Episode Transcript

Hey what’s up? What’s up? What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome back to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. Hey guys real quick, would you partner with me to spread the word and help change lives? If you know somebody that would benefit and their life would change for the better by listening to the show, Would you share it with them? And if not, would you mind rating and leaving a five star review for the show and just help spread the word that would be so great, I appreciate it guys.

Well, anyways, today I want to talk about truck B. And this comes back to a philosophy that Andrew and I work from often, which is finding our constraint. So one of the ways that Andrew and I work constantly in the business is finding the constraint, where’s the constraint, and this comes back to the 80/20 rule, 80% of our outcomes come from 20% of the work that we do. So 80% of What we produce really comes from 20%. And that’s where the constraint comes in. Because a constraint is simply a task, or something that needs to be built or changed, that upholds all these other tasks, and all these other things are dependent upon it. So it’s a dependency, the rest of the organization is dependent upon it, and so on and so forth. And so our goal in when we work is to find this constraint. And that’s where truck B comes in. Okay.

And so let me give you an analogy of this. I own a delivery business, we deliver baked goods every day to bakeries around our city. Okay, I have two trucks. One of them is truck a, and one of them is truck B. And those are the only two ways that I get to deliver my baked goods all the way around to the bakeries. That’s it. So truck a works 90% of the time, so it rarely breaks down it doesn’t have any problems, we need minor maintenance. Truck B only works 20% of time. So 80% of the time, truck B is out of commission, which, which then leads me to talk about which truck should I work on to better my business. Most of us, like working on the thing that is easiest, which is truck a the thing that works the best when I was taking piano lessons, there’s a big difference between practicing and playing the piece. And everybody wants to play the piece, but they don’t actually want to practice the technical skills. This is the same type of concept. We as people like to work on truck a because it’s nice. It’s shiny. Oh, look, it looks so great. And it feels good. But that’s actually very deceptive. Because the biggest benefit the business would have is if we fix truck B. Right.

So if we got truck B working to 50% of the time instead of 20%. Right now, truck B is only out half the time, that is 100% increase is 100. Really, it’s 120% increase if my math is correct, of productivity by fixing truck B to get it to the point that it functions 50% of the time. Isn’t that crazy? Versus if I’m going to get truck a to increase productivity to 120% How much more work do I have to do? Now it’s not even a truck we’re like making a spaceship or a teleporter or something, which is radically much harder to do. And so this is the question always, where’s my truck B? And am I working on truck B and this is What I mean by finding the constraint. If we fix truck B and got truck B to work 90% of the time, we could probably double our business. We can’t double our business right now. Because really we have one truck that is our main source of delivery. We say we have two trucks and we do physically we have truck a truck B but only one of them does the majority of the deliveries and so our distribution is now constrained by truck B and we can’t grow as a company because truck B doesn’t function the way it does.

Oftentimes, we’ll be like well, I just need to buy a new truck I just need to do this. It’s like true. But are we actually fixing truck B? Are we aware of truck B or are we just buying another truck because those are two different things as well. And so Andrew and I when we work it’s constantly Where’s truck B? Where’s truck B in my personal life? What is my biggest thing that I need to work on, truck B, my big items the easiest fix to get the most gains, right? If you’re learning a new sport, the easiest most quickest time to improve is at the very beginning when you have no skill versus if you’re in the NBA competing like against LeBron James and Steph Curry or whoever else. You have to work five to 10 to a who knows how many times harder just to increase by half a percent better or by 1% better because the skill level is so high.

So anyways, that being said, Find your truck B’s and you will watch a lot of things change. I’m out of time guys, I’ll catch you later peace