Do Business Owners Really Want Balance?

Introduction:

Most business owners say they want balance in their lives. They tell themselves they just need to get through this one crisis, this one launch, this one quarter—and then life will settle down. But what if that’s not actually the goal? This week, Mel Gravely, Lena McGuire, and Ted Wolf talk candidly about what it really takes to build a business—and about whether balance is something owners are truly striving for or simply something they feel they’re supposed to want. “I gotta tell you,” says Mel, “I just don’t know if people were really honest that they’d say that they’d be one to spend their time at their kid’s parent-teacher conference.” Lena stresses that it’s not about right or wrong. It’s about owners making the choice that’s right for them. “You have to make yourself happy first,” she says. “It’s kind of—we always use that, ‘Put your oxygen mask on yourself first, and then you can help others.’” The owners agree that there’s a seasonality to entrepreneurship. There are periods when the business demands more, and owners have few real options. That pressure can intensify when a company is struggling—but, intriguingly, it can be just as intense when the business is growing fast. Of course, all businesses endure periods of crisis. But what if the crises never end?

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Mel Gravely is chairman of Triversity Construction.

Lena McGuire is CEO of Spóca Kitchen & Bath.

Ted Wolf is CEO of Guidewise.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Mel, Lena, and Ted. It’s great to have you here. Before we get started, I just want to note that I recently announced that the next 21 Hats Live event will take place in Cincinnati from May 13 to May 15, where we will be hosted by Mel Gravely at the Triversity headquarters. First, thank you, Mel.

Mel Gravely:
It’s a pleasure.

Loren Feldman:
Maybe you could tell us what we should know about Cincinnati.

Mel Gravely:
Let me just tell you that, first, the weather will be perfect in May. So I promise you, every single day will be sunshiney, low humidity. It’ll be perfect.

Loren Feldman:
I’ve got a guarantee from you on that in writing, right?

Mel Gravely:
Guaranteed on the weather. We’ve got the coolest downtown that I’ve been in in any city in the country, and I really do mean that. And I’m sure I’m biased, but imagine a downtown that doesn’t have any chain restaurants. Every single restaurant is a unique experience, unique to Cincinnati, bringing you flavors from all over the world, but unique to Cincinnati.

It’s a walkable city. We’ve got great entertainment. We’ve got cool businesses that we’ll visit—maybe a drive through on the Cincinnati Reds or an ice cream factory for Graeter’s, a family-owned ice cream company. So Loren, it’s just going to be a wonderful experience, and I just hope that folks come and hang out with us.

Loren Feldman:
That sounds pretty good to me, Mel. All right, so let’s get to the topic of the day. As I warned all of you, I want to talk about an aspect of owning a business that I’m not sure gets enough attention. My interest in this topic was sparked recently by a Substack newsletter written by a friend, Josh Patrick, who owned a vending machine business for many years and who worked as a consultant to business owners for many years. So he’s had a lot of experience with business owners.

I’ll just read the beginning of what Josh wrote: “You know the pattern because you’ve probably lived it. You start a business with big dreams. You’re going to build something meaningful, create financial freedom, maybe even change your industry, and you’re going to do it without becoming one of those workaholics who missed their kid’s childhood. Then reality hits. The business demands everything. There are fires to put out, deals to close, employees to manage, and customers to satisfy. You tell yourself it’s temporary—just this quarter, just this year, just until we get past this crucial growth phase. Except the crucial phase never ends. There’s always another milestone, another crisis, another opportunity that demands your complete attention.

“Your spouse starts making comments about how you’re never around. Your kids stop asking you to come to their events, because they’ve learned not to expect you to come. You miss birthdays, anniversaries, school plays, and quiet bedtime conversations. And when you are physically present, you’re mentally somewhere else, checking your phone, thinking about work, half listening while planning tomorrow’s meetings. The really insidious part, you justify it all as providing for my family or building something for our future. You tell yourself they’ll understand someday, that the sacrifice will be worth it. But here’s the brutal truth I’ve learned both from my own experience”—that’s Josh talking—“and from watching hundreds of other business owners. Your kids don’t need a bigger house or fancier vacations. They need you, and by the time most of us figure that out, we’ve missed the years we can never get back. So how do we work differently?”

Let’s stop there. Does that pattern that Josh described sound familiar to any of you?

Ted Wolf:
It does to me. Absolutely.

Loren Feldman:
Tell me about it, Ted.

Ted Wolf:
Started a business. I was young, I was single, so I could put all kinds of time into it, and it was my dream, etc. I learned an awful lot about myself. Finally, I did get married and had three children, and I found out that it wasn’t really a time challenge. It was a design challenge. How do I want to design my life and use my time to get the best quality that I can?

And what I came up with, and what I tell clients today is, there’s four areas I need to balance: mental health, emotional health, physical health, and financial health. If I didn’t have those four things, I didn’t consider myself successful or have a happy life. So I had to completely redesign what I was doing with the business and prioritize things in a different way. It paid off in the long run. But in the beginning, you don’t have any quality of life. It’s all the business, and in many respects, you have to do that.

Loren Feldman:
Did you figure that out the hard way, Ted? Did things have to get bad before you started redesigning?

Ted Wolf:
It didn’t get really bad. I’m always on a search for, “How could I become a better leader within the business?” which then translated into personal development, self-awareness. As I grew in that area, I could understand people better. So the mental-emotional thing came together. I would say, of the four, probably physically working out and physical health was the one that I kind of ignored the most. I didn’t have any difficulty in doing it, but probably would do it differently if I had it to do over.

Loren Feldman:
How about you, Mel?

Mel Gravely:
For me personally, of course. I’ve had episodes—actually, even whole businesses in my life—that got me out of balance. But I’ve got to be honest with you: This article made me think, because I think that the author may have missed or failed to establish the basic premise. His basic premise was that the business owner wants to spend time with their family, and I’m not exactly sure that’s true. And sometimes, it’s just time to be honest with yourself that you’d rather be doing what you’re doing than doing the other thing.

And that’s never been the case for me, but I’ve seen people when, if they got naked and they got truthful, that they’re actually spending time doing the thing that they want to be doing. And it fulfills them in a way that’s different. And it sounds horrible, so no one ever wants to admit it, but just more and more I think it’s true. If that premise is not true—let’s make the assumption that that the author’s premise is true, that people really do want a balanced life, then I think the way he articulates a plan, and the way Ted just laid out kind of having these parameters, presents an opportunity for success. But I gotta tell you, I just don’t know if people were really honest that they’d say that they’d be one to spend their time at their kid’s parent-teacher conference.

Loren Feldman:
What drove you to that conclusion, Mel? I happen to think you’re right, but if people are so reticent about acknowledging that, how did you figure out that your business-owning peers were really thinking that way?

Mel Gravely:
So I had these multiple conversations with various people. And when you start talking through what they say is their challenge and then talking through what they’re willing to do to change it, you realize that it’s a priority problem. And if you listen long enough, people will tell you the truth by accident.

And the truth is, if over and over you get these opportunities to make different decisions, yet you keep making the same ones—you’ve been made aware that there’re options, and you keep making the same ones—I just kind of think that maybe you really don’t want what you say you want. And I see that in a lot of people about a lot of topics, not just this one. People say they want one thing, but their behavior, their continuous behavior, lets me know that’s really not what they want.

Loren Feldman:
Was this something that you had to figure out for yourself, Mel?

Mel Gravely:
No. Oh, I didn’t get it right, but I always knew I wanted it, and I’m back with Ted on this. I think businesses go through seasonality, like children do. They mature in ways. At times, they demand more of you. They worry you more. They’re more colicky, if I can use all of those terms, and then you’re back in that kind of intensity for a season. But overall, if you really do want to have balance, I think you’d find a way to structure your life differently so that you start to have balance.

And as the author points out, that may mean that you grow differently, or you grow a little slower. And I hope we get a chance to talk about this. I think this also depends on the kind of business you’ve got. You know, some businesses are more like practices, think medical practice or design practice. And to grow faster and bigger, you’ve got to do more, because you’re billing by the hour, or by the project. Other businesses provide for better scale. And some businesses are never going to be successful, and so those people are grinding away at something that, no matter how hard they work, the business model is broken somewhere. And I hope we spend some time on that.

Loren Feldman:
I would like to come back to that, but first, Lena, what’s your experience been like?

Lena McGuire:
I agree with both Ted and Mel. I think the whole process of that life/work balance, that’s the question. Because it’s not 50/50, and it changes seasonally. So if you’re a young business, there’s so much work you have to put in it, you’re probably going to be two, three years before you break even and start taking a regular paycheck. And then once you start making the money, you can hire people and you can grow. So your business is going to grow just like a child grows.

And I think that as a business owner, you’re going to grow and change, and your needs will change, and your definition of success is going to change. If you are like my husband, and you don’t like changing baby diapers, you might want to stay at work an extra little bit to make sure the baby is going to be in bed sooner. Or if your children are a little bit older, and you want to sit at that baseball game, and you love that practice, then maybe you want to cut out of work a little bit earlier so you can go see that practice. So I think it does change a lot.

And for me, when I was in college, and when I was first out of college, I worked in retail, and you had no control over your calendar. So for me, when I started a business, I started it so that I could have control. So I’ve always had the flexibility. It’s always been built in, and then it does change what I need to do, how much time I put into the business, when I want to be there, when I don’t want to be there. So I think everybody’s going to approach it differently.

And I think the real question is designing your life. How do you want to live your life? What makes you happy? What makes your family work? What makes your business work? You have to really think about those things, and then you have to think about them a lot, because times change, and you have to adjust those—strategic planning for your life.

Loren Feldman:
It sounds, Lena, like you kind of figured this out fairly early and designed your work life the way you wanted it to be, kind of from the beginning. Is that right?

Lena McGuire:
That is right. I’m not saying I got it right. There have been times—I had a computer crash on New Year’s Eve, and I had to cancel party plans and work for like 72 hours straight. It was a horrible three days, but, you know, I had the support system to get me through that. But there were other times, when I had a graphic design business, I worked 32 weeks a year because I wanted to have those vacation times and the time off in the summer to be with my children. So I scheduled my work to work that way, and I scheduled my projects around it. So yeah, I have been that way pretty much from the get-go.

Mel Gravely:
And there were probably trade-offs there, right? You know, working 32 weeks a year has its trade-offs to it, and some people don’t want to make those trade-offs. So it goes back to priorities, I would suggest.

Ted Wolf:
Yeah, and then I think there’s another element that comes into it. When you’re running a business, a lot of business owners are always working in the business and not on it. That’s a problem, which means they’re probably not going to delegate a lot of work and then train people to work on their own. Also, I think, in making decisions, you can’t be the final arbiter as an owner and grow and scale a business and have time for your own life if you can’t train and build a team around you that can make decisions that you have confidence in.

Finally, I think the ultimate thing, then, is the culture, because culture is what runs the business while you’re not there. Put a good culture in place, get it implemented so people use it, you can make decisions and get some free time. Because time with your kids is going to change. When they’re young, they need you. When they’re teenagers, they don’t want you around. And then when they go out on careers and everything, it’s a different time commitment again. So I think all those things mix together, but it’s an echo chamber that’s kind of tough to get out of and get out of your own head, so to speak.

Mel Gravely:
You know, we’ve had these conversations in these podcast [episodes] before, and I even hear some of the podcast participants who I think there’s just no way they’ll ever get their heads out of working in the business, because their personalities and their unwillingness to broaden that kind of thinking won’t allow it. And I’m with you, Ted. If you are always working in the business and not enough on it, you will always be pressed, or the business will suffer—one of the two things—because no one around there will be able to step up and lead and make decisions and drive the business in your absence.

Lena McGuire:
Yeah, it’s really a mindset change. That’s the key thing. You have to understand that there are people who do things better than you, that you don’t have to do everything, and that it’s okay to pay somebody else to do something that you want off your plate.

Ted Wolf:
And I think what you just said there is real key: There are people in your business right now that probably can do things better than you, but you’ve got to change your identity. It is a mindset shift. You’ve got to be able to say, “I’m going to trust they’re going to do it. We’ll learn from it. We have to build it.” And you’ve got to give up this dream that everything’s going to be perfect. You’re looking for continuous improvement, not perfection, from yourself and others.

Lena McGuire:
Absolutely.

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, I don’t know if I—maybe I agree that there’s probably someone else in there who knows better. My challenge with that is that smart, capable people don’t stay in an organization where the leader doesn’t delegate. They move on to an organization where they can get increasing levels of responsibility and opportunity. And so, they may be smarter than you in the short run, or more able than you in the short run, but those really top talented people, they don’t want to work for a person that’s not giving them any leeway to make calls.

And so I think that mindset shift drives a different level of talent opportunity. You may have to compensate in different ways, because top talent wants to be paid and appreciated as top talent. But I think if you’re really a work-in-the-business person, and you have to make all the decisions, I think your talent is going to be depleted over time, because no one wants—the very best don’t want to work in that kind of environment.

Lena McGuire:
I think you have to offer challenges to people. They want a purpose, and they want to grow, and if you don’t allow them to grow, they’re going to stagnate, and they’re just going to drift off. So you have to plan your business a certain way. You have to have your mental acuity going too so that you can see what’s going on and when people need to stretch a little bit.

Ted Wolf:
I think that when you focus on a business, you’ve got to live at that intersection. You’ve got business requirements and cash flow requirements and all kinds of things that you have to pay attention to in the business. But then you’ve got your own personal life, and you’ve got people. Those two things you’ve got to balance out. How do I attract the best people? Put them around me, train them so that I have a life. They have a life. They have a future. We all do. And then the final thing that comes in is technology. How do I manage technology to increase productivity and make everybody more productive and effective, but do it in a controlled manner?

Loren Feldman:
Lena, not only do you have your own experience, I know you know a lot of other women business owners. I’m curious, how different do you think this conversation would be if there were three women on with me?

Lena McGuire:
If they were friends of mine, [Laughter] they would be saying the same thing I am. We’ve gone through the same coaching groups. We swim in the same ponds, so we have the same mindset. Because that’s what we’re looking for. We are looking to empower women to have successful businesses, to not be afraid of success. So the women who I know, they would be all in on this and understand that you have to make yourself happy first. It’s kind of—we always use that: Put your oxygen mask on yourself first, and then you can help others.

Loren Feldman:
Well, I have to say I know women business owners who would not have made the choice you made to work 32 weeks a year, who are, you know, just as driven as any—

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, but the empowerment is for people to have the choice. I don’t think 32 weeks is better than working really hard every week. I’m sure during her 32 weeks, Lena was cranking it pretty hard. I think the empowerment is the opportunity to make that decision for yourself, to define your own success matrix, and pursue it that way. So, I’m sorry, I jumped in there.

Lena McGuire:
No, absolutely, that’s right. Because the freedom to choose how to use your time and your resources, I mean, that’s my whole reason for being. If I can’t have that freedom, why do I bother? So, yeah, like right now, if I only work 32 weeks a year, I think I would drive myself crazy. That’s not enough. But when I had small children, that was perfect.

Ted Wolf:
I’m curious, how’d you come up with the 32 weeks?

Lena McGuire:
I was working as a graphic designer, and I had publication schedules that I was working with. So the 32 weeks fit that publication schedule, and four of the weeks I actually worked 80 hours. But the other 26, I worked eight to 12 hours a week. So when I knew those four weeks were coming up, I had vacations planned for after those weeks of 80 hours so working was done, because I needed that little R&R to really get back into it.

Ted Wolf:
That’s an interesting design. How’d you really come to terms with that, saying, “This is what I have to do to make my life work”? Is there one event that triggered it?

Lena McGuire:
It might have been when I had one of my bosses come to me and actually confront me right to my face and say, “I own you.” And I just shut down. That was the moment. I was like, “Mm mm. Nobody owns me. I am working for you to make your business successful, to make you look good in your boss’s eyes. You don’t own me.” That was the turning point for me.

Loren Feldman:
Wow. Lessons in leadership.

Lena McGuire:
Yeah.

Loren Feldman:
I want to go back to what Mel brought up with the issue of a business perhaps not performing well, and how that changes the calculation. And I think this is something that I would kind of maybe look at the other side of what Mel pointed out, in terms of Josh’s article. Mel pointed out that there are some owners who just prefer to be in business, and I don’t doubt for a second that’s true.

I think there are also some owners who aren’t doing it, as Josh put it, because they think their kids need a bigger house or fancier vacations. They’re doing it because they’re not sure their business is going to make it. They would like to be home, but there are sometimes just impossible trade-offs. And sometimes they make the choice that they’re happy with in the end, sometimes they don’t. But it can be a really difficult choice if the business isn’t doing well. Does that make sense?

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, I want to clarify what I said, though. Because, you know, God knows I’ve run businesses that were not doing well. I’m talking about businesses with a business model that suggests it’s never going to do well, that its economic engine doesn’t create the kind of velocity to lift it off.

Loren Feldman:
In that case, Mel, do you think the business owner knows that, usually?

Mel Gravely:
I think they don’t, which is my point. And so, when they don’t know that, they’re working harder and harder, and what they don’t realize is: It will never end. And maybe this is acutely on my mind because I talked to a business owner this morning who said to me that they’re still in the same grind that they were in six years ago. And I thought: Hmm, this guy reorganizes every 60 days, it seems like. I’m exaggerating, but it’s probably every few months, and yet he’s still not able to make his engine turn over.

He’s never built a business plan. He’s never really looked at his economic engine and his business model. He’s never really clarified his market. He’s never really hunkered down and looked at the org design. He’s never really defined who the exact best customers are for him and the services that they should provide. And so it’s always something different, something new, trying to make it happen. And Loren, this young man, in six years, will be in the same place he is today, because he’s not willing to go back and make those other kinds of assessments to have a business model that works. But yet, he’s stressed. He’s working a lot of hours. His wife is worried about him—all the things that this article suggests. And I see that more often than you might think.

Lena McGuire:
That’s a hard life.

Mel Gravely:
It’s a horrible life.

Loren Feldman:
Did you give this business owner any advice, Mel?

Mel Gravely:
Loren, you know me. So what do you think? [Laughter] Of course I did. And I’ve offered to sit with him and walk through—this is the third time, though, so it’s the last time—let me spend a few days with you walking through a planning strategy. Let’s just take a look at the business.

Loren Feldman:
That’s a generous offer.

Mel Gravely:
“Yeah, I’ll get to it. I’ll get to it.” Okay. I’ve given him books to help him through it, and so I don’t know what else to do other than watch that. I don’t know what else to do.

Ted Wolf:
So how do you think his—if I can use the term marital situation—his spouse is supporting, or how are they being calculated into his time for things other than work? Because at the end of the day, the economy changes, people change, your business changes, people come and go. You’ve got to learn how to manage that change. But at the same time, your spouse has to be able to support that.

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, I do see him taking time with his spouse. She seems to be very, very important to him, and I think that’s great. I worry about how that quality could be, with his mind always worried about, you know, payroll every other Friday. But it seems to be important to him, to answer your question. He seems to spend time against it. He does take vacation time. But I can’t imagine what that looks like with the angst that he feels.

As Loren pointed out, the business just might not make it, and he’s already in a tough business. I won’t name it, because it might disclose who he is, but I worry about folks like that. So when I see an article like this, I think this sounds really, really easy. But if I’ve got a business that sucks at its very core, I’m not so sure this is what I’m talking about. I’m talking about maybe a business that we should say, “Hey, maybe that’s not the right business, and maybe we should start over or go do something else.”

Loren Feldman:
Do you really think this sounds easy?

Mel Gravely:
It sounds—not easy. It sounds… I won’t even call it simple. But when I can write it down, point by bullet point, at least there’s a script I can follow. It’s not easy. So, no, the discipline of it is not easy.

Loren Feldman:
I guess it sounds easy in the sense that there are a lot of common sense suggestions that you can follow. The difficulty is in applying that to specific situations where it’s not obvious to you which way to go.

Mel Gravely:
You know, when people aren’t around others—I heard Lena mentioned that her friends are all a part of the same kind of mentoring groups. When people aren’t in those kind of circles, that’s where you get stuck.

Lena McGuire:
Yeah, I think who you’re associating with, you know, I think I heard that the five people who you hang out with the most are going to be the ones that influence you the most. And you have to break out of your comfort zone and try new things and meet new people. I’m always telling my kids that creativity comes at the intersection of curiosity and intellect, so that when you have two different disciplines, and they’re talking at dinner or over lunch, somebody will say that they’re struggling with something, and the other person will have this, like, look in their eyes, like, “What’s wrong with you? It’s so obvious that this is what you need to do.” It’s because they’ve come from a totally different perspective. And if you’re not having a circle where there are enough perspectives, you might stay stuck.

Mel Gravely:
So true, so true.

Loren Feldman:
You know, I think it’s my bad luck that I’ve managed to bring together a group of extremely well-adjusted business owners here. [Laughter]

Lena McGuire:
Oh, Loren.

Mel Gravely:
Well, let’s be clear about this, though, Loren. I think what you’re hearing us say is, of course we’ve had periods in our lives where we may not have had it figured all out. Or, you know, we realize there’s a tough period. But if it’s always that way, there’s something wrong. There’s just something wrong if it’s always that way.

The other thing is, as he’s defining it in the preamble you read, there’s always a new crisis. That’s just a part of the nature of what we’ve got here. But I don’t know any jobs that are easy, either. You know, people who have their jobs, they’ve got crises and things that come up. The difference is the level of ownership and the level of support and resources you might have around you to help you solve them.

Loren Feldman:
Right.

Ted Wolf:
I also think each business takes on a life of its own. Someone earlier said, “the seasons of a business.” I mean, if you have a business that’s really scaling quickly, I mean really quickly, and you can’t build a team around you fast enough to delegate and everything, it’s just going to eat up your time. And perhaps you don’t have the right product-market fit. I think, really, what you need to be able to look at is say, “Okay, where’s the business going? And how fast do I want to scale it?” But a lot of times you don’t have say in that. And God knows, I’ve lived that more than once in my life.

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, I’ve never been in the tech space, or the innovation space, where that tends to happen a lot more. But when we grow more than 12 percent a year, there are scorch marks to pay for it, and we’ve just learned that 8 to 12 percent a year is really healthy. The last two years, we grew 24 percent, and it is scorch marks everywhere. But we have a chance to control that a bit, maybe not completely, but a little bit.

Ted Wolf:
My own life experience, I had a business that grew real fast. My brother and I owned it: It was technology consulting and staffing. And I was on a plane, literally, three weeks out of the month, traveling to 12 different sites throughout the United States. The one week I came back, I was exhausted, and once we were acquired and got out of the business—I made a decision to actually get out of the business, simply because I wanted my kids to know me as their father, and I wanted to know them as my children.

But that was a tough decision to make. I mean, I had an identity crisis I had to go through. I was a father. I can remember I was probably three, four weeks into it, and my wife was saying—she was teaching me how to clean a diaper better. Let’s put it that way. That was a big change. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Were you literally a stay at home dad at that point?

Ted Wolf:
No, my wife basically was responsible for the kids, I’m gonna say, day to day. She politely told me afterwards, after I got out of the business, it was probably two, three months later, she said, “You know, the house is my office. I think you should get an outside office to go to.” [Laughter] And you know what? She was right. And I fought it internally at first, but she was right.

Loren Feldman:
So what did you do then? Did you start another business?

Ted Wolf:
I took about a year off. I pulled out at that time, a yellow legal pad, and started writing notes on what did I learn in this adventure of building this business and scaling it? And those notes just took on a life of their own. And I still do it to this day, and it gives me a lot of information to look back on and see patterns in myself. But it was a big adjustment, to say the least. But it was worthwhile, totally worthwhile.

Lena McGuire:
Yeah, Ted, what you’re talking about is reflecting. I think a lot of people don’t do belly button gazing anymore. As a kid, you’d go out in the backyard and just stargaze, or just watch the clouds go by, and use your imagination. And as adults, we kind of lose that habit. And it’s really, really important to reflect on what you did right, what you did wrong, what confused you. And if you keep those notes, and you take notice of what’s going on, then you can really design and draft a life that works better for you.

Ted Wolf:
Actually, my doing that led to today’s product platform that we have for change management and change adoption, where, what is it that prevents people from processing and adjusting and adapting to change? So if I wouldn’t have had that reflection period and kept that up throughout my life, I would have never been able to help design and implement or build a product like that.

Lena McGuire:
If you have a business that isn’t successful, it doesn’t mean you’re never going to be successful, because there’s always something that you did right, something that made you happy. So reflecting on failures and successes, I think, it’s critical to do both and reward yourself.

Ted Wolf:
Yeah, totally agree.

Mel Gravely:
You know, I remember once, Loren, I made a statement, and I forgot what the statement was, and you replied, “It’s kind of easy to do that when you’ve got a business at a particular scale.” And I never forgot you saying that to me. So I never want to forget that I do have this privilege of: I’ve got a business that’s at some level of scale.

Loren Feldman:
I hope I said it nicely.

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, you said it kind of nicely, but it was true. [Laughter] Because I think sometimes the angst we feel is real angst, like something could be lost: my home, my income. Another angst we feel is reputational angst or aspirational angst. There’s just a higher level. And I think some of the ideas we’re talking about today come from a place of a bit of privilege, of some kind of level of economic—I won’t say security, but I don’t know if houses were on the line at some periods of time.

So just something to think about there. Because, as you said, when someone is worried about absolute failure, as in, “I put my house on the line. If this business fails, I lose my house, the whole nine”—there’s a level of anxiety around that that can be crippling, for sure, and not leave much room for reflection and consideration and all the healthy things we’d like to do.

Lena McGuire:
Mel, earlier, you were talking about this person whose business is going to be in the same position it was six years ago. Do you think there are warning signs that people can pick up on to notice? If you’re trying something, and it’s not working, are there signals that people can pick up on to notice that the business and what they’re trying to do isn’t quite working and that they need to do something different? Because I think a lot of people who are spinning their wheels, they keep trying the same things over and over again.

Mel Gravely:
Yeah, that is a great question.

Loren Feldman:
It is a great question.

Mel Gravely:
I am sure there are some things. I can only tell you what I see from the outside looking in that makes me realize that’s just not going to work. When I see people trading off long-term assets for short-term needs, when I see people having to, what they call “reorganize” multiple times, when I see people who are leaning on others in the supply chain in a way that’s not normal—for example, not paying suppliers or asking them to do things for free, or trying to find partnerships that allow them to get more done without using any resources—I start seeing a model that I say, “Well, how can that ever work if you’re trying to operate it that way? Where’s the economic opportunity in that?” So I guess I see signs. But no, I think that’s a great question. We should ponder that harder, for sure.

Lena McGuire:
And then my other question is, if you are successful, like with your business, you said you’re trying to keep that growth to, like, 8 to 12 percent. What are you seeing in the pipeline that says, “Well, we need to put the brakes on”? Or, “Oh, we better hustle a little bit so we can stay in this healthy range”?

Mel Gravely:
Well, that’s all about our backlog. We’re a construction company, so if we don’t see things in our backlog and in our lead log, we should be concerned. Quite honestly, over the last seven years or so, or eight years or so, the opposite has been our challenge: How do we service our ongoing clients without violating the grow 8 to 12 percent rule? And that’s why the last two years, we’ve grown 24 percent. Coincidentally, the two years since I’ve been CEO, they’ve grown 24 percent, and it’s because they wanted to go after additional revenue, I guess, and they paid for it. It’s been painful for them.

Loren Feldman:
Mel, when you grow 24 percent, does that mean you have to hire 24 percent more employees?

Mel Gravely:
Not quite 24 percent, but a lot more. So we think we can grow the capacity of our existing people about 10 percent a year. So you eat some of that up with that, right? But the rest are new hires, yeah.

Loren Feldman:
That’s a lot of work.

Mel Gravely:
It’s a lot of work. So it wears out our HR team. You hire too fast, so you hire people that then you turn over later. So your turnover goes up, your customer satisfaction goes down, because they’re new people, and they don’t know the Triversity way. It’s just, you give people projects and opportunities that you’re not sure they’re ready for. Their resume says they are, but you’ve not seen them do it before. Leadership gets stretched because they’ve got to do more patching holes. And I haven’t even started talking about the financial strain on the organization doing it that way, too. Margin compression happens. It’s just a tough thing to grow too fast. And everybody’s company is different on what rate you can grow, but 8 to 12 just seems to work for us.

Ted Wolf:
I have a question for everyone, and that is: How do you manage change and see it coming? What I mean by that is, in 2020-2021, we had Covid: radical change. Everybody had to work harder in many respects, if they owned a business. All of a sudden, tariffs come in. It changes the entire game again. These things are consistent. They seem to be a trend now. Every couple years, major change is coming. How do you manage change and still have a quality of life? [Laughter followed by long silence]

Ted Wolf:
That seems to be a tough question.

Lena McGuire:
We know there’s going to be change. That’s the definition. You know, death and taxes. Change is happening. That’s a given. But how do you adapt your business to be prepared to pivot? So when Covid came, I had to stop going into people’s homes to have meetings. So Zoom was available. All these video conferencing programs were there. So really quickly, you had to be able to decide: How do you pick quickly and efficiently a piece of software to learn really fast and use it and get your team up to par on it so you can start using it with your clients?

It’s kind of like onboarding a new person. How do you do this at the pace that they can handle, at the rate that you can afford? So I think if you could put together an SOP, a standard operating process, for how you’re going to adapt to change if you need to have additional resources, what does that require me to have in reserve? Or where can I cut corners from first so that you know you have an emergency plan? So I think being prepared helps you be ready for the change and I think knowledge is power.

Ted Wolf:
And how did you, or how would you, suggest others actually work through that change? Because sometimes you can change quickly, but your employees can’t change as quickly as you, so you’re kind of dragging them along, so to speak. And that’s a lot of anxiety there. How did you manage that?

Lena McGuire:
Well, first, I don’t have employees, so that was pretty easy. I trained myself, but I do have a good support system. So when I needed to find a new way to video conference with people, I had a support group where I could call and just get everybody on a group call and say, “Hey, I need to do this. Do you have any experience with this?” And somebody in the group suggested this software, somebody else suggested that. We had a conversation.

So I had two or three pieces of software to look at, evaluate it, and just pick one, and just know that it doesn’t have to be perfect. You just have to pick one the best that you can do with the time and deal with it. And if you’re going to switch it later, that’s okay. You have to be okay with making a decision. Sometimes decision fatigue is a real issue. You just have to pull the trigger and go, and I know, because I am very bad at pulling the trigger.

Mel Gravely:
Ted, you’re much more versed in change management than I am, so I hesitate to even try to even weigh in on this with you. Here’s what I will say: I am a huge advocate of having both a strategic and an annual plan, and my premise behind that is, if you have a plan, you know what you’re changing to or from. If you don’t have a plan, I’m not exactly sure how you manage change.

If you have a plan and you can communicate the need to change, I think communication and then pacing through the change management process becomes—I don’t want to call it, it’s not routine. That’s the word I was going to use. That’s not what I mean. But it becomes a process now more than a crisis, because there’s a plan in place. But I would turn that question to you and ask you to answer it. [Laughter]

Lena McGuire:
I think that’s the perfect thing.

Ted Wolf:
Number one, have different scenarios, similar to what you were just saying, Mel. “If scenario one happens, this is what we do. Scenario B, scenario C. Here’s what we do in different scenarios.” That requires a lot of critical thinking, and not everybody has time to do that, because back to what was mentioned earlier, with reflection. So I think, first of all, you have to be able to say, “Here’s what our businesses are capable of doing. Orders are down or going down.” You’ll watch the trends, and then you have to really be able to make sense out of that change and figure out: How can I turn this into a money-making opportunity, or monetize it to my favor? But then you also have to be looking at the market a lot to see what your competition is doing.

Lena McGuire:
And that’s your job as the boss. If you’re working in your business all the time, you don’t have the hours to dedicate to your strategic thinking. And it’s critical to running a successful business. If you can’t see the changes that are coming, you don’t see that the people are not buying certain things anymore, that you have to shift—if you as the owner aren’t cognizant of these insights, you’re not going to be able to make those changes and be prepared. You really have to be prepared. And if you can’t think about it and look at your data that you have, you’re sunk.

Ted Wolf:
Yeah, and I think also it comes down to reading your people. It’s all metrics. A lot of it is metrics. Cognitive biases always take over, fear, things like that. So if you have good metrics on your people—I mean, we’ve developed metrics that will tell you shifts by week, by day, teams, the entire company, their emotional patterns that they’re going through. And how do you talk to somebody who’s in a state of apathy? But then, how do you get that person back on an even keel so they can see opportunities? So managing change, it’s mental and emotional. No question.

Mel Gravely:
Did you just say you have—I’ve got distracted now. Did you say you have metrics on all the people?

Ted Wolf:
Yeah.

Mel Gravely:
Really?

Ted Wolf:
That’s what we do with our clients. Yeah, we’ll go in, and we have a platform we can go in and monitor, if you will, emotional patterns, belief patterns, what kind of meaning are they assigning to things? And in effect, when you look at your rumor mill in a business—and every business has a rumor mill—that’s what everybody’s talking about.

Loren Feldman:
How are you measuring this, Ted?

Ted Wolf:
We have technology built into it for watching and monitoring tone, voice, things like that, for emotions. And then we do an awful lot of pulse surveys. We bring in emotions. We ask people about their beliefs in certain things, and the way they respond will tell you what their belief systems are. And we’ve got a pretty sophisticated set of metrics that we can go into an organization and help them understand: Here’s where your people are, here’s the shift over the last three or four weeks, the last quarter. Here’s how you want to talk to them. Here’s the words you need to use, and here’s how you guide them through this change.

And the reason why we came up with this is because, after selling the business, I did a lot of executive coaching. I could always get leadership teams to understand the need, and they would come, but they couldn’t bring the rest of their business along. They just couldn’t get them shifting fast enough in a world of change. And that’s why we started developing these other metrics. Because without metrics, I’m lost. I need metrics: both financial statements, but human metrics also. And it’s not HR metrics: How many days did they take off? How many people were calling in sick? I mean, that’s part of it, but that’s not a true human mindset, if you will, that they’re working out of.

Lena McGuire:
Sounds more like alignment.

Ted Wolf:
Yeah, that’s exactly what it is. And that’s the word we use: alignment. You’ve got to get all of this aligned.

Loren Feldman:
We only have a couple minutes left. I’d kind of like to try to tie this up by referring to some suggestions that Josh makes in that column we started with, and a number of the points he makes are things that we’ve actually talked about here. But I think it’s good to summarize a little bit. He offers kind of, I guess, a five- or six-step process. If you sense that you’re caught in the destructive pattern that he described, that I started by reading, these are the steps he suggests you take, starting with doing an honest assessment of yourself. And he suggests doing that by really tracking how you spend your time for two weeks to pay attention to where you’re spending your time and where your energy is going.

Lena McGuire:
Yeah, I think that’s key, because how you spend your time is how you’re spending your life. Time is your number one resource, and if you don’t know how you’re using it, and you’re just wasting it, you don’t even realize it’s being wasted. Busy is not the same as being productive. You could be doing things that are just spinning your wheels.

Loren Feldman:
Here’s Josh’s second step, and I think this will resonate with you, Ted. He says: Think about what success really means to you. And then he points out: We all track metrics in our business, like revenue and profit margins. Maybe add a few metrics, like the number of family dinners you actually make it to—and make it to mentally, as well as physically.

Ted Wolf:
I think that’s really smart.

Loren Feldman:
The third thing he suggests is to create real boundaries and actually enforce them: time boundaries, physical boundaries, mental boundaries. He says the mental boundaries are the hardest to enforce, learning to actually stop thinking about work when you’re not working can take a lot of practice. Have any of you struggled with that?

Lena McGuire:
Always.

Ted Wolf:
I struggle with all of the above. [Laughter]

Mel Gravely:
I will tell you, though, something I’m doing more now is, I’m reading a lot of fiction, because I’m trying to write fiction. But the fiction takes you someplace else. And so now I’m almost always reading a fiction book. Right now, I’m in between, because I’m reading CEO Excellence again, but I’m almost always reading a fiction book, and that has seemed to help me not focus on the things that are on my list to focus on.

Loren Feldman:
Step four on Josh’s list is to show up differently at home than you do at work. He points out, in business, you’re often solving problems and making decisions quickly. At home, sometimes people just need you to listen without trying to fix everything. I actually think that’s probably good advice at work, too. What do you guys think?

Ted Wolf:
I’m guilty of that sin also. And I think it’s good advice and good practice to put in place.

Mel Gravely:
I agree. I think working on asking the question about trying to figure out: What do they want from me? And sometimes at home, you shouldn’t ask it so directly, but trying to figure out: What do they really need right now? They need me just to listen and nod my head. They need a hug. I mean, what do they really need? And I think it’s just a good habit.

Loren Feldman:
Josh says step five is the suggestion that you accept that you’re going to miss some business opportunities.

Mel Gravely:
Wait, wait, wait, wait. I don’t accept that. I think if you find the things you’re supposed to be doing and do them, I just don’t subscribe that you’ve got to do the trade-off. Again, unless it’s a business that demands you’re there to deliver its value: doctor, lawyer, accountant, maybe even design, like Lena is doing. That’s one thing, but if it’s not that kind of business, no, I don’t agree that I have to give up on business opportunity. That equation is not that simple.

Loren Feldman:
Because you don’t have to do it all yourself. Is that your point?

Mel Gravely:
That’s correct. And if you do, then that’s a different whole situation that we already talked about.

Loren Feldman:
Josh’s last point is: Start today, not tomorrow. Which I think you probably agree with.

Mel Gravely:
I would say: Start yesterday.

Loren Feldman:
All right, we are out of time. I think we can all pretty much agree that Josh was right that these issues do not get discussed as much as they should, but the three of you have very generously taken a crack at that. My thanks to Mel Gravely, Lena McGuire, and Ted Wolf. And by the way, if you’re impressed with what Josh has to say, or if you disagree, either way, you can meet him. He is already registered to attend the next 21 Hats Live event in Cincinnati. And Mel, if I recall correctly, you invited us all to stay at your house. Am I right about that?

Mel Gravely:
Absolutely, absolutely. My wife will not mind. Yeah, it’ll save you money. It’ll be great. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Excellent. And if you’d like more information about 21 Hats Live—like the incredibly low price—just shoot me an email: Loren@21hats.com. Thank you, guys. I really appreciate it.