Shownotes
BIO: Damon Pistulka, co-founder of Exit Your Way, is known for his hands-on, practical approach to helping business owners maximize value and achieve successful exits.
STORY: Damon explains his journey into understanding technology and its role in business growth.
LEARNING: Stay informed and adapt to changing industry trends. Adapt to changing customer expectations and preferences.
“The simple things we can do with technology today make the customer experience so much better.”
Damon Pistulka
Guest profile
Damon Pistulka, co-founder of Exit Your Way, is known for his hands-on, practical approach to helping business owners maximize value and achieve successful exits. With over 20 years of experience, Damon is dedicated to transforming businesses, enhancing profitability, and helping founders create lasting legacies.
Technology is your business ally
In today’s episode, Damon, who previously appeared on the podcast on episode Ep649: Be Careful of Concentration Risk, discusses the value of technology in running a business. He emphasizes the importance of robotic process automation, CRMs, and AI in modern business operations to accelerate value. In his opinion, technology allows businesses to do simple things that improve customer experience.
Damon highlights a couple of threats businesses face today that could be dealt with by adopting technology.
- Rapid innovation is outpacing businesses. Those lagging behind will be overtaken by competitors who have adopted new technologies.
- Aging workforce with limited new talent. There’s an aging workforce and limited new talent. As more people retire, businesses increasingly find it hard to replace the retirees with educated and qualified people.
- Customers now expect top-tier service levels. Buyers are now demanding businesses provide instant feedback and real-time updates. Businesses that don’t meet customer expectations will not stay competitive.
Using technology to deal with the threats
Damon explains his approach to helping clients develop business growth strategies. He emphasizes the importance of starting with small, manageable changes and gradually scaling up.
Damon cautions entrepreneurs from trying to do it all. Instead, he advises starting with simple, practical changes, often referred to as ‘low-hanging fruits’—these are the tasks or opportunities that are the easiest to achieve and provide the quickest benefits. Gradually, as these are implemented, more complex systems can be adopted.
Seek out experts who can help you advance
Further, Damon advises seeking out experts who can help you advance in the particular area you’re focusing on. Then, work your way up as you get your company, your people, and your supplier base comfortable with these changes.
Get educated before adopting new technology
Damon also underscores the importance of getting educated before adopting new technology. He advises becoming familiar and comfortable enough with it to try it, enabling you to identify potential areas where the technology could help your business.
This approach instills a sense of preparedness and confidence. Then, he suggests hiring an expert to help you implement your new technologies and strategies.
Move fast
Another way to deal with the business threats is to move fast. Damon says that speed sells, and businesses must adopt a speed and innovation culture. This culture is about encouraging and rewarding quick decision-making, rapid implementation of ideas, and a constant drive for improvement. Technology will help you do things in half the time and stay efficient and competitive in your operations, which is a key aspect of this culture.
Just get started
Finally, according to Damon, just get started. Business owners wake up knowing what they have to do every day. By cutting the distractions and focusing on your core strengths and capabilities, you can stay reassured and focused. As Damon says, there’s a lot of time in your day if you throw out the junk.
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Connect with Damon Pistulka
Andrew’s books
- How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market
- My Worst Investment Ever
- 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
- Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming’s 14 Points
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Connect with Andrew Stotz:
Transcripts
Andrew Stotz:
Steve, hello fellow risk takers, and welcome to my worst investment ever. Stories of loss. To keep you winning in our community, we know that to win in investing, you must take risk, but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives, and I want to thank you for joining this mission. Today we're going to have a special guest and a great discussion. So my fellow risk takers, as I say, this is your worst podcast host, Andrew Stotz, from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guest, Damon Pistulka, Damon, are you ready to rejoin the mission?
Damon Pistulka:
I certainly am, Andrew, and thanks for having me today.
Andrew Stotz:
Yeah, I'm glad to have you back on I know for the listeners out there, you can hear Damon's story, and that was about being careful, about concentration risk, and he talked about that in episode 649, so go back and listen to that. But let me introduce Damon to the audience again, and tell you a little bit about what he's doing. We just had a fun conversation. I think he's got a lot he can bring us. So Damon is co founder of exit your way. He's known for his hands on approach, practical approach to helping business owners maximize value and achieve successful exits with over 20 years of experience, Damon is dedicated to transforming businesses, enhancing profitability, and helping founders create lasting legacies. Damon, tell us what you're up to these days. What are the things that are really got you worked up and then, and then we'll dig into them. But what would you say are the core topics you'd like to talk about today?
Damon Pistulka:
Well, for me, right now, the last year, has really been a journey on understanding technology. And you know, I do a lot of work with manufacturers. I do a lot of work with E commerce companies. And some people think that these companies are, you know, whiz bang got all the technology. But when you look at a lot of manufacturers and even e commerce companies, they're still operating the same way they did a number of years ago. Manufacturers, I think, a little bit more than others. But I'm really into technology in because of the fact that to grow value today, it's never easy to grow value, and we're there's still opportunities to be acquiring businesses and growing value, but that's not usually the way that people are doing it in the smaller business setting, right? And even though we're helping people acquire businesses and doing some small roll ups with our clients, it really comes down again to how can we be really, really good with technology in our business, so that we our marketing is good, our customer service is good. We have really good performance with our business. And so I've spent the last year really looking at things like robotic process automation, and I mean like electronic, moving data kind of things, and looking at what are CRMs really do, and is AI really applicable in a business now? And how is it applicable? Because if we're not adapting these things, what I'm finding is, even though I'm trying to keep abreast of this and reading about it every day and talking to people out there today, these things are moving so fast now that I feel we're at a precipice of two things happening in some of these industries, especially like manufacturing, we've got a tremendous amount of knowledge that's walking out the door with retirement, and we don't have a lot of young people coming in, and we don't have a lot of innovation coming in around the things that I'm talking about, and the companies that are doing these innovations are really going, Hey, I know we've, we've been able to to sell $20 million or whatever it is, a year in our manufacturing business, because we do good products, we do good services. And we've always had, you know, these people in the field doing sales, but they're all getting ready to retire, and our buyers are starting to change, because our buyers aren't their age anymore. Our buyers are in their 30s and 40s, and they buy differently, and they need different things, and our customer expectations are way different. So that's the journey I've been on, and I'm super passionate about it, because it is what I believe is going to allow people to take off and succeed, or they're going to die a slow death. So
Andrew Stotz:
for business owners out there, mid size, small size, large size, business owners, particularly manufacturers. But can be any type of business owners, listen up, because there are ways there's a tsunami basically coming, and it's already here. To some extent, we've seen the beach line, the beach water has received. Did and and everybody's playing with AI and all that. But what most people don't realize is now, now, soon, that tsunami will come and it'll wipe us out, if we haven't thought about, as you said, technology, robotics. CRM, AI, so let's frame it that way for everybody that's listening, this is an opportunity to understand the tsunami that's coming. Yes,
Damon Pistulka:
yes, it really is. And I mean, we don't have to go into big, complex systems. We have to, we have to start with the simple, practical things and the expectations of current customers today, right people around the globe are used to be able to buy off of places like Amazon. They know when they're going to get their products. They know that that's going to show up about the time they said they can look through all these kind of things. And these are the typical buyers, even for industrial buyers. Now they want those same kind of things. So when it used to be that I was able to have somebody email me a purchase order, and then I would have to enter the information in my customer service. People would enter it in and then send them an order acknowledgement, maybe. And it was a PDF, and, and, you know, and when they needed more of them, they would do that. I mean, that all has to change, because your buyer today wants to be able to do that at seven o'clock at night. On Friday night, Sunday morning. They want to do it Tuesday at 8am but they also want to have instant feedback and understand where that is at. They want to be able to place an order with you, and they want to be able to and in the US here we have Domino's Pizza, and I love they came out with, I forget what they call it, the pizza tracker or something, but you could when my kids were small, we would order the pizza, and they would watch the pizza tracker, and it would say, we're making, we're kneading the dough. Now, it's in the oven. It's, you know, getting it. It's in the car for delivery. And this is the kind of stuff that our customers today want to know because they're being asked. They get this information from other places. Now, when they order stuff, they don't care that we're a manufacturer here that we're making. You know, we could be making snow blowers, or we could be making lawn mowers, or we could be whatever it is that we're making that they need. They don't care. They want that same level of service. And they also want to learn a lot more about your products. So these things are driving innovation like nobody's business, especially when you think about the technologies being simple that can do this today, applying them in your business and the impact that has long term, just from simple things like Andrew places an order with me today, and I say, thanks. Andrew Stotz, time you placed an order with us. You bought this too. Do you need that as well? The simple things that we can do with technology today make the customer experience so much better. Doesn't matter if it's an industrial customer or if it's a if I'm buying my favorite, you know, gift or craft thing, whatever. It doesn't matter that the lines have been blurred between I'm buying industrial products from this place, or I'm buying my favorite. Like I said, craft supplies, expectations don't really change that much anymore with people
Andrew Stotz:
so. So let me summarize what I think I'm hearing from you about, um, three threats. The first threat, I'm calling a tsunami of accelerated innovation, like, you know, it's just coming. What you know, with what, how that's advancing. The second soon, uh, the second threat is retirements, you know, as society's age, we're getting more and more retirements, and we're not able to replace that with the, you know, with the same type of people. Also, I would say, in the US in particular, you've education levels have gone down so long and so bad that you may not even have the engineering talent that's walking out the door in retirement. And so, yes, you've got tech savvy and, you know, good consumers, but the technology that you need and the engineering smarts may not even be there. So that's the second one. And then the third one is, I would, I would say what you're describing is nowadays. You know, go back 2030, years ago, we only had so many customers we could buy from you. We went on the internet, we went to the phone book, we went around our neighborhood, and we asked people. And so we were exposed to only a small number of sellers. But now buyers are getting used to the service levels of the most advanced operators, and now that's what you gotta beat. Those are my three ones that I got an accelerated innovation. Retirements and advanced operators are killing us.
Damon Pistulka:
Yeah, you're right, because the and the edge don't. Forget the education, because I think that's a huge one as well. But this retirement and the lack of education, educated, qualified and educated people that fill that void is something where I see some really cool systems coming to play, especially an example that I'll give you a company that I get to work with them a little bit once in a while. We play play in what they're doing, and it's Gen Alpha technologies, and what they've got is for OEMs, like, say, I'm, I'm an OEM manufacturer of street sweepers or something like that, but I want to sell my products through distribution and retailers and all that. But I have to have customer service people inside what we're doing with them is that what they're doing is they're taking the knowledge from their 20 plus year customer service people, and they're putting it into their system so that when someone goes to buy something, they're saying, hey, I need to do an oil change on this unit. I need that filter. Well, the customer service person now has, don't you need all this other stuff? And do you want me to walk you through that? Because I've got the instructions here, I could either send them to you, or we can go over them on the phone. I've got, you know, I've got the whatever video I can send you the all the different kind of stuff to really give that customer service person a ton of extra knowledge when they're on the phone or they're communicating with those customers to be able to to fit to close that gap for the very thing you said because, because Stan left, he's not there anymore, and Susan's in there now, and she's doing the best she can, but she doesn't have 25 years of experience. But what we did is we took 25 years of experience, put it into a system that she can easily operate. Because in systems, they work really younger people work really well. And if you give them the knowledge, they can easily give it to others and help them with it. So these things, they're simple. I mean, they're when you think of the things that we can do to help bridge these gaps, they're simple. But the company that doesn't do that, as you said, and if they're competing against the company that does that, how much different of a customer service experience is that?
Andrew Stotz:
Yeah, and what's interesting too, is that, well, first of all, being in Asia, I'm sorry about the US education system, and I'm sorry that the US government has let down young people by allowing education to Crash and Crash and Crash for 30 consecutive years. Sorry about that, but that's not the problem in Asia here, they are accelerating their education. They are trying to improve their production systems. China is amazing now that moving so advanced and so, you know, even listening to, you know, right now we're in the middle of election season, so we hear both candidates talking about, you know, bringing jobs back to America, to what, to what bringing it back to what to a workforce that's not educated and not ready to take on those challenges. There is a huge opportunity in America to bring production back to America, but it's going to take a huge rethink about how you're going to actually achieve that. And I would agree that taking on AI and other, you know, tech innovations can help leapfrog some of those problems, you know, but you can't, let's say, when you dumb down an education system, you can't easily overcome that. In fact, as I like to say, you can't dumb down an education system and a people and not expect there to be consequences. There are massive consequences, and they are long term. They're not easy to turn around.
Damon Pistulka:
This is true, and you know, some of the best operators that I work with are taking a global perspective on that as well. There's, there's a few companies I know now that consider their engineering arms not in the US. You know, they have their engineering arm and it gives them several benefits, a access to more educated people that can really understand what they do be they can almost get faster turnaround time, because if they're doing it right, they can keep projects moving faster and get a lot more done that way. And again, it's utilizing the technology and eliminating the geographical limitations that we put on ourselves to really maximize, maximize what our businesses truly can be. So
Andrew Stotz:
let's recap again. This is for business owners. You're a business owner, you should be listening to this. And what we're talking about, ultimately, is technology, robotics. CRM. AI all of these things and how we can apply those, and we just want to help wake everybody up and wake you up to think, Wait a minute, there's this rapid innovation that's outpacing what we can do in our businesses. For a lot of older businesses, there's an aging workforce, and there's limited new talent, and then you've got customers now expecting top tier service levels from a mid tier company. These are the threats or the competitive forces. So now let's talk a little bit about what it is that you're doing, how you're working with clients, what you're learning, what you're sharing to help people think about, how do I deal with this situation?
Damon Pistulka:
Yeah, I'm really lucky with what I get to do with clients, and it's around helping them find, develop this, develop the strategies. First of all, where are we? Where are we behind? Where do we need to what are the low What are low hanging fruit points? Because you never want to go, oh, we make this big system is going to cure all our problems. That's not the way this works. You start small. You look for little, little low hanging fruit ways to go. Hey, what if we tried this little bit of technology here to see how that works? Oh, let's try a little bit over here, and then work your way up, because you need to get your company, your people, and every all your supplier base, everybody comfortable with these changes you're making, and it's the best to go this is a constant, annoying problem that we think we can solve, and go in and solve the the low hanging fruit that are not difficult first and then work into it. So my job is primarily to talk to the smart people that know how to fix a lot of these things, and know how to practically fix these things, and then help to to get the right things in front of clients, and then Shepherd those clients through these processes. Because as we do that, we're organically helping those business to be more efficient and grow, and ultimately, by building a great business foundation. We're creating a business that's very valuable for the owner,
Andrew Stotz:
so don't try to do it all. Look at, you know, simple strategies that you can do, low hanging fruit. And what I'm hearing from you, too, is look for experts that can advance that particular area you happen to work with clients. But if, if somebody's hearing what you're saying. They see they have a problem. Go out and try to find an expert that can accelerate that. I wanted to go back to something that you mentioned earlier about you mentioned about growing value of a business, growing the value of a business. And just for those people that may not totally understand that, let me explain that from a finance perspective, basically, value is created with the gap between income and, let's say the cost of money. Let's keep it general, the cost of money that a business gets to create its business and the return that it gets on that money in the future. And that's the simplest way we get money into our business. We deploy it in such a way that we try to get the highest return that we can get on that in the future, and that that cash flow stream that we're creating then needs to be discounted by some risk factor. So ultimately, if you ever hear anybody say that the all those greedy capitalists, they want to maximize profit, wrong, wrong. The objective of capitalists is to maximize value. A great example is, you know, Amazon, in the first seven years it was listed, it lost money every single year. So was it destroying value? No, it was creating value. It was investing and then eventually created value. Of course, if you just lose money every year, you're going to basically eventually destroy value so that so how do we grow value? Well, there's two ways that we can grow value. The first one is that we expand the gap between our cost of money and the return that we're earning, so we get a higher return, great, but there's limits as high how high you can go, because competitors are going to see that and they're going to come in. So the second one is that you bring your product and services to more people, and get that spread to from more and more people. So there's margin expansion, and then there's growth. Ultimately, now I focus on profit, because that's the simplest way to look at it. And so basically, what my passion is profit. I love to help people think about, how do I generate more profit out of this situation, so that I have the resources to invest in my employees, my research and development, my tools and stuff, so that I can bring better, you know, better solutions, to my clients. So that's a little bit of a recap of the concept of what you said grow value from a finance perspective,
Damon Pistulka:
yes, yes. That's a great, great way to explain it, because that's really, in the end, that's what you're trying to do with any businesses, is to increase the profitability, which increases the value of the business and and really then utilize. That to continue developing ways, and this is what's so much fun, is when you start looking at these innovations, and you start getting these little wins, the innovations oftentimes lead to bigger and bigger improvements. Or when it's really cool, you find these blue ocean strategies where you go, Okay, now we're playing in an area that our competitors don't even know how to touch right now, like, you know, speed is always a good one. Amazon's a great example of this. When they came out with Amazon Prime, and they were saying, Hey, we can deliver everything. And what was it? 2448 hours or whatever. Oh, it's crazy. Everybody said, No, we don't do that. You always have to wait, you know, three, five, whatever, days to get some word, nope, 24 hours or 48 whatever it was. And that is an example of blue ocean strategy, because they went to a place that nobody else was willing to go. They couldn't do that without extradite, delivery and all this other stuff. And how long did that last, and how big of an advantage Did that give them? And it still continues today, even though other people have tried to duplicate it, and they are, it's still they're out there, because they got out ahead of that with these innovations. And you do that, and if you think that in and I always go back to manufacturing, because there's so many things right, especially if you're if you're a contract manufacturer, and say, I'm manufacturing assemblies for an automobile manufacturer. Well, at a certain point, like you said, I can't get more efficient on what I'm doing. I've robotically automated all this other stuff, but innovation and technology might allow me to do something that my competitors can't, because maybe I can manage the inventory for my entire supply chain for my customer so I can better anticipate their needs so they never run out of product no matter what happens. You know, just things like this that give us the advantage outside of our our core products that are so interesting with these, these bits of technology that you can
Andrew Stotz:
implement the when, when I, when I think about this, you know, I think about the module in my profit boot camp about corporate strategy, and, yeah, basically, there's a couple lessons that I, I provide through that. And it comes from, you know, true masters like Michael Porter, where he talks about the idea of making sure that your that your competitive advantage is built into your into your supply chain, into your, what I would call your cost of goods sold, yes. And so once you've built it into that, it's very hard to replicate. And a great example he uses is IKEA and their flat boxes. If I was to take over a company and say that was competing with IKEA, and I was to say something like, yeah, you know, we're going to use flat boxes only. That's going to be, you know, an impossible challenge,
Damon Pistulka:
yeah. And so great example of it, yeah.
Andrew Stotz:
And I'm going to destroy my business, basically. So the first thing is building into the value chain. The second thing is I basically take away from all that I present in the profit bootcamp is it's got to fit your DNA. And definitely the speed aspect of Amazon fit their DNA and then, and then you've got it in, you've got to iterate and improve, improve, improve, improve, improve, improve, improve. And when you do those things, you build it in your supply chain, it fits your DNA, and then you just focus on it. It doesn't have to be, you know, faster delivery. Come on. Who would say that would be a competitive advantage? Come on, that's like, No, I can just go to UPS and ship faster or whatever. Nobody's going to think that that's fact, that that's a competitive advantage. But the fact is, anything can become a competitive advantage if you focus on it and if it fits your DNA. And the last thing I teach in that profit bootcamp module on corporate strategy is I asked the question. I asked the question, should strategy be private, secret or public? And what I say is public, because actually you want your competitors to copy your strategy. Why? Because you are now bringing them onto your space of flat boxes as an example and let them rejigger their whole business around flat boxes. It's not in their DNA. They didn't do it from the beginning. It's not built into their value chain, and therefore they're going to destroy themselves in the process. So as having, having mastered the read many books on Genghis Khan and his attacks, he's constantly pulling other opponents onto his battlefield and then crushing him. And so, you know, those are some of my thoughts about what you've just said. Oh, I
Damon Pistulka:
think it's, it's 100% true, because, and you, you said the one point that really, I think. Makes a difference it's not in their DNA, because if it's not in your DNA, you're not going to be able to do this in your business. But if it is in your DNA, and you can do it, and you can refine it, you can transform industries. I mean, we all have the opportunity to transform industries if we find the right things that our customers desire, and we transform our entire business around that, so our customers are very happy that they're getting that. And it's a wonderful thing when it happens.
Andrew Stotz:
And that goes back to one of my first teachers, Dr Deming, and I have another podcast that I'm the host of the Deming Institute podcast, which is a great place to learn about the teachings of Dr Deming. But what he said is, you know, stop looking at your competitors and start looking at your customers. And basically, if anybody listening to this find yourself having a discussion internally about benchmarking and saying, our customer does this, but we don't do this. We do this, but our customer doesn't do that. We need to do this because our customers do that. You're doing it the wrong way. What you need to do is focus completely on the customer and completely on what your capabilities and your strengths are, and just keep building that, keep testing that, and keep bringing that to the customer. It doesn't mean you ignore the competitors, but the point is, benchmarking off of competitors is one of the dumbest things to do. One of the smartest things to do is try to figure out with your customer what they need, and then, and then start testing that out, you know, and then eventually you build your competitive strength. So I like that you talked about, you know, developing strategies. You talked about low hanging fruit. You talked about how you shepherd clients through a process of finding the best people, the best way to do it, and starting to implement it. What else would you recommend for listeners out there who can see that there is, you know, there are those threats that we've mentioned, about the tsunami coming, about the retirement aspect, and also about customers now being able to experience world class service. What are the next things that you would mention?
Damon Pistulka:
Well, I think it's start get educated first of all, because the biggest, the biggest challenge to adopting anything like this, change in business, change in life, is, is getting familiar enough and comfortable enough with it, at least to try it. And that's what scares a lot of people from the beginning. It's like, oh, it's like, we're not that's just way too Oh, they just can't do that. Well, listen, if somebody else is doing it, you can do it, and if somebody else is to do it, and you can mix it and do it in your own way, it's probably going to be a lot better. So get, get knowledgeable about it. Ask people, go see this stuff. Talk. You know, we have the internet. Look at for goodness sakes. Well, you could watch videos. YouTube is like education on steroids. If you want to learn about new technology, just go out and start looking at things. Because you have to get comfortable enough quickly to start identifying potential areas where this could help your business, and then start talking to people that can help you do it. And don't waste time on these initial ones, trying to learn things yourself. I'm a do it yourself. Earn a lot of things, but when it comes to technologies, and you need to go fast, you have to hire the right people out of the gate, but get intelligent enough so you can ask the right questions and make sure you've got the right person, because they will take you far ahead. Your team's going to learn. Everybody's going to learn. Then maybe your team can take it after that in these next steps, but that first step. Get really good help. Yeah,
Andrew Stotz:
that's great advice. And I know from my just yesterday, I had a guy come into my house and help me with my home studio and the lighting. I called many different lighting companies that they're selling lighting materials. I said, Do you do like, a home consultation? And they're like, you know, an office consultation? And they're like, Nope, you just got to come down and look at the lights and see what you can get and all that. But one company said, yeah. So they sent a guy, and I paid him for it. I said, I'm happy to pay for it. He came and looked at my space. He already made changes, already without even selling me any of his products. And he's already made changes that have improved things dramatically. And now he's coming back with some proposals, and now I can see exactly how I can improve. And you know, we'll go to an expert right now. So we talked about, number one, develop strategies, particularly focused on low hanging fruit. We talked about getting educated, and I wrote down, bite the bullet and grow your knowledge. It's time to go. It's time to do it. You got YouTube, you got podcasts, you got company visits, visits to customers. You know, all that things, all those things, get the right person to try to help you and demand that you've got to move forward on these things, because this tsunami is coming. Is there anything else that you would tell people from your experience of what they should be doing? So. Speed.
Damon Pistulka:
Yeah, speed is everything. I don't care what. Anyhow, it doesn't matter what you're doing, right? Look at Amazon did it. I've been unfortunate enough to do it in several manufacturing companies when I was running them back in the day, where, if you look and you're in an industry where everybody does something in six weeks, four weeks, two weeks, whatever it is, and you can come in and do it in half that time. Everybody's going to think you're crazy. Everybody's going to think you can't do it, but you can, and you have to get really good to do it. You have to be very efficient to do it. And that also means you can do it at a lower cost than everybody else is taking their time and wasting time and all these other things, and poorer quality. But speed sells. I am just it is a mantra that I do. I don't care if I'm working with a healthcare client. You know, time to get my appointment scheduled to the time I'm in for somebody that's putting flooring in homes or on manufacturing cars. Because if someone told me that, that you could order your car today, in a week from tomorrow, it would be ready on the lot. How many people will buy that car compared to what they have to do now? I mean, you just think speed is so important to everybody, because we want that instant gratification, and why
Andrew Stotz:
don't we have speed like if you're thinking about a typical client, or a typical person out there that's running a business, what? What is it that's holding them back from speed?
Damon Pistulka:
They haven't looked at the process well enough. I mean, I'm an old process guy, and when you look at it, and you get your teams together, and you go, Oh, how do we do things? First of all, because you look at the current state, and then you go, Okay, let's cut this in half. And everybody's gonna go, oh, we can't do that. I said, Well, what's the first thing that we have to do to do it? And you start stepping people through this process, and I've done it. I've seen it work. I've seen I've taken companies before that. We had eight week lead time on product, custom made product, and done it in 10 business days. By the time we're done with it, this is the kind of thing you can do, but you have to go, know really well what we're doing, and throw that out after you figured it out, and make it new, because it might mean that we have to redesign our services to be more efficient the sequence of order that how we do things. There's a lot of things that might need to change, but it's there. It's there for the taking. And when you do it, you can, you can, you can become the leader of an industry in your area, in your industry, whatever it is, if you do it, its speed is something, you know. And I'm so glad that Amazon did this umpteen, many years ago, because it's hard to dispute it. So
Andrew Stotz:
Damon, for the listeners out there, they're like, Yeah, we're so slow. And every time I look at improving a process, it's like, everybody's busy. I don't have time. Where everybody's just like, working like crazy. So How the hell am I going to get the time? I agree I want to go faster. I want to improve these processes. But every time I go at it. People just tell me, I don't have time. What do we do?
Damon Pistulka:
You make the time. There's this, is this, is this, is do or die. You know, that's the thing I've been in the turnaround, where you either have to do or die. And there are times you should treat this like it's a turnaround, because if you don't realize it, it's happening, and somebody else is doing this and watching young men here practice baseball until they go to the MLB. Some of my son's friends are playing in the MLB now, and it is the people that act like everybody else that are going to practice a little bit harder to them if they don't practice harder, it takes that kind of mentality to do these things. And you know, industry leaders don't get there without a lot of smart people doing a lot of smart work. And that if you've got that kind of attitude, first of all, you need to sit back and go, okay. First of all, how much in my day am I really doing that? And we can go down a whole different road with this, but I'm just going to say there's a lot of time in your day if you throw out the junk.
Andrew Stotz:
So there's a great book that recently came out. It's called, uh, 10x is easier than 2x Yep, yeah, that's a good one, yep. And what you're talking about there is that you've got to, you've got to throw out some things, you know, you and I would say every business is full of non value added stuff that just grows and grows and grows. So as you've said, make the time. It's do or die. Someone else is going to eat your lunch. Things are moving at a fast pace. So I'm sorry that everybody's overloaded, but we have to make time for this, and we have to disappoint in another area in order to get this, because this is going to make a difference in our long term, you know, growth. Yup. Okay, so we got developing strategies to attack low hanging fruit. We. We've got getting educated and figuring out what's going on. And then we're talking about speed. Is there anything else you want to tell the audience? Just get started. That's, yep. Just start. You know. It's, it's,
Damon Pistulka:
you know what you have to do. Business owners wake up knowing what they have to do every day. Cut the distractions. Cut the crap out. Get focused on that.
Andrew Stotz:
Yeah, great. And that's in my profit bootcamp. My mantra is, double your profits in 12 months. And people question that. That's a statement that's either going to piss someone off and say, I don't believe you, or it's going to say someone's going to say, I want to do that. But either way, what I know is that it's not rocket science. People know their problems, they just don't deal with them, and they don't address them, and they don't fix them, and move on to the next one and the next one to improve. Improve, improve. And so as you're saying, just start. You know what you have to do? You know, any, any good business owner has a chance to survive in this accelerated situation, they know what to do, and so they've got to get on it, and they've got to put other stuff aside, and they got to start now, okay, wow, that's a lot of stuff that we just covered. And where is the best place for people to get, get you and get in touch and, you know, learn more about what you're doing.
Damon Pistulka:
Yeah, you can, you can follow me on LinkedIn, Damon pistolka, or just reach out to me. You can get on our website. Exit your way.com, there's contact us forms. There's, we got a bunch of Business Resource Center downloads all kind of stuff there too. But go ahead and check me out on LinkedIn. Damon pistolka, there's only one of me in the world, pretty easy to find.
Andrew Stotz:
Well, that is a great discussion about how to well, you know, I'm all about reducing risk, and this is about reducing the risk that you're going to die, that your business is going to die. So I want to thank you for joining the mission again and sharing your knowledge, fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host, Andrew Stotz saying, I'll see you on the upside. You.