Leading Through Change with Bill Tansey

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Unknown
Oh, hey. Oh, hey.

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Speaker 3
Well, welcome.

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Speaker 1
To blue Collar start up, everybody. The podcast where hard work means big ideas. This is your home for real talk, real stories and real strategies from the frontlines of life and the business of the trades. I’m one of your hosts, Mike Nelson from Five Towers Media.

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Speaker 2
And I’m here, their host, Derek Foster of Daigle Cleaning Systems. What’s going on, Mike?

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Speaker 1
You know, living the dream over here on the farm. Derek. It’s, it’s hunting season, which is very exciting. And, I’m happy to be out in the woods. Rifle opens on Saturday, and, yeah, if you’re looking at. That’s where I’ll be.

00;00;49;19 – 00;00;52;28
Speaker 2
Well, you know what happens at hunting season and all the deer go away.

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Speaker 1
It’s pretty wild. Yeah. We’ll see em. It is at your spot on. I mean, it’s nothing like the amount of deer that I see and where I see them. And as soon as hunting season starts, it’s like they’re looking at the same calendar. We are. They know they do now. They do? Sure. But, Yeah. Hoping to hope and see some horns.

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Speaker 2
See stuff. Yeah. You going out? And hopefully it’s nice this weekend. I don’t know what, starting to cool off, obviously, but.

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Speaker 1
Yeah, I’ll take the cold. The cold is helpful. Get some movement a little more, and, but even if it’s raining, I’ll still be out there. I don’t, I’m not a fair weather hunter. I’ll go out regardless of what the conditions are, but, Yeah, I’ve already been out a couple of times with my, with my crossbow.

00;01;40;07 – 00;01;47;09
Speaker 1
I didn’t I didn’t get any. I saw a couple doze. No shots, though. But, they’re out there. We’ll see em. We’ll get them.

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Speaker 2
Well, it’s good. Good luck, man. I hope you get one.

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Speaker 1
Yeah. Thank you, thank you. I know we’re going to introduce our our guest here in a second, but before I do that, I just want to give a quick shout out to our sponsors. Of course, the folks over at People’s Martin Electric, MLB construction, Binotto construction, Michaels Group, of course, Scott, Stacy, the whole team over at Catamount Consulting.

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Speaker 1
Derek’s team over our Daigle cleaning system. And then, of course, our team over at Five Towers Media. And, also just want to preface, too, if you’re listening to the show, you know, we’ve changed the format recently. We do, our podcast here about 30 and 40 minutes. And then we’ve also, created a Patreon account for people.

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Speaker 1
And this is really where the rubber meets the road. You can go in there. The kind of conversations we’re having are built specifically around trying to help blue collar folks build their business from the ground up, make adjustments, make changes. And, so we’re really excited about adding that component. We’ve already got a few things up in there, and we’ll be continuing to add to it every week.

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Speaker 1
So, link is going to be in the show notes. So check out the link. Check out our Patreon account. A whopping $5 a month, folks. Big money, but worth every penny for what you’re going to get in return. So, and speaking of growing your business, Bill Tansey. Hey. What’s up? Welcome back man.

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Speaker 3
Hey guys. Appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks. That’s a little too warm to be hanging deer, so it’s probably good that you waited to get that shot.

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Speaker 1
You know, I it is a little warm up here, but, you know, you can you can hang them for, you know, 24, 48 hours in this kind of weather. And then, you know, you got to get them chunked up and put it in a fridge for a few days to age a little longer. But, where there’s a will, there’s a way, though.

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Speaker 3
Here, let me know. Let me know if you need a hand.

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Speaker 1
I will, I will, don’t worry. I’ll get you some of that back strap to, once I, once I get one that will work for food. Yeah. Bill. So the name of your cut, you obviously you’re involved in a few things, but, you know, we’re here specifically to talk about the work that you’re doing. And the blue and gray collar spaces, with your company, the op shop.

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Speaker 1
You want to, kind of give our our listening viewing audience just kind of a rundown of topics and what you guys are up to.

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Speaker 3
Sure. Yeah. Appreciate the, so the Opic shop is the operational excellence shop, and, essentially what we do is, lead or guide organizations, through substantial change. And that change could be rapid growth, rapid reduction, mergers and acquisitions. Rarely start up, but we can talk about the economics of that later. Resurgence, for example, resurgence from Covid was a big thing for a while.

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Speaker 3
Companies that got beat up bad through the the New York State or other lockdowns during Covid, so we we lead companies to success can change, to excellence and, the important differentiator is it’s on the operations side of the business. So when I look at a business, I look at it split into two halves. Quite simply, one half is the commercial side.

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Speaker 3
That’s where you play, for example, Mike, on the sales and marketing side of a business constantly. And then the operations side is where the crank is getting turned. You know, if you will, to make the proverbial sausage or to get to provide, to build the product or provide the service that’s bringing the value into the company.

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Speaker 3
So I’m typically deployed on the operational side of businesses, have dabbled a little bit on the, on the, commercial side, but pretty rarely. So, really focus on leading businesses to change on the operations side of things. And, and of course, businesses that have a large operation are things like construction companies or factories or production facilities or distribution facilities or anything like that, where there’s a substantial component, that’s the operation.

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Speaker 3
There’s a lot of cost. And, there’s a lot to a lot to fix and improve towards excellence.

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Speaker 1
Yeah. And I know, I know we’re going to get into it a little bit more. But, you know, one of the things I always loved about the way that you operate is where some consultants just kind of come in and talk to you and kind of talk at you and tell you what to do and then expect you to go do it.

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Speaker 1
Whereas with you, if I’m not mistaken, you really get your hands in there and and help them do the work. Is that a fair assessment?

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Speaker 3
Yeah. Well said. I appreciate that as well. The you’re right. I always struggle with what to what to call the op shop. So if I’m talking to somebody succinctly I’ll just say it. It’s a boutique consultancy, but we’re really not a consultancy. It’s really internal leadership. And that interim leadership may be chief operating officer for hire, or it may be to augment or support the operations team or the leadership team on an interim basis.

00;06;28;21 – 00;06;55;28
Speaker 3
So, if I call myself a coach, everybody thinks you’re a life coach or health coach or religion coach, you know, and if I say consultant, again, they’re used to consultants talking about, telling them what to do and then auditing later, for example. And that’s not the case. So I do come in, the order of operations typically come in and clearly define the problem, and we go through a detailed, problem definition, which has, you know, five, if you will, kind of key components that we align around the problem.

00;06;55;28 – 00;07;15;19
Speaker 3
And then once the problem is defined, we put together usually a phased approach to attack it, sometimes one phase but usually a phased approach. So we get an early win and build some traction and then follow through with the ultimate solution. So we put that plan together. I usually lead the team, through the execution of that plan.

00;07;15;22 – 00;07;35;14
Speaker 3
And then towards completion, I’ll start to kind of fade to the back and make sure the team can sustain the work and the changes that we put in place. And at that point, if things go really well, often grateful that the executive sponsor will ask me to solve another problem, and I want to stick it around, or, or I kind of, again, fade to the back.

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Speaker 3
And I’ve made a new network of professional friends, and I move on to the next gig.

00;07;39;28 – 00;08;14;25
Speaker 1
Yeah. Which, again, I just think is the best approach. And, you know, you talk to so many coaches and consultants and it really is just kind of like people giving you ideas. And it can be hard to take action on those ideas. So having people involved in the actual action I think is is absolutely huge. And also and this will kind of lead in your background though, and I think we’ve talked about this before, but very valuable for the audience is the fact that you’re not coming from a place of not having done the kinds of things that you do with your with your clients.

00;08;14;25 – 00;08;31;08
Speaker 1
Right. Like a lot of consultants and coaches in many, many different industries, the, you know, like I always talk about it with business coaches. The first business those folks ever owned was their business coaching business, and they came out of another role or something. And, and I just that always kind of sticks in my craw a little bit.

00;08;31;08 – 00;08;49;07
Speaker 1
And it’s like, well, if you never ran a business, how are you really qualified to tell me how to run my business? Whereas with you going in with operations, you that’s where you spent your career, right? So can you kind of tell us a little bit about, you know, where you spent your time over the last 20 years and.

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Speaker 1
Yeah, that.

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Speaker 3
That is a differentiator. And it’s funny to hear you say that. I’m glad you kind of acknowledge it. But there it seems like consulting or coaching is kind of become popular in recent years. And there are a lot of people who want to go in and kind of tell somebody else what to do. I get in and do it with them and kind of lead them through it in practice.

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Speaker 3
And the reason I can do that is I did spend, my entire career in those types of roles, so left engineering school, was focused on the commercialization new products or bringing new products to market, which obviously is the operations side of the business. And then, picked up an MBA along the way and led a bunch of different operations inside, relatively large, and eventually some of the largest businesses in the world.

00;09;36;13 – 00;09;57;04
Speaker 3
And, and, for example, the, you know, if started in new product commercialization, new product deliveries were started towards the end of my quote. Well, the the careers broken in three phases. So phase one new product delivery or the commercialization of products. Phase two leading some pretty substantial operations. And then phase three, I consider what I’m doing today.

00;09;57;07 – 00;10;20;09
Speaker 3
So at the end of phase three, just as an example, I had about depending on the day, 300 to 350, what we call technical advisors under my leadership for the installation of wind turbine, generators. So, and that was a global operation at the time. I was charged with taking that from, from a U.S. centric and German center to a global operation.

00;10;20;09 – 00;10;35;13
Speaker 3
So there was a change or was a problem we needed to grow. We needed to leave Germany and the USA and go around the rest of the world. How are we going to do that? And how are you going to take this team and go be successful? So that was kind of, I shouldn’t say my last. And that was my second to last.

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Speaker 3
And but the largest, reach, if you will. And then the second, the last stand was in the oil industry before, before pushing out of my own.

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Speaker 1
And, or I don’t know if you’re able. Are you able to say the names in any of those companies or is that sure?

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Speaker 3
Yeah. And of course, it’s on my LinkedIn as well. I don’t like to lead with that. It feels. It feels,

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Speaker 1
It feels like. I know you don’t want to be, like, name dropping, but I but some of the names are obviously recognizable and I think helps to speak to scale and. Sure. Yeah.

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Speaker 3
So, early on in new product commercialization was with Boston Scientific Corporation. At the time, it was the largest medical device manufacturer in the world. Later there were some startups, and then back to big business again. And I was with the data her corporation, which really became the basis for a lot of the work I do today.

00;11;23;06 – 00;11;40;29
Speaker 3
The data, her business system, people may be familiar with the Denver business system, or we can talk about it if appropriate. And how it has broad application and all sorts of industries today. And then, leaving Denver, the Denver Business Systems, with a small company called General Electric for a while. And, that’s.

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Speaker 1
A small company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was gonna say I could have sworn that she was somewhere on that list, too. I mean, there. Monstrous. I don’t even know how big they are at this point. I know they had a lot of changes in the last few, you know, ten years. But.

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Speaker 3
Yeah, they’re huge, and they do a really great job of controlling their external branding. And, so if you haven’t worked in GE or if you’ve only worked in GE, you usually think really highly of union. And there’s been ebbs and flows and changes over the years in GE. Just to be clear. But the 8020 rule, you know, I left Danaher, which is the pinnacle of operational excellence.

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Speaker 3
Definitely was at the time. There’s others that are, you know, catching up or playing similar today. But I left Danaher to go to GE. When I got to GE, my eyes were so big, I was like, I can’t believe this place operates like this. You know, in comparison to Danaher, which was like, you know, whistle while you work, things are cruising along.

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Speaker 3
Everything’s done right, if you will, and simply get the GE and the level of complexity to do simple things was staggering. But but yeah. So it provided a lot of opportunity for me. Again, when I was inside GE, I was repeatedly charged with fixing problems. I kind of worked as a, Yeah. Well, similar to what I do today, but internal to GE source, almost like an internal consultant in when projects were really large.

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Speaker 3
I could pull from a GE internal consulting agency that was based out of the headquarters in Connecticut, and I could bring them in to support the work I was doing on site, for example. Yeah. But yeah, yeah. So similar work they’re solving complex problems inside the General Electric business.

00;13;12;21 – 00;13;35;05
Speaker 1
Which I have to assume, you know, solving complex problems for organizations that large. I have to assume that some of those that problem solving and some of those processes that used to do that scales down, maybe not to the startup level, but scales down to, you know, our organizations that are leading 100 or 200 people as opposed to, you know, leading.

00;13;35;05 – 00;13;38;13
Speaker 1
I mean, I assume GE must have thousands of employees.

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Speaker 3
Worldwide, tens of thousands. I don’t even know. Yeah. You’re absolutely right. So the the nice thing about big businesses is, you get a chance to try this stuff out, and if you fall down and scrape your knees, it doesn’t put them out of business. Right. So there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity to learn and really quickly.

00;13;56;01 – 00;14;15;08
Speaker 3
And also, you know, it turns out that it’s great for your resume or your LinkedIn page because, you know, efforts in GE returns, you know, 20 million in savings, you know, 20 million in savings is more than the annual revenue of some of the businesses I support today. Excuse me. So, you know, they, it allows you to put some numbers on the scoreboard.

00;14;15;08 – 00;14;28;20
Speaker 1
So, Bill, when we were first getting going, you had mentioned about the. And I forget how you phrase it, but it’s the five parts or five things that you work on with the. Can you can you explain that a little bit?

00;14;28;23 – 00;14;39;05
Speaker 3
But yeah. So, in under the scope of operational excellence, there’s, there’s a, there’s a handful of pillars, if you will, that are that we’re focused on. I think that’s what you’re asking about.

00;14;39;10 – 00;14;40;00
Speaker 1
Me, sir.

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Speaker 3
Yeah. So,

00;14;45;12 – 00;15;06;03
Speaker 3
Daily operations is, is probably the first one that we talk about. So daily operations. I learned a phrase in Denver that stuck with me and that was, are the trains running on time? What it simply means is if the trains are running on time, if your daily operation is is doing well and producing money, then you earn the right to go play in other areas and do more.

00;15;06;06 – 00;15;23;04
Speaker 3
So first things first, you have to make sure the money machine is working in the company. People stay employed is work and so are the trains running on time. So how are daily operations working? So that’s one area that I focus. And of course when you’ve got daily operations running, you’ve got day to day problems that need to be solved.

00;15;23;04 – 00;15;46;06
Speaker 3
So problem solving is the second major area. So if daily operations turn red in a specific area, we need to get in and solve that problem and get the trains back on time. And then of course if those things are working well, you earn the right to go and be innovative and to, to figure out what the next thing is that you’re going to launch or bring to market or make available.

00;15;46;09 – 00;16;11;14
Speaker 3
That’s going to help push the company down the road. And I use a tool that when I use, I call it strategy deployment. And it’s based in something called motion planning or policy deployment, which is all the work I do. None of the work that I do is a built into original. These are all world class, long practice things that I was exposed to and did a big business now kind of bring forward into the work I do.

00;16;11;14 – 00;16;29;08
Speaker 3
So my my strategy were to lead businesses through, you know what what three years down the road looks like. We back that to what this next year look like. And then what is next year look like. We put that into sizable bites in a way that are easy to understand and visualize. On one page. And that kind of becomes the marching orders for the year.

00;16;29;10 – 00;16;49;15
Speaker 3
And, then we check in on that process locally. So that’s, that’s strategy deployment. And the key piece there is it’s not strategy. It’s not annual strategy. It’s strategy deployment. Meaning it doesn’t matter if it’s not deployed and successful. So we can get together and talk about it. But if that’s all that happens as you talk about, we get excited about it and then nothing changes.

00;16;49;15 – 00;17;11;06
Speaker 3
You know that’s no good. So we we deploy it or carry it all the way through the result. And then the final area is is the team. And and that area is, is tremendously important that you’ve got the right people on the team that are there sitting in the right seats and crystal clear on what success looks like in that seat and are able to go be successful.

00;17;11;08 – 00;17;30;05
Speaker 3
And, a minute ago, I mentioned how positively I thought of Danaher, went out because of the dinner business system. But when I was at Danaher, I had left a startup where I was exposed to an incredible leader, and that leader put a lot of emphasis on leading people. And I learned a tremendous amount, especially leading people through change.

00;17;30;07 – 00;17;50;29
Speaker 3
So when I got to Danaher said, what about the people? They said, Dan, her business system. And I said, no, no, no. Like, what about the people? Like how you lead the people, the culture, Dan, her business system. And I was like, you guys don’t get it, you know? So since then, I think Danaher has matured a little bit in the people leadership side versus the process leadership side, which is the other stuff we talked about.

00;17;51;01 – 00;18;17;00
Speaker 3
But the, that’s an important piece. So I take the the people leadership component from Roger, the mentor that I worked with. Years ago and some of his teachings and some of the other kind of schools of thought around that kind of thing forward as well into the work I do with these teams. So we structure the people in the right spots and, and, build the people up in the right way so that they can feel good about coming to work and winning.

00;18;17;03 – 00;18;30;25
Speaker 1
What Bill, when you’re, when you’re working with these teams, like what do you see as the biggest challenge that these teams are facing or that. Or maybe it’s challenges. But what kind of crops up often for these folks.

00;18;30;27 – 00;19;06;28
Speaker 3
So yeah the challenges the challenges very. So now that I’m working with, you know, I work with what I would consider midsize business, I guess I should look up a definition and find out what Google says. Midsize businesses. But the businesses I work with are typically, under 100 million of revenue a year. Right. So in those businesses, and then they go down to a companies that are around 10 million or a little less, maybe 6 or 7 million, so let’s say 7 million to 100 million in revenue.

00;19;07;00 – 00;19;29;13
Speaker 3
And the problems, if you will, change typically a little bit depending on where you are in that spectrum. But generally speaking, one of the biggest problems I see is the division of responsibility isn’t clearly understood. So what is my role in this company? How do I contribute to the overall success and how is that the same or different than the person next to me, or the person in the next factory or building, or what have you?

00;19;29;15 – 00;20;00;27
Speaker 3
So clear? Division responsibility is absolutely critical to success. And, that’s something there’s also often a gap. And, and the second probably biggest gap beside and they often go together to be clear, but the second biggest gap besides unclear division of responsibility is probably inconsistent execution. And so what does that mean? It means if I’m running the machine, I run it one way, and the person running the machine next to me runs it slightly different.

00;20;00;27 – 00;20;26;08
Speaker 3
Or the person on second shift that replaces me behaves a little different, or frame in the back of the house and someone’s frame in the front of the house. And, and we are operating differently. We’re not operating the same. And when there’s inconsistency in operation, mathematically, statistically, it’s impossible to measure your success when that’s a bigger, longer story on college level statistics we don’t need to get into.

00;20;26;08 – 00;20;47;19
Speaker 3
But the point is, is if if we don’t operate all the same, measuring how we’re doing is actually irrelevant. Like it’s of no good. You cannot make good decisions if you’re not behaving the same. Number one. Number two, if we’re not all operating the same, it’s nearly impossible to capture lessons learned, good and bad and drive them across the organization, right?

00;20;47;19 – 00;21;12;15
Speaker 3
If you get everybody operating the same, you could often raise the overall level of performance. Not quite as good as, quote, the best guy, but damn close to as good as the best guy. And so between clear division of responsibility and operating repeatedly and consistently, those are probably at the root of just about everything that we go solve in one way or another.

00;21;12;17 – 00;21;22;10
Speaker 1
And so when you’re working with folks and you’re seeing these problems, like, what are some of the things that you do with them that helps them overcome those?

00;21;22;12 – 00;21;26;22
Speaker 3
So.

00;21;26;24 – 00;21;29;17
Speaker 1
And I know it’s probably situational, you know, depending. But yeah.

00;21;29;20 – 00;21;57;05
Speaker 3
Yeah, but if we back it out to big picture, I usually more recently I often start with a what’s called a value stream mapping, a VSM exercise. And that’s a facilitated exercise where the leaders from across the business are in the room with me, and we visualize what’s happening on the production floor or in the operation.

00;21;57;07 – 00;22;26;18
Speaker 3
And we visualize it using different colored post-it notes on a wall. And you know, if you were to walk in and look at the wall, it’s almost dizzying, like, what the heck is this diarrhea of post-it notes on the wall? But if you’ve been in the room for the few day event, it becomes very clear what’s on the wall, and it enables the people working on delivering value to very quickly see, some of the things I mentioned on clear division, responsibility and consistency and how we’re executing.

00;22;26;20 – 00;22;47;20
Speaker 3
Ultimately, when we come into the room and we do this value stream mapping exercise, we also train them on something called waste, and they look through the lens of the eight wastes to look at the value stream map and figure out where waste exists in the map in these eight types of waste, and then we’re able to chase after and fix those areas.

00;22;47;20 – 00;23;09;12
Speaker 3
So in essence, we visualize the problem. So we get alignment across the team. That’s important. And once we’ve visualized it and gotten alignment, we’ve also created sufficient dissatisfaction that team who thought last week when they came to work, they were doing pretty good. Their boss didn’t think they were doing that. Great. That’s why I’m there now. They realized, wait, we could do a lot better.

00;23;09;12 – 00;23;23;24
Speaker 3
There’s a lot of waste that’s been identified. I see it now. I didn’t see it a week ago. So now they have that that dissatisfaction. Most good people say, well, help us fix it. What do we do to make this better? Like, I want to do better. I want to be good at work, you know? I want to do good in my role.

00;23;24;00 – 00;23;30;19
Speaker 3
How do we do that? And so that’s what leads into the to the follow on steps.

00;23;30;22 – 00;23;37;03
Speaker 1
I don’t know if it’s secret sauce or not, but you mentioned the eight types of waste. Can you tell us a couple of the the common ones. Yeah.

00;23;37;03 – 00;23;52;17
Speaker 3
So, absolutely. And it’s not secret sauce at all. So you can Google eight ways. And that’s one of the things I kind of pride myself on is anything I speak about with the teams I support, they can lead our meeting and they could YouTube or Google and find, you know, abundance of information, some good, some bad, just like any Google search.

00;23;52;17 – 00;24;18;10
Speaker 3
But they can find it. So yeah. One of the eight ways is movement or unnecessary movement, for example. So if we use like a, so recently I was exposed to a modular home building, which is pretty cool, right? It’s a mix of carpentry, framing and, production. A factory. Right. They kind of come together where when you, when you build a home on site, it’s not a factory.

00;24;18;10 – 00;24;45;10
Speaker 3
You’re, you’re framing a home on site. And in a factory, you’re usually not banging nails. So this brings the two things together. An example of unnecessary movement when we look at through waste would be for example, a inappropriately set up belt where the person who is running a framing exercise doesn’t have, both of the nails required to execute the framing on his belt at the time that he’s doing it, for example.

00;24;45;10 – 00;25;07;11
Speaker 3
Right. So for some reason, they are available to him and he has to go somewhere to get these nails, for example. Right. Might seem to a normal guy to run back to the truck all out of nails for the roofing gone or whatever, right? Well, that’s not normal in a factory. There’s other things you can do differently. And that’s so we would identify that as for example, movement waste.

00;25;07;14 – 00;25;28;28
Speaker 3
And that, you know, that’s one of the eight obviously seven more. But in, in essence, I’ll give you another example that’s a little bit more of a layman example. Only once ever has somebody raised their hand and had the right answer to this. Everybody else when I when I ask somebody, how do you take out your kitchen garbage, they walk me through the same steps.

00;25;29;04 – 00;25;51;16
Speaker 3
They go to the cabinet, they open it, they take out their garbage pail. They realize it’s full at that point. They cinch the bag, they lift the bad guy, the garbage can, and they carry it outside to put it in the county waste or whatever receptacle. They walk back in the house, they get a clean bag. They put it in the pail, they put the pail back in the cupboard and they close the cupboard right.

00;25;51;16 – 00;25;55;25
Speaker 3
Every only once. So somebody’s given me a process other than essentially that.

00;25;56;22 – 00;26;15;29
Speaker 3
There’s a ton of movement waste in that. Right? So if we think of that from a factory, what we want to do is open the cap, the cabinet, pull the pail out, pull the bag out of the pail. We want to set the bag down for a moment. Grab the fresh bag, put it in, put the pail back in, then carry it out to the outside garbage receptacle.

00;26;16;02 – 00;26;33;26
Speaker 3
Now we don’t have to go back to the kitchen sink or wherever the cupboard was again. Now we can move on to the next step, right? So 50% of our movement is complete waste in a way that we normally take out the garbage. Right. And and that’s usually something people can relate to. So it’s, it’s using those types of examples.

00;26;33;26 – 00;26;43;25
Speaker 3
But in the production environment or in the, in the construction environment or the agriculture environment or what have you, that we go after that, we go after fixing.

00;26;43;27 – 00;27;05;17
Speaker 1
It, you know, that’s exactly how I change my garbage bill and I, I have movement waste. And to be fair, though, I’m just thinking about, like, when I’m doing projects around the farm, the amount of movement waste that I have when I’m looking for the tool I didn’t put back where it’s supposed to go. And I can’t remember where this thing is or I can’t find my damn glasses.

00;27;05;19 – 00;27;07;11
Speaker 1
You would probably laugh watching.

00;27;07;11 – 00;27;18;00
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah. And you can imagine how popular I become with the husbands and wives of the people that are in the room with me because they go home now and want to fix everything at the house, you know? So it’s, I.

00;27;18;00 – 00;27;23;11
Speaker 2
Was just going to say the rest of my day is going to be. Yeah. Thinking about all the wasted movement.

00;27;23;16 – 00;27;23;28
Speaker 1
About.

00;27;23;28 – 00;27;46;27
Speaker 3
The movement. Yeah. And so that’s a simple one to understand. At the other end of the spectrum is, is inventory imagery a waste? That’s another waste. And, and then all the other six waste kind of falls in between from a, from the easy to understand, if you will, to takes a little more to understand. But at the end of the day, the eight ways are structured brainstorming technique that allow everybody to look through new lenses and see stuff that they couldn’t see before.

00;27;46;27 – 00;28;13;07
Speaker 3
And we apply that against the visual that I have them build out on the wall. And that’s usually how we set our charter. And then everybody in the room, by the time we leave the room, will will learn how to action plan properly. They’ll build an action plan, that helps resolve the waste we identified and and I’ll usually coach that through the successful completion of the action plan, give them templates and methods and processes to have them fix the things that are that are within their charge to fix after that.

00;28;13;07 – 00;28;17;24
Speaker 3
So that’s kind of a big picture. Look at, you know, like what an engagement might be like.

00;28;17;26 – 00;28;27;08
Speaker 1
Yeah. And I’m just thinking that those eight ways I assume they’re pretty applicable to most business, every business and industry.

00;28;27;10 – 00;28;50;23
Speaker 3
Yeah. Everything completely, completely ubiquitous, applicable anywhere personally life, although it does tend to annoy partners and spouses. And, definitely any, any work environment. And that’s, that’s one of the things that sometimes is difficult for people to understand. And they kind of look at me funny, like, really, I’ve been in this business, whatever it is, marginal home building.

00;28;50;23 – 00;29;07;21
Speaker 3
I’ve been in the business model home building for 30 years, and you are going to show up and tell me how to do it. And and then the answer is, yeah. And the reason for that is the methods and the tools and the processes, things like the eight ways and the value stream mapping that I spoke about as well as a whole host of other methods.

00;29;07;23 – 00;29;50;07
Speaker 3
They’re completely ubiquitous. Like it just doesn’t matter. They’re applicable anywhere. So somebody I work with once said, Bill, you’re an expert at becoming an expert. And, and it’s it’s kind of like a false pretense. I’m an expert at seeing less than optimal situations, and those situations are the same. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a custom home builder, a modular home builder, or you make leather for aircrafts, which is one of the gigs I’ve just finished up recently, a production facility that makes leather for FAA approved, aircraft interiors like Air Force One, for example, which is seem kind of neat, but point is, is I didn’t know anything about making leather till

00;29;50;07 – 00;30;09;28
Speaker 3
I got there. I learned a bunch. I don’t know nearly as much as the people that work there, but I’m able to apply the same, mindset and tools and, and have, similarly good outcomes. And, and, you know, in the case of the leather is my first time ever in a leather factory. We got done with the first initiative, and, the executive sponsors, like, hey, you want to do another one, you know?

00;30;09;28 – 00;30;20;11
Speaker 3
So and we did two more. So, it kind of just goes to show that this, this tool set, is that broadly applicable.

00;30;20;14 – 00;30;31;29
Speaker 1
I know that we got to move over shortly here to the Patreon section of the podcast. And, my incessant talking has not given Derek an opportunity to ask any questions, because before.

00;30;32;02 – 00;30;33;09
Speaker 2
You’re asking all the right one.

00;30;33;09 – 00;31;02;06
Speaker 1
So, Thanks, Derek. Okay. By me? But one thing I, you know, I did want to ask was, you know, if someone’s listening to this podcast and, and they’re thinking about challenges they have in their business, whether it’s, you know, fabrication or plumbing and heating or construction or, you know, any of the trades, what are going to be some like, signs or symptoms that they may want to have a conversation with you.

00;31;02;08 – 00;31;26;29
Speaker 3
Yeah. So the most common sign is, is, they’re feeling an elevated level, you know, as an owner of a business or feeling an elevated level of stress. So maybe that’s, you know, working 80 hours or 60 hours a week. Maybe that’s go away for vacation, come back and everything’s a mess. Maybe that’s, you know, I, I can’t I got 20 people in the business today.

00;31;26;29 – 00;31;42;19
Speaker 3
A year ago I had 30 people in the business and I was pulling my hair out, couldn’t couldn’t deal with it. So now I’m back to 20 people, right? So those kinds of feelings or that messaging, is a perfect time to reach out and say, hey, you know, there’s got to be a way to do this better.

00;31;42;19 – 00;32;04;03
Speaker 3
Like, I, you know, I want to keep growing. I want to stay in this. But, like, I just can’t manage it all. That’s the impetus to start digging in and defining the problem. And then once we define the problem using some or all or more than just the tools we spoke about and and getting an understood get in position, so yeah, I think that’s a bigger sign.

00;32;04;05 – 00;32;28;15
Speaker 3
Now some more obvious stuff is excuse me, I had a client who there was a change in Medicare reimbursement rates that impacted the service they offered, even though they work in private sector. And that changed Medicare reimbursement rates, reduced their margins significantly. And all of a sudden, overnight, with a reduction margin, they were they were losing $700,000 a year, negative cash flow of $7,000 a year.

00;32;28;18 – 00;32;45;27
Speaker 3
So, yeah, we got to do something quick because we can only and they at the time they were like, I don’t roughly 8 million in revenue. So they, you know, 8 million revenue, but they’re going 700 backwards a year and it doesn’t take longer for the end to come. So that’s, you know, that’s an overwhelming example. That’s easy to say.

00;32;45;27 – 00;33;04;17
Speaker 3
We have a problem right now. Something like that happens. You know, but yeah, more subtle thing. It’s just when the leadership is kind of banging their head off the wall and not having fun and not spending the energy where they want to spend it, you know, we can come in and fix that thing and get the energy twisted back to where it needs to be.

00;33;04;17 – 00;33;09;10
Speaker 1
if people want to find you, get Ahold of you. How do they do that?

00;33;09;12 – 00;33;22;20
Speaker 3
Yeah, it’s, the op shop, the apex shop.com, or Bill at the epic shop. And really the most longstanding, easiest way to find me is on LinkedIn. It’s just William J. Tansey Jr on LinkedIn.

00;33;22;25 – 00;33;31;03
Speaker 1
Awesome. Before we jump over, guys, do you got any questions? You want to jump in with or anything? You you want to know?

00;33;31;05 – 00;33;39;01
Speaker 2
No. I’m good. I think, you covered. Covered some of it. I’m. I’m excited to hear the rest of it. And, you know, the second part of the show.

00;33;39;04 – 00;33;59;01
Speaker 1
Absolutely. All right, well, we’ll jump over here in a second. Before we do. Of course. Everybody check us out on Patreon. And, jump over there and check out the other, you know, we got blogs, we got other videos, we’ve got, marketing stuff. We’ve got all sorts of things that we’re adding to that Patreon portal.

00;33;59;01 – 00;34;17;16
Speaker 1
So please jump over, check it out. Definitely check out our, our sponsors, the amazing people that help us to, you know, do the work that we’re doing and to help us give, money for tools and tuition to kids over at Boces and HVC. Very grateful, to be able to do that. And we can only do that because of some of our sponsors.

00;34;17;18 – 00;34;22;09
Speaker 1
And, appreciate everybody for listening. And, we’ll jump on over.

00;34;22;09 – 00;34;50;14
Speaker 1
And that wraps up another episode of Blue Collar Startup. A big thank you to our sponsors, Five Towers Media, Daigle Cleaning Systems, Daigle Fire Solutions, The Michaels Group, Martin Electric, MLB construction, Pinocchio Construction People, and Catamount Consulting for making this podcast possible. And thank you for tuning in. If you learned something or felt inspired. Connect with us on our website at Blue Collar Startup Bio or email us at hardhat Dot CSU at gmail.com.

00;34;50;14 – 00;35;03;07
Speaker 1
We’d love to hear your questions and topic ideas. Help us spread the word by sharing the show and following us on social media for updates. Until next time, keep on building. Keep on dreaming and keep hustling like your future depends on it.

00;35;03;07 – 00;35;18;17
Unknown
Oh, hey. Oh, hey.

00;36;38;18 – 00;36;53;28
Unknown
Oh, hey. Oh, hey.

00;36;53;28 – 00;36;55;14
Speaker 3
Yeah I think I think, you know.

00;36;55;16 – 00;37;15;14
Speaker 2
One thing that, you know, I’d like to hear a little bit more on, Bill and I think it would, would be helpful for, for listeners is navigating the change piece and merging the human element, with the process. That’s always a challenge. I’ve been through it a couple times, and it’s it’s never easy.

00;37;15;16 – 00;37;38;28
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah. So the pretty astute that you mentioned that whenever we lead change by and again I try and I try and cook things back to like simple retail nuggets. Right. Because that’s really important to to whatever it is I’m working on sustaining when I leave. So if I cook back change to its simplest. And in my mind there’s two components to change.

00;37;38;28 – 00;37;57;17
Speaker 3
There’s the process of the people. Right. So to your point, we talked about the process a little bit. Then there’s the the people component as well. And the, years ago I had a stack of books. I used to joke that my nightstand was replaced with a stack of books, and the alarm clock sat on top of the books, and there was an alarm clock.

00;37;57;17 – 00;38;15;02
Speaker 3
Still not an iPhone. So you get an idea. Like when that was. But the point is, is in that stack of books, there was a book by the Gallup organization, called First Break All the Rules. And and that really resonated with me with regard to people. So there’s a, there’s a bunch of other components of people leadership.

00;38;15;04 – 00;38;37;01
Speaker 3
But the simplest thing I think I can give back to your users is the book first Break All the Rules. I think it was called the 12 questions. And in essence, it’s a 12 question survey. And if you want your team to be happy and successful at work, they need to satisfactorily answer these 12 questions. And some of them are stuck with me more than others over the year.

00;38;37;03 – 00;38;56;06
Speaker 3
But obviously your audience can go to Amazon or whatever. As far as you know, the book is still in in production. But the questions are like, do I know what’s expected of me at work? And before we left the YouTube segment and came over here, we talked about division of responsibility. Right. Clear Division of responsibility. Do I know what’s expected of me at work?

00;38;56;08 – 00;39;16;18
Speaker 3
That’s a critical thing for someone to be successful in their job. Right? So when you talk about leading people and leading people through change, do I know what’s expected of me at work is one of those big things. It needs to be present. And like I said, the Gallup organization identifies the other 11 really clearly. Do I have an opportunity to do what I do best?

00;39;16;18 – 00;39;32;24
Speaker 3
So am I in the seat that best suits me right? So you can ask people to flex for you as a leader. But at the end of the day, you’re you’re taking from the credit card. The more you ask them to flex outside of the areas that they’re good at. So you need to line up the right people in the right spots.

00;39;32;26 – 00;39;55;00
Speaker 3
And there’s a number of ways to do that, just like anything else as well. So I think number one, from a general leadership standpoint, I think those 12 questions are key and they’re key through the change. There’s another piece, though, from a from a complete, you know, totally aside from Gallup and, and maybe it’s appropriate to talk about I know Mike.

00;39;55;00 – 00;40;20;03
Speaker 3
Sure. And we talk about it before, but that’s the model that I use to lead people through change. And and again, that’s kind of a simple model. It’s when without having something a flash up on the screen right now, sometimes it’s a little tough just verbally, but I’ll go through it very quickly. When we’re leading people through change, we, we have to first create a shared vision of what the future looks like.

00;40;20;08 – 00;40;38;16
Speaker 3
Right? So everybody has to buy into a shared vision, right? So that’s if we look at an equation that’s s shared vision. That same group of people needs to have sufficient dissatisfaction with today. Right? So that means they have to be unhappy with today. If the role of change. So do we want to lose weight or how bad do we want to lose weight?

00;40;38;16 – 00;40;59;13
Speaker 3
Do you still want to eat the ice cream or would you rather be in better shape? Like what’s more, you have to be sufficiently dissatisfied to stop eating the ice cream. It’s the same with change at work. So we need a shared vision. We need sufficient dissatisfaction. And then the third component required for change is is first steps.

00;40;59;15 – 00;41;15;25
Speaker 3
And what that really simply means is we’ve all listened to Ted talks like you get done. Listen to Ted talk. You’re all charged up. That’s a great idea. That’s so cool, I am I’m going to embrace the heck out of this tomorrow. But we don’t know what to do to get from where we are today to what we just learned about in the Ted talk.

00;41;15;25 – 00;41;40;17
Speaker 3
Right. So first steps is the action plan or the roadmap that gets you going, that builds momentum and that starts you in the direction of that shared vision. So if I look at change, what does it take to change successfully? You need shared vision, sufficient dissatisfaction with the current reality, and a clear roadmap or first steps to get the team going.

00;41;40;19 – 00;41;53;17
Speaker 3
And if I look at big picture, what does it take to be successful with leadership and leading change? I love the the Gallup’s, first, break all the rules, 12 questions.

00;41;53;19 – 00;42;03;28
Speaker 1
Sorry, I jumped off there for a second. Guys, I, I got flowers if you did. Yes. Well, I didn’t get flowers. Kristen got flowers from someone. Oh.

00;42;03;28 – 00;42;05;00
Speaker 2
Very nice.

00;42;05;02 – 00;42;30;26
Speaker 1
A little post-surgery. So, of course they came. You know, we’ve got 18 doors on the house, and they came to the door. And I’m in while we’re recording, but, And, Bill, I do love that formula, by the way. I always think that that was very helpful. And also, I, you know, something you said in the, in the the other portion of the podcast was, are the trains running on time now?

00;42;30;26 – 00;42;51;26
Speaker 1
I’ve heard you say that to me a few times over the last six months or whatever. And I got to be honest, it never clicked with me until today. Which is always weird. Why that kind of stuff happens, right? Like you hear something a million times, and then all of a sudden it clicks. And specifically, you know, because, as you know, you know, I’ve, we’ve got and Derek’s the same way, right?

00;42;51;26 – 00;43;11;02
Speaker 1
We got all these different things going on. I think this happens to a lot of business owners. And why I wanted to bring it back up. Where I don’t maybe you get bored or you have another opportunity to do something that can bring in money. Maybe it’s an additional service offering inside that company, or maybe it’s a whole nother business as well.

00;43;11;05 – 00;43;34;03
Speaker 1
And we have a ten. I know I have made the mistake of getting spread too thin, with too many objectives, going in too many different directions, and didn’t focus on getting the trains running on time. And my main business before letting my attention drawn away to something else. So I want to bring that back up and just just see if there was something that you could expand on.

00;43;34;05 – 00;43;36;10
Speaker 1
For us on that.

00;43;36;13 – 00;43;51;06
Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah. So it’s funny you say I, as you were saying, that I was relating to some books that I’ve read. So I, there’s a couple of books I’ve picked up a second and third time. And for me that’s unusual. And when I picked it up the second or third time, I’ve taken away something different from the book.

00;43;51;06 – 00;44;12;29
Speaker 3
Right. So I wasn’t ready to hear or conceptualize one of the ideas. I took another idea away the first time. Second time I took away some additional new stuff so I can I can relate to that. I kind of when you’re ready to receive the information. But yeah, as far as the trains running on time, there’s two there’s two major components to that.

00;44;13;02 – 00;44;31;03
Speaker 3
One is you have to have an operating system of some kind. So when you think about trains, there’s tracks and the trains stay on the tracks. So that’s the operating system. The system is in place. And then there’s a scoreboard. So like you go into Grand Central and you got the board that flips like everybody knows that graph.

00;44;31;03 – 00;44;36;10
Speaker 3
And there’s a Penn Station or Grand Central. Anyway, that example, maybe I got to do my homework on a New York City subway. But my point.

00;44;36;11 – 00;44;42;06
Speaker 1
I get those things, I get those to confuse. Too bad one of them is busses and one of them is trains. And, yeah.

00;44;42;08 – 00;45;01;01
Speaker 3
It shows you how much I like the city. Not much. I went through a subway station or a train station in Germany once. I had a similar one of those sports that the numbers and the letters flip, you know, like old school mechanical. Anyway, point is, is you need a business system, and then you. And then once you had a business system, you’re working consistently or repeatedly.

00;45;01;01 – 00;45;29;24
Speaker 3
Once you’re working repeatedly, you can then measure how you’re doing and know if you’re on time. And that was the whole point of the board at Grand Central would have you. It says the train is arriving in five minutes. You look down and the train’s pulling in. You know, four minutes and 59 seconds later. So, two components to on time, a business system that guides or keeps things on the tracks, and a measurement system to compliment that to, to be able to objectively measure whether we’re doing well or not.

00;45;29;24 – 00;45;46;28
Speaker 3
So that avoids, you know, the I’m doing, you know, it’s fine or I’m doing fine. And somebody else saying, well, you’re not doing fine. I don’t think you’re doing good. Right. And that’s something that I hear a lot between like co-owners of businesses. So I’ll go in and work with a business and there’s two guys or two women that started the business, you know, x number of years ago.

00;45;47;01 – 00;46;03;20
Speaker 3
And in the I there’s one business in particular and know one of the women is like everything’s great. The other one is like it’s a disaster, you know. Well, okay, we need an objective measurement system. We need something that everybody can see what’s going on. And not these value judgments. These. It’s good. It’s bad. No, we need it’s red.

00;46;03;20 – 00;46;09;29
Speaker 3
It’s green. It’s 100%. It’s 70%. Right. So, so that’s the scoreboard component of it.

00;46;10;01 – 00;46;15;25
Speaker 1
And is the scoreboard, is that chiefly revenue or is it other metrics or maybe a combination of metrics.

00;46;15;29 – 00;46;31;12
Speaker 3
So there’s five metrics that I use on the scoreboard. And part of that is if we think back to like total quality management and and scorecards and that kind of stuff, there was a moment there where things got carried away. So this is going back to like the 80s and 90s. There was a moment there where things got carried away.

00;46;31;12 – 00;46;52;29
Speaker 3
We had like 20 different measurements or whatever. Right. So in this idea of cooking things back to be simple and retail and to sustain, there’s five measurements. And these measurements can be applied in different verticals of a business, different business units. They can be applied in different operating companies of a main company. They can be applied at any level in the organization from air to production.

00;46;52;29 – 00;47;17;23
Speaker 3
Doesn’t matter in engineering, anything in between. So and it’s an acronym, the acronym is Q, DP and a plus sign. So the plus is safety or compliance. How are we doing against safety and compliance. And by the way that ship you measure it every day part of daily execution like we talked about. So were we red, yellow or green in Q where were you.

00;47;17;23 – 00;47;40;12
Speaker 3
Red, yellow or green and the plus sign, etc., etc.. And every day that’s measured against an objective set of standards we developed for the department in particular. So Q is quality, D is on time delivery, IE is inventory. Again, that’s often one that’s a little more complex and annoying to understand. P is productivity that can be humans or machines.

00;47;40;14 – 00;47;59;10
Speaker 3
And then the plus as I said is safety and compliance. So those five measurements are the five that that I default to standing up and in businesses and using to make database decisions and to take those, those value judgments out of, out of business and decision making.

00;47;59;12 – 00;48;01;23
Speaker 1
And you’re and you’re measuring these daily.

00;48;01;25 – 00;48;23;23
Speaker 3
Yes. Daily. Absolutely. And and again to make a long story, not a headache at the where the work is being done, which there’s a so they say it’s a Japanese word. I don’t speak Japanese, but gemba, where work is being done, we measure daily. At the departmental level, we may measure weekly as a accumulation of how we did so every day.

00;48;24;01 – 00;48;43;21
Speaker 3
Were we green every day or where we green? You know, five out of the seven days we worked or four out of five days we work. Right? So we may measure weekly. Then at the division level, we may we may measure monthly. And the reason we set up a cadence like that is it’s those measurements in some businesses are very hard to make predictive.

00;48;43;23 – 00;48;48;21
Speaker 3
So they’re reactive measurements, i.e. it’s already happened that we’ve measured after the fact.

00;48;49;06 – 00;49;08;00
Speaker 3
That’s the case. We want to set up the operation to get it fixed before it gets visible by leadership. Right. So like you want to you want to do it daily so we can get it fixed before the leadership above. You see that at the end of the week. And that layer of leadership wants to fix it before the layer leadership above them sees it at the end of the month.

00;49;08;03 – 00;49;24;08
Speaker 3
And and that that’s how we start to leverage the hierarchy in any organization and push decision making back down to the floor that says, look, guys, get this fixed. If you can get it fixed before the end of the week, then nobody cares. Nobody notices. You don’t get dinged, you know? So we that’s where the problem solving comes in.

00;49;24;08 – 00;49;35;26
Speaker 3
And we empower them to go solve problems and fix and make decisions. And, and this, this kind of blows open into a bigger, bigger story, as you can see. But yeah. So daily, at the point of where work is being done.

00;49;35;29 – 00;49;56;02
Speaker 1
And then I guess, you know, one of the questions I have is you’re talking about that, like, does this system also help you? You know, obviously one of the big questions, especially for smaller companies like, you know, maybe it’s not as big a problem for large companies. I honestly, I don’t know, I’ve never worked in large companies, where there was hundreds of people.

00;49;56;05 – 00;50;06;25
Speaker 1
But, you know, I’m just wondering if from a hiring or, or, you know, growing, expanding or shrinking your team, are these indicators kind of involved in that process?

00;50;06;27 – 00;50;32;23
Speaker 3
Yeah. So these indicators become the data behind all of your decision making. So, let’s say we’re talking about a production floor. And On-time delivery is, is slipping. Right. So On-time delivery is no longer green, it’s red or yellow. So then we start to ask the question, why solve a problem? And and the root cause of that problem will drive us back to a decision.

00;50;32;23 – 00;50;59;08
Speaker 3
Right. And that decision could say that we need to change the the process or the physical flow of could you say that we need to change or change the people structure? Right. It could lead back to a number of areas. But at the end of the day, those those five metrics operationally are critical to systems. Now at, at a business level, we talk about mergers, acquisitions or selling a business or scaling up or down.

00;50;59;10 – 00;51;16;16
Speaker 3
Then you start to get into the now in financial decision making. Right? So that’s another set of tools at the business level of decision making. But at the daily operation level and, you know, keeping the trains running on time, the Ship Plus’s is really the basis for decision making.

00;51;16;18 – 00;51;31;10
Speaker 1
I love it, although the train’s running out of time. I can’t believe I, I know for a fact you’ve said that to me a dozen times. And I like I like right now I’m after having this interview with you, I’m like, man, I’m going to get something on my wall that says, are the trains running on time?

00;51;31;12 – 00;51;42;29
Speaker 1
Or I’m going to get a picture of a train or something, some sort of something to remind me, to basically stop getting distracted by bullshit until I got what’s in front of me sorted and and doing what I needed to do.

00;51;43;01 – 00;52;04;16
Speaker 3
Yeah, I probably have no less than a half dozen different reminders that pop up, like on the second Monday of every month in my calendar with reminders like, what? You’re talking about. So, you know. Yeah, yeah. So I’ve defaulted to that. My my memory’s horrendous. It’s embarrassing. As a kid, I was tested, you know, like, I’m, like, deficient in memory.

00;52;04;19 – 00;52;23;28
Speaker 3
But and totally out of balance. So, like, I don’t even. It was fourth grade, I was tested. I had, like, a kindergarten level memory, but I had, like, a, like, a freshman in college level of analytics. Right? In fourth grade, it was like this crazy out of whack situation. So my prior, I’ve had to build in a bunch of tools and systems for myself to, to cover that gap.

00;52;23;28 – 00;52;41;22
Speaker 3
So it’s not visible to the people around me. So I could be successful. Yeah. And so 2.1 of the ways I’ve done that is, is put those reminders and it all started with like the BlackBerry back in the day. Before that I was a planner, like a hard planner, but nowadays it’s in my Google calendar and there must be a at least six of them.

00;52;41;22 – 00;53;01;01
Speaker 3
Another book that’s a great book, for people that are going into their first executive position. Just what got you here won’t get you there. And, I took away some pretty heavy duty learnings from that personally. And those are in a reminder, the pop up, I think, quarterly that basically says, you know, don’t screw this up.

00;53;01;01 – 00;53;07;21
Speaker 3
These are the four things you identified that we’re going to get in the way of future success. So don’t ever forget it kind of thing. That’s.

00;53;07;21 – 00;53;11;23
Speaker 1
Interesting. So do you go through like a whole exercise when these things pop up on your calendar?

00;53;11;26 – 00;53;34;27
Speaker 3
Yeah, I made a commitment to myself that, I will read them and reflect on them for a minimum of 30s. And 30s is a long time to reflect on, like one idea that you’ve reflected on every quarter for the last decade, for example, you know, but I made the commitment that when the reminder pops up, I won’t just click it off, that I will open it, read it, and reflect on it for a minimum of 30s and, yeah, it’s it seems to work.

00;53;35;01 – 00;53;47;11
Speaker 1
So I got to write down the name of that, but I’ve already written down three things during our interview that which again, is surprising because I talk to you pretty much every day and but, what got you here won’t get you there.

00;53;47;14 – 00;54;11;19
Speaker 3
Yeah, that was it. I hope it’s it’s I assume it’s still publication. I don’t know, but, yeah, it was, is, is a good one. I mean, it’s funny how the professional books might as well form a self-help side of it, you know, because they’re just self-help books applied to professional stuff, but it works at home to kind of like I was joking before about taking the garbage out and, you know, Katie, you know, she’ll pick on me about all this stuff all the time.

00;54;11;20 – 00;54;28;29
Speaker 3
So one of the one of the things I identified personally that I had to do better at was something that book calls, creating too much value. So it basically means I get really excited at wanting to help improve things, and that can really annoy the shit out of other people. Right?

00;54;29;06 – 00;54;30;13
Speaker 1
Because otherwise.

00;54;30;15 – 00;54;54;03
Speaker 3
Well, yeah, how about this? And how about that? Let’s try this. And how can we go this direction? And what about, you know, and and that is you know, that can be seen in a number of ways by other people, not the ways I intended. So my intention is I want to help, but it can be received as he’s a know it all, he’s a pain in the ass, etc. etc. so, every once in a while Katie will look at me and go, you’re adding too much value, you know, like.

00;54;54;03 – 00;54;55;09
Speaker 1
And that’s funny.

00;54;55;16 – 00;54;59;24
Speaker 3
Yeah. Like, I just need a hug. I don’t need you to solve a problem. You’re adding too much value. You know, that’s really funny.

00;54;59;24 – 00;55;06;28
Speaker 1
I feel like I’ve actually heard her say that to you, and I didn’t know what that meant at the time. Yeah, probably. That’s great.

00;55;07;00 – 00;55;08;12
Speaker 2
You learned a lot today, Mike, on that.

00;55;08;13 – 00;55;33;02
Speaker 1
I know, I know, well, Bill, I, I really appreciate jumping on with this man. I, I don’t think you have anger, but, super helpful. Super valuable. Like I said, I wrote down a few things, that I’ll probably end up asking you about again later on, but, very helpful stuff. And, if people want to, I and I should have said this before, so I’ll make sure that somehow we get this part into the other episode as well.

00;55;33;02 – 00;55;33;10
Speaker 1
But

00;55;33;10 – 00;55;38;03
Speaker 1
if people want to find you, get Ahold of you. How do they do that?

00;55;38;05 – 00;55;51;13
Speaker 3
Yeah, it’s, the op shop, the apex shop.com, or Bill at the epic shop. And really the most longstanding, easiest way to find me is on LinkedIn. It’s just William J. Tansey Jr on LinkedIn.

00;55;51;13 – 00;56;02;10
Speaker 3
Yeah. It’s fun to talk to you guys. Thanks for the opportunity. Who knows if somebody finds some of this interesting and wants to come back and dive into a small piece of it, you know, a little deeper or something, let me know.

00;56;02;10 – 00;56;04;11
Speaker 3
But, I don’t want to offer too much value.

00;56;04;11 – 00;56;10;21
Speaker 1
So, yeah, that was good. Thanks, Bill. I appreciate you.

00;56;10;24 – 00;56;12;04
Speaker 3
All right, guys, a real pleasure. Thanks.

00;56;12;05 – 00;56;29;27
Speaker 1
I we’ll see everybody to who, who are our Patreon members? Tell a friend, make sure they know that this is available to them. And, again, there’s a lot of. We’re adding probably too much value. Right, bill? We’re adding a lot of value here, for our for our members. So thanks for subscribing. And you’ll hear from us again next week.

00;56;29;27 – 00;56;58;02
Speaker 1
And that wraps up another episode of Blue Collar Startup. A big thank you to our sponsors, Five Towers Media, Daigle Cleaning Systems, Daigle Fire Solutions, The Michaels Group, Martin Electric, MLB construction, Pinocchio Construction People, and Catamount Consulting for making this podcast possible. And thank you for tuning in. If you learned something or felt inspired. Connect with us on our website at Blue Collar Startup Bio or email us at hardhat Dot CSU at gmail.com.

00;56;58;02 – 00;57;10;25
Speaker 1
We’d love to hear your questions and topic ideas. Help us spread the word by sharing the show and following us on social media for updates. Until next time, keep on building. Keep on dreaming and keep hustling like your future depends on it.

00;57;10;25 – 00;57;26;05
Unknown
Oh, hey. Oh, hey.