Episode Transcript.

What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m.

So I want to talk about how most things in life are two and three steps removed. And so this is what I mean by that. I recently saw a statistic where, and this was done with market research about things that were most problematic for business owners and small businesses. And the statistic was not enough cash flow, about 62% all right, 62% of a problem of business owners are like, hey, this one of my biggest problems is not enough cash flow, but only 19% of them said that their problems were due to marketing, like they have a problem with marketing.

Now I want to really talk about this, because this is how all of life works. Okay, for business, what’s the first thing you think about when you need more money? What do you need more of? sales How do you fuel sales? marketing And most business owners like, Oh, we don’t have enough cash. Well, the way to get more cash is to do marketing. And Andrew and I talked about this. It’s interesting how marketing will be one of the first items cut on the business agenda. Oh, this is the least important thing when it’s actually the most important thing.

Revenue really solves all problems. Like, if you have the cash flow coming into the company or coming into your life, it’s solve all problems. Okay? And it’s amazing to think that, oh, marketing ‘s not important. But yet, 62% of business owners are like, Oh, my cash flow is a problem. So if you look at that and what I just laid out, that’s two or three steps removed from the problem that they see.

This is how life works. Most people and I, and I talked to a service tech the other day. We were talking, and most people think that, oh, no, the problems here, right? Because I told him, I was like, Hey, man, you know, we had issues with this. The last guy who was working on this, he didn’t do a good job. And it’s really taken a long time to really work through all this with your customer service. Your customer service has been poor. Not talking to him, I just been telling him the client journey. He immediately took it personally and was like, oh my, I don’t, don’t be upset at me. It’s this, it’s that, it’s all these things. And it’s like, Hey, man, I’m not upset at you. I’m just talking about the customer service journey. But he couldn’t see that I was talking about things that were two or three steps behind him, and was immediately like, oh man, you’re upset with me, and I wasn’t even upset with him, which was interesting.

But this is normal. We normally go and look at problems at immediate like what is immediately in front of me, and normally what caused our immediate problem is not what is immediately in front of us, it’s three or four steps behind us. And I think it’s super interesting how our immediate reaction is tied to what we immediately see, and then we don’t deduce any further behind that. That’s what this whole theory of constraints, by the way, if you’ve ever looked it up, I would you know, if you haven’t ever looked up what the theory of constraints is, you should look it up. It’s useful for life in general, not just business, because the Theory of Constraints is really about, hey, this problem was caused by this. This problem was caused by this.

I was watching a video on it, and they talked about how this weapon weapons manufacturer, they continue to fall behind in production schedule. They couldn’t meet their quotas to manufacture the ammunition, and as a result, they’re like, Okay, cool, what we need to do is get more people, maybe more throughput, blah, blah, blah. And then they started. They they had somebody in their team, or whatever. I don’t know how it turned out, but they had somebody who was trained in constraints and analyzing, identifying constraints. And what they realized were people were leaving the workstation 15 minutes early and not getting to their workstation on time, because the bus was a 15 minute walk and there’s only one bus to that area, so they actually met all their production schedule when they started bussing everybody in and actually increasing the amount of busses coming to the facility. Isn’t that crazy? What the world do busses have to do with productivity?

Well, at first glance, nothing, but then at second glance, and really looking at everything, they absolutely have everything to do with productivity. Because if you can’t get your people there on work, on time, everything stops. And if you lose 30 minutes a day per station, right, you have 30 minutes per day right per station, you have 10 station that’s 300 minutes right now, you do that five days a week. So 300 that’s 1500 minutes per week, times four, three that’s 6000 minutes. And then you divide that by 60, that’s 600 hours of lost time. I think somebody you guys can double check me on my math. There’s my brain math for you, but that’s crazy.

And then where does all that come from? Oh, all that comes from. I’m just taking things at immediate value, and I’m not looking at really what’s happening, what’s going on. And so I’m saying all that because most problems in life are two or three steps removed. And just like that mark. The example I gave, just like that manufacturing example I gave. This is how life works in general.

If you’re having a problem today, it started somewhere yesterday or even a week ago, and to look back and be like, cool, what was that? And this is why critical thinking is so important. Anyways, guys, I’ll do another episode of Critical Thinking. I’ll just hand it off this. I’ll catch you later. Peace.