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 to the show predicated on the journey of life and business.

Well, guys, today, I want to talk about building out the starting line. So before we talked about how it’s so important to define What winning looks like, it’s so important to define, really, where you’re going to end up. We talked about vision, What am I actually building, right, we’ve talked about greater good the heart posture of the company. And we talked about these things. And I actually want to talk about another piece, which is building out the starting line. And when we, when we do a lot of work with other companies and businesses, and we’re helping them you’re going through some of our frameworks or processes and different stuff, one of the things that we do is we help them define their current starting position.

So when I say starting line, I mean that it is your current position where you stand today, okay. And part of building that out is, you’ve got to know and take inventory of everything that you actually have an inventory includes skills includes tool sets, it includes network, it includes resources, right, it includes bench, like who’s on your bench who can actually use for production, it includes a whole slew of things and items that you need to build out, right that are universal, okay? It includes marketing sets, marketing tools, it includes each aspect of the business, right. And this doesn’t matter whether you’re starting out as just a solo guy right now, or whether you’re a few years down the road, or whether you’re 10 or 20 years down the road. This applies universally.

And this is something that, you know, Andrew and I do is we take a current standing of where we are at, and we call it a current standing assessment of where we’re at. And we walk ourselves through the framework to go okay, where are we at currently today? Are we as far along as we thought we would? How did we get here? Who are the key players in our life? What were the key decisions that got here? And how are we going to move forward in tomorrow? So we talked about the past, we talked about the present, we talked about the future, to really get a gauge and an understanding of where we’re at, it’s so important to know where you’re starting out from. And let me give you an analogy of this.

All right, if you are trying to go to the beach, in the state of Florida, if you don’t know where you’re starting from. And let’s just say you’re going to drive that we’re assuming you’re going to drive there, and you’re trying to get to Pensacola, Florida, if you don’t know where you’re leaving from, and you can’t have a GPS or anything like that, currently, you gotta use an old road atlas, you don’t know your starting point and your starting position, you’re going to have no idea how to get to the beach, you’re going to have no idea What routes or What roads, you should take the highways, you’re not going to be able to map out your route. And Here’s the thing, there’s no GPS for businesses, a lot of it is the manual routing, for the roadmap to get where you need to get. And part of that process is a current assessment. Where am I at? What am I starting with. And so this is What I mean by building out the starting line, or defining our current location and position in the journey. And then we’re working our way to understand where we’re at, and then building out the next steps to be able to move forward.

See you cannot get somewhere if you don’t know where you’re at today. And so I think this is something that’s so important. It’s overlooked. Andrew and I did not do this, you know, when we first started out. And even when we first started, we took it so interesting, we actually took an assessment of What we had What was available to us how we are going to start, we took an inventory. But we did not actually keep a current inventory. And we did not continue with the assessment. And you can actually look over our journey and see how that caused us. Problems and caused problems, created challenges. It caused pain and different things in our lives. Because we didn’t understand where we’re at.

And that’s very much like trying to decide who you want to be when you grew up. And you don’t even know who you are today. How do you know who you want to be if you don’t know who you are. And it’s the same thing with a company, a company is a living entity, right? It really is, in a sense. And if you’re trying to build a company and it doesn’t have a current identity, it you’re you’re not going to be able to get it to where it needs to get to in the future. And so anyways, real quick just to give some practicals things if you’re going to build out a current assessment, you know, things that you should go over skill sets, right? You should take inventory of skill sets What you currently have on your team, your bench tool sets, you should have all your materials, you should have time and resources. You should have a constraints list. What are your current constraints, your top three, right you should have a list of the top three things that will guarantee failure and the top three things that guaranteed a success in our past to get here today. You You should go through and actually talk about teams and bench, right and then you should also talk about infrastructure. You need to take a current assessment of your infrastructure to make sure it actually suits What you need to do in order to move into the future beyond.

Well, anyways guys, I’m way over. So I’ll catch you later. Peace.