Podcast Episode 21 with Transcription – Rem Oculee

Rem Oculee:

Welcome to the Exit Mindset Podcast. I’m Rem Oculee. 15 years ago, when I was trying to sell one of my companies, I couldn’t get what I thought was the right price for it. I realized I had things set up the wrong way, even though the company was profitable. So, I spent years researching and studying exit strategies to improve my company’s valuation. I discovered that the same process that improves valuation would improve business profitability and give me more free time. I’m here to show you what I have learned. You see, the best way to grow your business is to look at it from the perspective of someone who’s going to buy your company. Once you start thinking that way, magic happens, and you start seeing things you could not see before. But that’s not all, I also discovered the three principles that you must know to command a better price for your company. The three principles are first, the product, second, the infrastructure, and third, the conversation you have with the consumer. Once you master these three principles, you will be on your way to increasing your profits, your company valuation, and get more work-life balance. So, listen in and learn how you can do that. I will teach you through this podcast, lessons from the trenches, and we will have a dialogue with some of the greatest minds on the planet.

Do you ever wonder that no matter how many goals you set and how often you discuss them with your team, you don’t end up with the results you’re looking for? There are many, many reasons why you will not reach your goal, whether it’s monthly, quarterly, or even weekly. It could be anything from your infrastructure, the conversation you’re having with your consumer. However, there’s one more possibility that I’m going to highlight in here. And I find to be very common and I’ve seen it over and over again. Which is your goals are set up in a too long of a time period then you need to make things happen and react a little bit more quicker. So, in many cases you find most people set up monthly goals, and quarterly goals. And of course, there’s the annual goals there too. However, what happened when you’re setting up, let’s say a monthly goal, is that people have a tendency, and you have a tendency to sort of let the beginning of the month and the middle of the month slide by. That is very normal, because you always think there’s more time.

The good old ‘cram for exam time.’ In most companies, you’ll find people do cram the night of the exam. How do they do that? They start scrambling the last week of the month to make things happen. The last few days, it’s a, it’s a hustle. They’re running around trying to figure out how they could make the month work. And sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. When they do, it’s really, really by the last-minute kind of a thing where a lot of effort and a lot of, uh, a lot of stress. So, I find there are many, many reasons for that, by the way. Sometimes people delay the actual work needed to be done to achieve a goal, because it makes them scramble and they get gratification in getting things done last-minute. Last-minute thing is a really, really overrated thing, because there’s a victory involved.

“Oh, I got it done, I pulled it off, I feel good.” But at the same time, there’s a problem with your risk assessment. Because when you pull things last minute, that means you took a risk. It could or could not work. And basically, you banked your entire result on the fact that it could work in the last, say week or few days. You had a whole month. Why not use the same effort, maybe in the beginning of the month and add to it towards the end of the month, easily in a comfortable way? Or are you better yet maybe increase your results? But again, we go back to what’s common. What’s common is that the month goes, and by the last week you go, “Oh my God, look at the results. They’re not there.” And you start scrambling to figure out what to do to you make it happen.

So, if your outcome was to salvage the month and you did, it doesn’t mean decisions how you executed this strategy to salvage the month was good. Because if your strategy was to start working hard at the beginning of the month and end up by the end of the month, ready for the result. That’s in my opinion, is superior. But let’s go to another way of doing this, which is sort of an even reduction kind of a way of doing it. So, what you would do instead of going out there and waiting till the end of the month or doing all at the beginning of the month, which I also like. You could also create a dynamic where every day produced a predictable result. Now we all know in business things don’t happen that way. One days up, one days down, one day is the same.

So, you’re going to fall into that trap. “Well, I can make it predictable. And this day we do three times the production we did those three days before, therefore is good enough.” I have an approach where you wouldn’t do it that way. You start taking your goals and turn them into a daily goal. So, you take the monthly goal, let’s say, or the yearly goal and divide it by the number of days. You’re going to come up with a number. What you need to do is start stressing to your team that that number is the one you need to go after. So, let’s say your goal is to produce, say for example, $20,000 worth of revenues for the month, I’m making it up. That means $1,000 a day in sales. Instead of doing $3,000 the third day, and $1,000 the day after, and $0 the day after, and then $2,000 the day after to make it up. Shoot for $1,000 in predictable sale every day.

Now, you’re going to say, “Well, of course, this isn’t going to work Rem. How could that be possible? I know things go up and down.” The idea behind this is that you get your team together and start daily honing on that one number. That $1,000 in sales per day, and here’s what’s going to happen. Day one, you’re going to find that you didn’t accomplish it and you’re going to try and find some solutions, and it’s not working. Day two, same thing. Day three, you might end up with a number, some number. So, you started working with the team on making sure that every day you’ll look at that number. And then I want you to do one thing, which is key to this; start asking the question, “Why is it that we did not accomplish that number yesterday?” Here’s what’s going to happen. Every day you’re going to ask the same question and you’re gonna get some answers. The payoff isn’t going to be in the net, in the first seven days or 10 days.

The payoff might take you about a month, month and a half, maybe three months to get. However, what happens every day you look at that target and you’re not accomplishing it, you’re gonna work with your team and finding out what are the things that did not work. And slowly day by day, you’re going to find distinctions, you’re going to find things, you’re gonna find problems. We’re going to find solutions that would lead to either the creation of that $1,000 per day in revenues from your sales.

Or would lead to something that could solve a problem that is preventing that from happening, and that’s what the process is. The big issue, the biggest issue you’re going to face is monotony. And the only thing you don’t want to do is turn this into a slogan. So, monotony means that you don’t want to just be every day, you’re going through the motions. “Oh, what, what did we, what did we do today? Did we do $1,000 in sales?”

“No. Okay. Let’s go back to work.” You don’t wanna do that, just making it monotonous. Or you don’t want it to be stale where ultimately it’s just a slogan. Okay. “Did we do $1,000? Are we doing $1,000? Yes. We gotta do $1,000.” And you go on throughout the day. The thing with that goes with this, it’s something called using your thinking capability to try to understand what happened yesterday that prevented that. And my guarantee to you that if you keep doing this every day, day by day, you’re going to come up with the solutions. The solutions may appear at once at some point, but most likely they will appear slowly. So, you might end up with a situation where instead of $1,000, you start doing maybe $250 every day, and then you do the bigger numbers as in over sporadic days. Or it might be that you start slowly increasing until you get to the $1,000. Or sometimes you’d be surprised that you actually end up being ahead of the $1,000 on a daily basis.

But as long as you keep the pressure on your daily production, you’re going to find that you will, at some point, find a resolution to the problem. Because problems, they get solved by just looking at them or by just talking about them in a casual way. You’ve got to investigate, probe, trying to figure out what is going on with this. “Why are we here? Why aren’t I getting the $1,000 a day in revenues from the sales and next day, this same thing? Well, why??” Well, maybe because we haven’t reached enough consumers. Okay, well, let’s try and do that today, the next day or the next week by that, as you repeat the process, you might get there while you’re reaching out to consumers. “Well, it’s not working. We only get into $300.” Well, maybe the product is a problem. Maybe we need a different product.

We will work with that. Well, maybe the infrastructure is wrong. Maybe I’m not enough servicing. I don’t know. It could be anything. I mean, I could talk to you right now for hours and days about what could it be? This could be anything. But remember, your business is unique, and you are the one in charge. And if you’re going to have an Exit Mindset where you’re actually, now take a company has scaled up to a point where it’s predictable, where a buyer can come in and say, “I love this company.” I think is going to give you a steady stream of revenue. One of the ways to demonstrate that your company is viable, and it’s worth a lot more than a company is not predictable, is to show them that it can produce revenues and sales on a daily basis. I can assure you that. You think of it yourself.

If you want to go buy a company would just buy on a, buy a company that you just never know when the sale is going to come in? Of course not. Would you rather a company that most of the sales come in one day of the month? Would you rather a company that the sale is spread over 20-day period? Let’s say if it’s, uh, you know, if you take weekends off. Then wouldn’t that be better and more appealing to you? I would say, yes, I know what it would be for me. And I know I could build on that, but it’s hard to build on predictability. That would be a topic of one of our next podcast that we’ll be talking about is the difficulty of building on unpredictability. So, I try to show you is really, it’s a very simple strategy you can wrap your head around, but I will tell you this, the gold is in the simplest strategies that we forget.

And I build companies based on simpler strategies than the complex strategies. I find the more complex it gets, it’s good. I use complexity on a lot of things that I deal with every day. However, that complexity only comes in as a drill down from things I need that are very, very basic. One of the most basic concepts that I use on a regular basis is that concept of achieving a daily specific result that is not going to change. And I find that all the time that these goals increase and get better and better as we go throughout the quarters and years. So, what I did, I created a sheet for you that you can take and start running the calculations as to how you could take your goals and turn them into a daily goal. And use that sheet as a basis for anything you want you to do in terms of improvements. Because I’ll have a section in it for you to list the things you need to improve on, to see if you could get the results you’re looking for. And if you don’t, use another one, and keep updating it until you get it right. So, as I always say, action is everything. Use it or lose it. I’m Rem Oculee, and I’ll see you on the next podcast.

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