen minutes, can you can you get to one thing? That you could do differently starting tomorrow that would start to move us upwards. And so that is what I will typically say to a client is look, let's just go and take ten minutes. What's one thing we can do that's gonna move us towards that better future? Having got an idea for it. And once you've done that, and it becomes then a little journey, it's it's back to that slow, steady upward spiral. You know, you're not going to fix it overnight. One day, maybe not today, you're gonna get to drawing that picture of how it all fits together. But I think the first thing you do is get to that discipline of planning the day, spend a bit of time planning the day. What does a successful day look like? And start to build the routines of that successful day. So there we come back to the one thing we started with. So these these two things that start to fit together: seeing it as a whole system and building that daily routine discipline, good habits that will enable you to work towards that successful future. If you're at that person though, in that moment, so I've just arrived today to start the day, half past nine, because I'm a bit of a slacker. and I map out my day, but when there's like five hundred things that need to be done that take three days and I've only got seven hours to do them, that doesn't really help me in that moment. So what what do you do then? So we're then into which are the ones we're then into thinking about how do we organise that list 'cause they're not gonna go away, are you? You know in that moment you're not gonna do all seven hundred. So you then got that the question for me then is which are the ones that are gonna make the biggest difference? Yeah. And it may not be the obvious ones, because to me, the obvious one in that original scenario was make sure I answer all the customers' questions, get them off my back. Because that seemed like the important thing to do. But the reality was that wasn't helping to fix the system. So we could in the end. Supply all the parts they wanted when they wanted them without all that hustle. So Ron introduced me to the idea of there's a difference between importance and urgency. Answering the phone, chasing all the things appears urgent, but is it the most important thing to do? And the things that are most important, the things that will make the difference. And never urgent because they're they're building for the future. And so, you know, he said, Well, rank, you know, not literally rank them, but more or less in your head, rank them in order of importance. Which are the ones that are going to make the difference? And accept that you're not going to get to all of those. Maybe you're going to upset a few people in the short term, but you have to do it to build for that future. And it's It it sounds a lot easier. I c it is absolutely painful at the time and it feels like the wrong thing to do. You know, I think one of the Japanese guys I've met one time, he said it's it's once you get it, it makes sense. But actually for anybody coming from a conventional world, it's what he called uncommon sense, because it sounds so counterintuitive to not deal with your angry customer. Other than the one phone call that says, Look, we are working on this, we need time to work on it, and it will take some time to get better. And no customer likes to hear that. And you don't like telling them. But it's that it for me, it was that recognition that unless we started to do that, it was never gonna get any better. You know, I just need an even bigger team of people to keep chasing all today's problems. So I walk up to my team of five are in customer service. Yeah. Really busy, you know, plagued by calls, etc. etc. I say to them, I'm gonna take Bob or Sally, the most experienced member. I'm gonna take them away for 15 minutes. If there's bigger delays, I'm taking ownership of that. That's on my shoulders. Please tell the customers, look, we're trying to improve this for a long term. Yes. They then come up with one great idea. Yeah. This is always where I get stuck. So now I've got four people sat on the desk massively busy. I've got my one great idea that I want to implement to those four people. How do I get that buy-in off them? Do I say, look, guys, I'm gonna buy pizzas on Saturday? Can you all come in for an hour? Or do I say, look, we're just gonna shut the desk down for half an hour and be damned? If we get complaints, we'll get complaints, they'll come through to my mobile. What do I do in practice? Because that's That's always where I get stuck. I've taken a t I've taken one person off because we can handle 20% loss in productivity. Now, how do I implement that one change that they've given me? And how do I make sure that the other four people don't get jealous that they never get taken off the desk and they never get to come up with ideas? How do I build that section of it? I th I think it's it's it's do what's manageable and not try to do too much at once. Because I think in in that situation you go, we've got to run this as an experiment. So we've had this one idea. Let's not roll it out to all five of the team at once because we don't know if it's going to work yet. So we tell the team what we're doing, we try it small, and we see if it makes a difference. Because, you know, our the one we did, absolutely honestly, the simple first thing we did. Was we organi got somebody to organise. So every morning we got a printout of how many of each part that we'd got in in the warehouse. And we knew for everything to work, if we got less than two days worth of material in the warehouse, that part was going to cause us a problem. And so we said, right, the first thing we're going to do every day is print that list off and go down the list and get one of the guys for the parts for the product he was responsible for. He went down and he circled all the parts we'd got less than two days. So instead of just reacting to the phone calls from the customer saying, Where's this part? Where's the other part? His day was now, these are the ones I need to focus on. And a lot of the time that meant when the customer rang up, instead of him going, I'll go and find out, he already knew the answer because he'd spent that 10 minutes at the beginning of the day. Going down that list. So if if they said it was ALR one two six six, which is the one number that sticks in my memory from thirty years ago, he said, Right, I know that one, I've spoken to them, this is what's going on. And he'd already got that information in front of him when the angry phone call came. So immediately he was taking less time. So we've gone, right, so we've we've just put a something different into the routine of his day. We haven't radically change. It's not like we've got to take the whole team away. It's just that 10 minutes at the beginning of the day was different. And because he'd done that, his day was immediately calmer and quieter. And once we'd done it for Sam, we went, Well that works. Hey Mike, why don't you do it for yours now? And then we work on the next day. Because it honestly in our situation Mike was the sort of guy who He said, I'm not actually bothered whether I get to go off and do this thinking. I just want a nice easy day. You've given me something that'll make my day a bit easier. I'll try it. So Sam went off and we Sam and I then worked worked on the next thing. So it was keeping it small so that it's not disruptive in an unhelpful way. That's what I want to say. You know, and it's it's it's not trying to take too big a bite at a time. And maybe if you've got a bigger team and they all want to have a go, you go, right, so what's what's the next good idea? And you take another person of the team and you run that experiment and if that works you then roll it out across the whole team and on you go. You know, it's it's lots of little things. It doesn't have to be big stuff. Yeah. So you've s you've shared a lot of lots of we've gone off in lots of different directions. So if we bring it back to so if an MD, I'm an MD of a manufacturing business and I'm listening to this and I recognise some of the problems in my team, what's the first thing I do tomorrow to try to change it? So if we take it step by step? The first thing you need, whether it's at the MD level or the individual level is to create a way of getting better visibility of what's going on. So if I'm if I'm a a one person or a team of two or three on the shop floor, what do I need? I need to know what's the what's my goal for today and how am I doing. So with Sam it was I need to work towards making sure we've got two days apart in the warehouse. My visibility was I now get this printo every morning and I can go down and I can see. If you're a production team, it might be these are all the jobs we need to try and do today, and they're in this order. Can we make those visible on the wall and track how do we do against the plan? You know, here's the plan, how did we do? And if we didn't hit it, what happened that meant we didn't do it? You know. We couldn't we couldn't make this one because this part wasn't in the warehouse, or the warehouse hadn't moved it across. So you just start to keep a log. So I'd say st day one is how do I get that visibility? And you're not going to do every you're not going to do that whole team in in one day, but you start thinking, right, how do we put that in place? So how do I create a little information board or a something for each team that says what is a good what does today need to look like? How did we do? And then once you start that, you can then do your five or ten minutes at the beginning of each day going, so what happened yesterday? What's gonna what's what's the plan for tomorrow? What do we need to try and do today to make tomorrow's plan better? And it's it's getting that visibility and stability is the place I'd start. I love that because we start off saying, Okay, we acknowledge an issue, don't we? We know that these guys are working incredibly hard. Do I need to recruit more staff? Let's have a look at it first. We take them off and we check in with our our our our top dogs, so to speak. What do you think your targets actually are? What do you think are the important numbers that matter? We make those visible to the team and then we can start that process of taking a top dog off every day for 10 minutes and saying, What do we think could we could do to improve this? And then as we start to pile through, we then maybe have a weekly or you know a twice a week meeting to say, Here are the stats we're looking at, guys. And this is kind of I always call it the airplane crash scenario. I don't want to put any blame anywhere, we've got no issues, but let's have a look at these numbers, let's work out why we got there, and then let's see if we can then take away and improve. And then we've got into that lovely continuous cycle, haven't we? Exactly. And it and it and it all starts with that simple visibility. What's what am what what am I actually trying to achieve today and how am I doing against that? And if I don't hit it, it's not, you failed and beat you up, it's what have we learned today? And it might be, you know, if that happens every day for weeks, you're saying we're actually overloading that team. They don't have a chance to win because we're optimistic in our planning. So we need to do s so then you go, right. So we need to go back to planning and say we need to make a bit of an adjustment over here. So it builds this cycle of learning and problem solving over the weeks. But it's step it's step by step by step. But I think it all starts with that basis of daily routine, and then you get yeah, that you next then have to get to so now we know what everybody's doing, how do we make sure that the thing they're doing is the right thing that fills their puzzle piece in the big picture? You know, so is the thing that is there is the thing we're saying there do it, you know, like for the warehouse, you know. They their number one job was make sure that production have got all the we've got all the parts ready for production for tomorrow. That became their number one goal because before they didn't know that's what their main job was. What I especially like about it is I can imagine in a practical situation going through to the sales team and saying, This is what we've agreed with the implementation team. This is what we've agreed with the manufacturing team. So when you're selling things, bear in mind these are their targets. Do you think their targets are correct? Because at the moment we're selling based on a production level here, and practically we can only hit this level here. So you guys need to work out do you sell differently? What targets do you move to? So if people have listened to this, Harvey, and they've thought, you know what, I've loved this. I can completely understand this situation. This feels like us. Who would you love to work with? And how do they get in contact with you? Okay, sim simple thing. I mean, I would love to work with companies that have recognized themselves in this call. So they they've grown and they know it doesn't quite all join up. So, you know, they've they've been successful, but it's it's not working as well as it could do and as they'd like it to do. But they're a bit like me, they're buried in the alligator swamp if you like and they just need somebody to come alongside them and help them see their way out which is what I can do you know what I can do. Two ways to get in touch with me really one is connect with me on LinkedIn and drop me a message. very easy to find me there or go to my website veracityoxford.com and there's a contact page on there where you can either drop me a message or book a 30 minute virtual coffee and we can have a chat and see how I might be able to help them. Beautiful. Thank you very much, Harvey. No, my absolute pleasure. That was really enjoyable. And as always, it's made me think differently about what I do. So, what do you think to that, Bill? I think there's one thing he didn't say, which I think comes before the visibility bit, which is like making sure that everybody in your team and you as the business owner. knows what everybody like what their roles are and what they should be doing and what like where the responsibilities lie. So I think you need to have that that bit first, then the visibility, then you get the problems, then you can improve them. And it's like a little cycle, isn't it? So no drawing that out. I'm gonna go against you on that, you know. Ooh. I'm gonna say I'm gonna say that even if people don't fully understand what they should be doing If you can get that visibility of what so say we need a hundred widgets a day, we can then look at basing the job descriptions around the target as opposed to doing the job descriptions and then working out what the big targets are. So yeah, I'm gonna say visibility, we need a hundred widgets a day. Okay, how do we break that down? Okay, so Bob, you know, who designs the first bit of the widget, he can only do fifty a day. Right, okay. So We need to work out what's a realistic target for Bob. Do we need to have two Bobs? Can we improve his process? How do we get and so then okay, right, Bob, what you need to do, you your job role now is first ten minutes of the day planning, you need. Yeah. So I think yeah, I it could go either way, couldn't it? I think you could flip those things either way. But if you're not sure what success looks like, I'm not sure you can build the job description off it. Yeah. Yeah, no, I c I can see that. Do you think that like when businesses start and they're small and you you like grow and somewhere along the way you kind of lose that control and lose the your hands around everything? How do you think you change that? Like if you could go back and do it again, what would you do differently? Because this is a problem that you see all the time. So sometimes I think with running a business, you're like, why do you make the same mistakes? when you know the answer. And I know some of that is probably ego or pig headedness or, you know, I know what I'm doing. But more often than not, most businesses end up in that place. Why do you think that happens and how do you think that can be changed or stopped? Sorry, I don't know why I'm asking you this question. Just a man. The people who do well in business tend to be let's take the Dragon's Den scenario. They've got a blueprint Very much as as Harvey had today, that they just implement on every business, don't they? And that's probably what reaches you get discrepancies in this. So you get someone who's the greatest Lamborghini mechanic in the world will be able to run their business however they want because they can command any price they want and turn business away. For the rest of us, I think there is a system that you can implement that works consistently. And probably the best people tend to be the salespeople who start a business because they immediately know that they need to rely on a lot of people around them. Whereas we as the engineers feel that, well, I can do the engineering bit, and I'm pretty sure I can bash out the sales because I know that I'm really good at engineering. People will just see what a shiny widget I've made and they'll want to buy it. And so I think it's us that really struggles to ask for the help and to start to systemise. And a lot of us, I think, is afraid of what does success look like? Let's set not the big hairy goal or whatever it's called, but what is the goal that I need to hit this year in sales or marketing or production or whatever it is that I can move towards. And that's the bit where we have to take ourselves out of the business and then look at what we're doing to get towards that goal and whether that's the right thing. And then going into that process. And again it's that visibility of setting the goals to start off with. To then see how the department's working. And I think that scales up for bigger and bigger businesses. That some of it is that we're a little bit afraid, and some of it is that we need those visible goals and they need to be right. Because how else do you manage the team? You don't need to know how the widget's being made on a minutiae, but you do need to know that we need to make a hundred widgets a day to break even, and the department's made 87 yesterday. I'm gonna go and sit down with them and say, okay, guys. why while we're behind target, what more can we do? Hm. I also think sometimes you just end up there and you don't realise how. Yeah, a hundred percent. You always end up there. If you don't what do they say, you know, would you drive your car without a sat nav? Would you drive without a map? And often we are driving without a map or a sat nav because we haven't got time to go and pick one up from the shop because we just need to get there. And it feels like the best thing we can do is to put our foot down and drive quicker. Yeah. It's interesting. It was it it's really it's a really good, it's a pra really practical framework though, isn't it? That's really useful for any business. So I thought it was a good what one thing. I thought it was a great what one thing. Is there anything that you're gonna take away and implement? I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I think there's probably some and I don't quite know what it what it is, but I think there's some and I don't know whether it's training, but there's something about investing in it I think it is training into the team to help them as they become managers or as they be they need to take more responsibility so that they're the people that can then be going, right, well I need visibility of this and they can do that cycle for you rather than me doing that cycle for everything in the business, which I I'm just not going to be able to do that and I won't do that. And we all know that. So it's then how you get how you switch it to get your managers to be able to do that. And I don't think me just going, this is a framework, off you go. I feel like there's like a missing bit between, you know, because I again like if you promote people through your business, so if you get somebody that comes in like in my world, they come in as a bookkeeper, they're really good at bookkeeping, they you know, they can do it really well. And then you're like, well actually I want to reinvest in my people. I w I want to have a good team. I trust them. They've been with the business for so long. I want them to go to the next level. You know, you can get the technical side there, but then as you start bringing people management into it or process management into it, it's a different skill set. So I think there's something around that as well that I think I need to think about. And this has just brought that to the forefront of my mind. What about you? My target will be to take everybody out of their role for twenty minutes once a week and just look through what they're doing and to set those visibility goals with them. And as we progress, I think exactly as Harvey said, as we progress, we then we're probably similar and every business owner is likely similar in that we don't like the boring little things. We like the I'm gonna take us from 10 miles an hour to a hundred miles an hour. This is where I want to go. And the reason our staff didn't open businesses is that they like to go from ten to twelve to fifteen to twenty. And I think that's the really important bit about taking your staff offline for twenty minutes. And firstly, what do we think success looks like? Let's set those goals and let's really slowly, and it will definitely aggravate me if I go through it because it's likely a three month, six month process. Let's really slowly start to transition towards success. And I don't think there's any reason that we shouldn't be doing it. And when you were saying that I'm not sure how to take my staff through that framework, and I'm I'm scared because I don't know it's myself, I think that's again the same thing. We all as business owners, we want to be perfect. before we try and teach our staff because we don't want to teach them incorrectly. But actually let's just give them half an hour out of the week and just sit down and say, How do you think things are going? What do you think your one biggest target should be? What do I think it should be? Let's have a chat about it and let's see how we move towards it. You know what this is, Phil? This is so you keep talking about resurrecting our implementation of this and this it this I feel like this is it. Yeah, I think this is a really great point of a game to buddy because I think it also plays off shout back to Alistair with marginal gains and I think Harvey's taken the marginal gains theory and then he's put a framework around it to implement marginal gains. Well if you have enjoyed listening to this week's What One Thing, please give us a like, a subscribe and share it with any of your friends. I'm Phil Davenport from AFirmIT. And I'm Hayley Baxter from Corburgh Accounting. Thank you for listening to What One Thing.