Brad Johnson: Today, I want to share with you the number one lesson I believe every single entrepreneur and independent financial advisor out there should learn. It comes to you from my favorite book. In fact, you can see it’s got a lot of miles on it. I believe I’ve read Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoics six or seven times through. It’s a daily reader for those that are unfamiliar but this passage I want to share with you, and then I want to share the lesson behind it.
November 22. The Glass is Already Broken. “Fortune falls heavily on those for whom she’s unexpected. The one always on the lookout easily endures.” —SENECA.
There is a story of a Zen Master who had a beautiful, prized cup. The master would repeat to himself, “The glass is already broken.” He enjoyed the cup. He used it. He showed it off to visitors. But in his mind, it was already broken. And so, one day when it actually did break, he simply said, “Of course.”
So, why do I share this lesson with you? Well, I was asked my first year of being an entrepreneur, Triad’s now four and a half years old, and I was asked, “What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in the last year?” And I thought about it for a second and I said, “It’s a lot easier to coach entrepreneurs than it is to be one,” because I had coached entrepreneurs for close to 13 years in my prior role some of the most successful independent financial advisors all over the US and was really blessed to be able to grow up in the business with them, learn from them, both all of the lessons not to repeat, as well as all of the things that worked and could be applied to other advisor firms I was coaching with.
But I will tell you, being someone that has always slept very well at night, as soon as my head hits the pillow, that first year, I had multiple nights where I would wake up in the middle of the night, heart beating out of my chest, just a little mini panic attack. In fact, I haven’t shared this, I don’t think publicly, but I actually went in and got an EKG because I was worried that I was going to have a heart attack. And the stresses of entrepreneurship are real. Don’t worry. My heart’s okay. But that entrepreneurial rollercoaster, the ups, the downs, the highest highs, the lowest lows, those are real. And if you don’t have frameworks to be able to deal with them, they can and they will eat you alive. In fact, I’ve seen it happen to many over the years.
And one of the things that stoic story, the lesson that I took from it, the cup in this scenario is actually a great analogy for that next business problem right around the corner. In fact, I remember the first year at Triad we had a personnel issue. Shawn and I were discussing it and literally going deep and spending many hours after hours on phone calls, “What are we going to do?” We had one division that was a division of one human that literally just didn’t show up for work for a month. And we were trying to give grace but at the end of the day, business must go on and we had to serve our members, our clients. And you can’t do that when a whole division shut down.
We got that solved. We built out the division so it wasn’t just dependent on one individual, the hit-by-bus test, as we call it. But as I look back and you start to have these lessons in business, your first personnel issue, the first time you have to let someone go. And a lot of times the emotional toil it takes on you, which can lead to health issues, all kinds of things as an entrepreneur, what you can’t let those do, as a leader that needs to be both calm and confident, is let you show up in a way that you are undermining your team, you’re not leading your team properly, you’re showing up like an emotionally volatile leader. And that’s one of the mental frameworks, the cup. So, just replace the cup in this stoic story with that next business problem.
And now that next personnel problem, I need to create a system and a process. We have one at Triad. We share it with many of our members of how to do a PIP, a performance improvement plan. In fact, we’ve actually renamed it because we don’t like the context around a PIP because it has a negative connotation. But in reality, here are the behaviors that are unacceptable or are keeping you from doing your job. Here are the expectations going forward. From a place of love and truth, we want to empower you, we want to coach you, we want to level you up so you’re hitting what we need on the culture side, also on the performance side. And the cool thing is once you develop those systems, they don’t have to derail you each and every time.
But if you have the mental mindset and philosophy that this too shall happen again, this might have been an incredible week, a record week, everybody’s loving it, culture’s vibing, but the cup might fall off the desk and break next week, that next personnel problem that is around the corner. And the thing that has really helped me as I’ve grown as an entrepreneur is now in a weird sort of way I just expect it and embrace it and I don’t let it eat me alive, but the way I do that is I make sure I have the systems in place to handle it in the way I want to handle it the next time it happens.
So, wanted to share that with you. It’s a lesson I’ve shared with many as we’ve gone deep on the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur. And just remember this, it will happen again. That’s the game you signed up for as an entrepreneur. So, if you just approach each and every problem as my prized cup, it’s already broken, now you just need to know how to glue it back together the next time it falls off the desk.
And so, with that, I hope that lesson serves you all out there, all of you independent advisors, all of you entrepreneurs. And, well, for those watching on YouTube, if you would like an example of that PIP process that we just talked about, go ahead and put a comment down below in the comments. And maybe I’ll do a future episode on that. In fact, we can share some high-level kind of four steps that we use because we do have the belief, no one should ever be surprised when they’re let go. We want to do everything in our power to both coach people up, level them up, and have a process.
Because the truth is the only people it really hurts are the people the team left behind. You don’t want them walking on eggshells wondering if they’re next to go. And if your team knows you have a process each and every time that is built to empower them, coach them up, we found that makes all the difference in the world. So, with that, hope this episode was helpful and I will catch you all on the next one. Take care!
