Blue Collar Culture

Business Results the Old Fashioned Way

Josh Fonger | Let People Help You – How Delegating Can Help Your Business

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In today’s episode of Blue Collar Culture, we sit down with Josh Fonger, a business performance architect and co-founder of Work The System. Josh is an international business consultant, coach, and speaker… all while helping hundreds of businesses grow simply by applying the systems created by Work The System. 

Josh’s specialty is taking stressed out entrepreneurs from working in their business to working on their business using his simple system. This leads to profit and freedom becoming more consistent.

This interview had so many insights that we’re excited to share with you! We’ll chat with Josh about documenting systems in your business, why systems are important for your employees’ success, as well as…

  • How to get the system in your head into a documented system your team can actually follow
  • How your ability and willingness to change will affect your success
  • Handing off tasks when you feel like you’re the only one who can do it
  • How to stop being a slave to your business
  • The steps you need to take to be more efficient
  • And more

Listen now…

Mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Ryan Englin: Welcome back to another episode of Blue Collar Culture. I'm your co-host Ryan Englin and I'm here with Jeremy Macliver. Say hi Jeremy.

Jeremy Macliver: Welcome back, everybody.

Ryan: Our guest today is a business performance architect and the co-founder of Work The System. He's an international business consultant coach and a speaker. He's had the unique experience of personally helping hundreds of businesses grow simply using the WTS, or Work The System method. His specialty is taking stressed out entrepreneurs from working in their business to working on their business using these systems so that that profit and freedom become a consistent mechanical reality. I want you to welcome Josh Fonger as our guest today. Welcome, Josh.

Josh Fonger: Happy to be here.

Ryan: So it sounds like you've got this overall, I mean, you've got this book, you've got a podcast, you've got lots of resources to help people really just create systems inside of their business so they get out of their business, what they want and maybe even change the reality that they have today. So tell us a little bit about that journey, how you got to where you are, and some of the things that you're able to do to help business owners accomplish that.

Josh’s Entrepreneurial Background and How He Helps Business Owners Free Up Their Time

Josh: Okay. Yeah, well definitely give you some of the backstory. I had planned to be in real estate development. So you, you're both local to where I am in the Phoenix Scottsdale area. So I used to be in commercial real estate development. Some companies out there, companies here locally because my undergraduate degree is in architecture, and I was the victim of the 2006, 2007 crash.

And so me, like a lot of other folks got laid off and I had to find something else to do. And I'd got my MBA while I was working. And so I was trying to find, basically a career in anything. I applied to thousands of places around the world. Well, maybe hundreds, not thousands, but a lot of places. It felt like thousands. And the only job I could get was being a business consultant, which is ironic because I wrote my thesis paper about why you should never hire a business consultant.

So there I was taking a career that I didn't think had any value and I didn't want to do really. But after getting hired as a business consultant, I fell in love with it. I just really enjoyed solving challenging problems, helping clients through difficult situations, and just had some really good success. Yeah, I had really good success early on because I started consulting when I was 26. Right, so I was usually working with companies where the owners were 10, 20, 30, 40 years older than me, 50 years older than me and so I just really hit it off and really loved the work.

And got to the point where I was traveling like 20 days a month and with a young family that's that's no good. And so I'm flying from location, location, location helping these companies out. And I had two major life changes happen which may be connected with Sam Carpenter, author of Work The System. One was that I was dying, you know, just burning out working too many hours away from home. That was killing me. And the other thing was I checked back on some of my clients and they kept needing me to come back again and again and again. Like the work that I did didn't stick, right?

I had to come back to help them with their sales. I had to come back to help them with their financial forecast. I had to come back to help them with their, you know, their merchandising scorecards, right? I had to keep coming back because what I did If I wasn't there, then they would lose focus, they would lose traction. And so I met Sam Carpenter in Bend, Oregon, I used to live in Oregon, and he wrote a book called Work The System. And this whole, the whole premise of the book is that you can build freedom in your business as an entrepreneur.

There's some very clear mechanical steps to do that. And if you build it right, you actually can work less and less and less and make more and more and more. Hence the subheading of the book, which is The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less, which is not a get rich quick scheme, it's just get rich correctly scheme, I guess is the way to put it. And I read in a book about how this idea of putting documented systems into place in a business, which is the most boring and painful thing for an owner to hear, is that it is entrepreneurs are creative, they like to, you know, make decisions quickly on the fly.

And this whole book is about, hey, actually, if you document the systems, the course of some of your business, you're actually going to build freedom, you're going to build higher quality, it's gonna improve your speed, your efficiency, cut out waste, it's gonna allow you to delegate, to cross-chain, to measure, to improve performance, all of these things that are essential if you actually want to grow with decreasing amounts of headaches and increasing amounts of freedom. It's just something you have to do.

And then I try to trying it out with my clients had really good results. And then Sam and I started this consulting business together, Work The System. And was maybe eight or nine years ago and ever since that's what we've been doing, is helping companies take his method in the book and applying it to a whole host of companies and industries around the world.

Ryan: So this system that Work The System, it really was that missing piece you had with your clients that you were consulting with when things weren't sticking. It's because they didn't have this system in place. Did I hear that correctly?

The Systems of Freedom

Josh: Yeah, well, so even if I would take, let's just say I had a sales strategy to help them or marketing strategy, we do teach it to the company, work with them on it, you know, teach their manager, teach that whatever that person was, people will come and go, the document system stay. And so even if the person was really good at that, over time, they would tweak it, they would change it, they would, you know, they'd have a good day, and then they have a bad day. And then they would bring someone else on and that person would have their own way of doing it a little bit different, a little bit more variation to it.

And then over time, it would get diluted, convoluted and chaotic. And then all of a sudden, you've got a mess again, right? You got three people, all involved in the marketing and they all do it differently. And no one really has clarity. And then, of course, the accountability goes down. Then, of course, the measure goes down. Then you've got a problem. And then your company gets in trouble.

The owner jumps in, the owner gets headaches, and you've got the mess all over again. And so that truly was the missing piece that I didn't take the time to, you know, encourage or force the client to document those systems and then hold people accountable to them. And then use those, I guess the exterior brain of the business. So instead of housing everything that's great in people's brains, you house it in these documented solutions outside of their brains.

Ryan: Yeah, no, that's great. I hear a lot of times from people that I talk to in the business community that, especially the owners, they just wish the people on their team would do it the way they would do it. Too often, we see a lot of business owners as the business is growing and they start hiring people, there's not a lot of time taken to train them.

And if they do, to your point, they may not hear it the same way. They may bring something from a previous position that they think would be a better way of doing it. And then before you know it, there's a problem. The owner gets involvement like, why aren't you doing it the way I did it? Because the way I did it works. And it sounds like that's really what Work The System is about is really solving that.

Josh: Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, people are not mind readers. And people, actually your team, your employees, they do actually want to do the job. But they need to have some clear way of doing a good job. And so we call it, you know, the recipe of each thing you're supposed to do. And here's a funny example. So I had one client where they, you know, the owner was always upset with the way people answered the phones. And this was actually a flooring store in Canada. And he was always annoyed by his team answering the phone, they were answering the phone the wrong way.

They didn't treat the customers the right way. And I said just write it down. Write down what you want. And evidently, it drove him crazy when people would answer the phone on the first ring because that made it sound too desperate. But if they answer the phone after the third ring, that sounded like they weren't really on top of it, like they weren't really in control of their business and they were behind. And, you know, just little things like that. And he said, you know, before they answer the phone, they need a smile first. And then they have to say it this way.

And here's exactly what they should say. And he had a whole methodology. And it was, you know, it was rooted in logic and it was rooted in experience. It was rooted in his training. I mean, the guy was in his 60s had been doing this a long time. And he had thought through exactly the best way to answer the phone. And he was wondering why, you know, whenever he hired somebody, they frustrated him so much. And it was just because they didn't know the recipe for answering the phone.

Ryan: Hmm. So how do you work with your clients to get that recipe out of their head? How do you get them to take a breather long enough to actually do that?

Josh: Right. Well, there is the trick, taking the breather. So that's one of our, it's built into our strategy is that we only work with mature thinking entrepreneurs. So if you're not willing to think in a mature way about your business, like you're not willing to take a breath and actually write down, write these things down, we can't help you, right? If you're just gonna keep running in circles and moving really fast and not getting anywhere, then you're not a good client for us.

We actually do need people who are going to provide leadership to their team, that we're going to move a little bit slower, just for a while, to get some of these best practices down, some of these things down. And the places where that's gray, we're going to spend a little bit time debating, arguing, figuring out what is the best way, and we're gonna write it down. And so that is essential. Like if the, we call it getting it. If the leader doesn't get it, they don't have what we call the system's mindset. If they're not willing to see things as separate systems, then we don't, we just don't even start with them.

So that's really the first component of any successful engagement is the owner has to see their business is not them, but they need to get outside and slightly elevated, look down to their business and see the separate pieces, the separate systems, understand that to have a perfect business, you need each of these individual pieces to be perfect and put back together. And if you don't see the separateness, then you are going to always be thrashing back and forth, never really having success because it's impossible just to fix a business as that's too big, it's too broad.

It's too difficult, but it is possible to fix today, the way everybody on your team greets customers when they walk in the door. You can fix that today. And that would actually make a measurable difference to your bottom line. And that is a simple, you know, it's one piece out of 100 for your business that you could fix with the system. And that's what we try to do is get the mindset first, and then once they see that, then we get to work, you know, piece by piece.

Ryan: Got it. So as an entrepreneur myself, I know one of the things I'm challenged with is the difference between my willingness to change and my ability to change. And what I mean by that is I might want to change, I might want that system, that process, I might want the documentation but when I look at my day, or I look at my week, or I will get my month I'm like, Where am I going to be able to carve out the time to distance myself enough from the fires that I'm putting out all day and be able to actually sit down and do that? What advice do you have for those other entrepreneurs that feel that same way?

Josh: I would say that you have, you're in good company because it's extremely unusual for a business owner to actually be good at this kind of work, to actually be good at sitting down and doing the non-urgent important work of putting systems in place. And so we mainly push the owners towards being good leaders, towards writing down a strategy which gets their team excited and shows them why they're doing this.

And we want the owners to be involved in developing the principles that are going to undergird this whole systemization effort. But after that, we try to get the owner away from the implementation because they are going to always be trying to, you know, they have big things to handle as an owner. And the big things that they're handling are almost always going to trump, you know, documenting how to answer the door, right? And so we have to get the team involved.

That's what we do is get the lower-level staff involved. In our case, we actually help document those systems for them. We have a writing company. We will actually, we have software we use regularly, we'll actually put those pieces in and not involve the owner because it's unusual for an owner to do that. Now, in Sam's case in the book Work The System, he has an engineering background. He thinks like an engineer. He loves to write.

His parents are, his dad was a grammar teacher and his mom was an author. He's an author, he loves this stuff. And this is a perfect thing for him. So he was highly involved in writing the systems and reviewing the systems and improving the systems because that was just what he really liked to do. But that's unusual, right? It's very often the case, I'm going to work with the second, third, fourth in command, and then they're going to actually work with me and we're going to actually get those systems built for the owner.

But the owner has gotta believe in it. They've got to be the cheerleader, they've got to have the vision, and they have to be willing to invest, you know, time and money, their time or sorry, their money, but their team's time in actually building a great company. And if they're not willing to do that, then, you know, they're just gonna stay small and dysfunctional.

Ryan: Wow. Yeah. So really leverage that the team to help them with that as well if that's not their specialty. Or, in the case of what you do, actually bringing outside experts to help them do that is one of the most effective ways to make sure it gets done. Because a lot of great intention but not being able to fully execute on it can actually sometimes make some things worse is what I've seen.

So when it comes to these processes, like, I think about business, and there's this joke that as business owners, we wear 17 hats and most of them look like a fireman hat because we're always putting out all these fires. So where does someone start with this? I mean, that's a big bite to chew on the business. So how do you get started in doing this?

Getting Owners Involved In Creating the Processes

Josh: Well, yeah, that's very true. And for some people, it's even more than 17 hats, right? Well, you got to start somewhere. So the place that I start is I get the owner to list out all the things they do. It's pretty tedious, but every single thing they do from the first thing in the morning to the last thing at the end of the night for multiple days, and I also do an org chart of everybody on their team. And then I do a future org chart of where they want to be in a couple years.

And so that gives us, again, the team goals of where we're going with that personnel and then it shows the owner what they're currently doing. And we start taking the list and say, Hey, you're an editor, like you review the copy. You know, actually looks like someone else could do that on your team. So we start to figure out, find out what things people could do in their team. And then it makes sense to actually document and train somebody because you realize other folks could do it. And then we find things that they could find a lower-cost provider to do it and then themselves.

So if I teach them to value their time, for what it's worth, and maybe to the business, their time is worth 200 or 300 or $400 an hour, then essentially anything the owner is doing, they probably shouldn't be doing, right? It's when I go through an owner's list, usually what I find is that the owner has very, very, very few CEO owner things on their list of to dues. Almost nothing, right? And so I'll go through the list I'll say to the owner, well, who is the owner of this business?

Who's the CEO? Who's running this company? Because I look at your list, it looks like you're actually not doing any of those things. You're just doing the things that all of your staff could do or we could bring on people to do. You know, who is actually casting vision? Who's growing the culture? Who's working on recruiting, joint ventures, new products, new services, innovation, you know, the development of the brand? Who's, you know, looking for financing? Who's doing those things? And it's usually no one, right?

And that's what I try to do is let them know that the work they're not doing is the essential work. And the work they are doing is the work that there are plenty of competent people to do. So yeah we just, you know, one bite at a time, you know one piece of time. It's, not going to happen in a day. Sometimes it takes a year or two, but it's worth it. In Sam Carpenter's case, he coined this term, the replacement. And so what he wanted to do is find somebody who could be just like him in the business. And his business, his replacement is named Andi.

And she runs the company on a percent, right? Now, oftentimes, that doesn't happen in the business. And so we have replacements, plural. So as an owner, you might do the sales, the marketing, the IT, and because of that, you're going to maybe have someone else handle the sales. So someone else handle IT and someone else handle the marketing over time as you document those various systems and they're going to run them, they're going to execute on them and you're going to slowly build your freedom. That's what it is. It's a process of building freedom and it's a process of building growth. And if

Jeremy: You actually said something that I wanted to jump back into, didn't want to get too far away from that I thought was, you know, interesting. Obviously, the owner is doing stuff that's not the ego level. And that's holding on back from the next level of growth. But a lot of times what we find is, it's because they can't find, they don't believe that somebody could do it as well as them.

How do you help them through that transition of transferring their skills because it really couldn't be true that people don't do it as well as them. They have a natural gift, a natural way of doing. So how do you transfer that skill to the next person? How do you hand that off? And then give them the confidence to do it?

Josh: Yes, very true. And there's, this is gonna get nuanced because there's a couple of different ways to go about it. Like, I've got this one chiropractor I work with and he's really amazing at tying in the emotional and the physical and the psychological and the, all these pieces together. And that's very hard, right?

So we're trying to remove everything except for his unique, you know, the zone of genius, right? We're moving everything else away from him so he can just do that one thing, which is fine, right? And then he's gonna bring on an apprentice, and it's gonna take a long time to bring on an apprentice to do those things as well. That's one way to go about it. And if you are a true craftsman doing something that's really unique, then that might be the case.

But 99% of what people do is not like that, right. And the easiest way to break up and give things away is to do it into small pieces, right? So you might say, you know, I am the best copywriter in the world, let's just say. And I, you know, I just write this amazing creative copy that converts and no one else can do it like me. Well, that might be true. But could somebody else research what the competitors is going to do? Sure. Could someone else come up with a list of headlines? Sure. Could someone else look at the designs of the competition and come up with some designs?

Sure. Could somebody else, you know, come up with ideas, find case studies, interview past customers interview the client, interview the competition. Yeah. Like all of these things that make up for nice converting copy could be broken down into the individual components. And then how about editing your copy at the end? Are you the best editor in the world? Probably not. So you've taken what is this artistic and complicated and challenging thing, you broke it up into 10 different pieces, and you realize that seven of those 10 there are definitely people who are better than you and they're simple enough where you could separate them, right?

Now, what this I think a big reason why owners don't like to do this is they're so used to moving quickly. They're so used to innovating on the spot. And they're so used to taking what could be very simple, it was broken out into pieces, and put it together and orchestrating in such a complicated real-time way that they're correct, no one else could do this on the fly, right? Which is what they do. But if they were willing to spread out the pieces and take them one by one, then actually many, many, many people could help them if they were willing to do that. And

Jeremy: I love that. I use a line, structure freeze creativity. Because a lot of times I run into entrepreneurs like Well, I'm on the fly, I'm moving. Like, I just know how to make it happen. But their real genius is more defined. And using that example you just gave, 70% of it or seven out of the 10 items were just structure issues. And if we can get the structure issues away from them and build a structure around them, now 100% of the time is in that 30% zone.

And now we've just expanded that 30% zone by more than almost three times what it was. And we're growing at a faster pace because we've expanded their thing. So, a lot of times when I see entrepreneurs that are struggling with the structure thing is because they are on the fly. They love the flexibility. And they don't realize that create that if they have a structure that could actually be more creative, they could be more free.

Question though. Finding the skills is one thing, but getting the confidence and the ability to hand it off to somebody, that art, you know, because a lot of these leaders have tried it once or twice and they've been burned. They've handed it off to somebody, they thought they did, they train they invested. They did whatever they felt like was to get that handed off. And then it totally crashed and burned. They're picking up the pieces. And from that point on, they have some resistance. So how do you help them transfer that confidence and that portion of it to somebody?

Overcoming the Bad Taste of Negative Experiences

Josh: Great question. And, you know, I'm sure Ryan can speak this as well. So, the first thing is to realize that if you don't do this, you're forever going to be a slave to your business. Forever. So let that sink in, and depress you a lot first, right? And to realize, gosh, I guess I'm not gonna take a vacation. I guess my kids won't see me. I guess this is my tombstone. This is why, you know, the vast majority companies do go under.

They do fail. And you're just going to be a statistic. So you can choose that. Because what's gonna happen is a string of bad things are going to happen. Your kids are gonna get sick for a while and then your big client's gonna leave and then you're going to have a bad week, and then your tech, your computer's gonna break. And then all of a sudden you're out of business, right?

Like those, you know, those, the perfect storm is gonna happen and then you'll be under. That's normal. That's actually above average with most everybody. So once you've decided that that future sounds pretty depressing, because it is, then you do have to bite the bullet and decide you're going to bring people on. Now, all you can do is reduce the chance of failure, right? And each step along the way, so people like Ryan who are experts at recruiting, right?

You're going to have to have a very clear person you're looking for so clear, an ad out there. You have to review resumes, do the first interview on the phone and then a live interview, then a drug test and then you're gonna have some other tests. Maybe a typing test or personality profiling, give them a project to test on, there's all these different things you're gonna do.

Those are the hoops someone jumps through just to even get a chance to work, you know, work with you, work in your company. That sounds exhausting to a lot of owners and so they never do it. But that is the essential first step. So maybe you've lowered your failure rate down from a 70% chance of failure rate with the person that you hire to a 20% 30%. Now, you have to onboard them properly. There's a system for onboarding. Okay, now they're onboarded, you have to actually train them properly. And then after that, you have to hold them accountable properly.

And then you've got to measure them and then you have to grow them and develop them and nurture them. And there's a lot of pieces to doing this right. And even if you do it all perfect, there's still a chance, and I've had several clients where the key manager died, right? So they're not just gonna die, or they're going to, you know, they're going to get pregnant and decide not to work anymore or they're going to move or their spouse is going to get a job somewhere else, or the kids who have trouble in school and so they're going to stop working.

I mean, there's higher dividends that can happen and totally change it instantly without your control. That's why you want to build a system so that if the person leaves, it's okay because then you can run the next person or the batch of people through the same system. And then if they leave, like there's natural attrition, but even if you do everything perfectly, and are the perfect person, you have to plan for there's you know, one, two, three months of them not making money for you.

Them losing you money, right? Like, they're a net loss because you have to spend more time training them, more time cleaning their mistakes, more time correcting them, and more time getting your customers used to them. There is that period and there's no way around it. This is for, again for mature thinking entrepreneurs. If you want to stay immature, then you will not do this. You just won't. You won't. And that's all up to you. But you have to be willing to invest that. But then I mean, the doors go wide open once you're willing to make those steps.

Ryan: So once you've made the decision, you start making these steps out, was really being able to measure. I heard measure in there. Being able to track how well they're doing. A lot of times what I've seen just even in my corporate past when I worked for large corporations, or even some of the work that we do, a lot of times we see someone come in and say, here's what I want you to do, here's how I want you to do it.

And then they go walk away and they go deal with the other stuff that they deal with as the owner. And when they come back a week later, or even a few hours later, the work isn't done to the quality they expected or it wasn't done at the speed they expected. How do we get those owners to really think about what the results really look like? Like what are some of the tools and some of the things that you've seen work to get them to think about those results?

But also be able to communicate that really well because one of the things that I learned really early on in business is it's very rare that someone is going to be as fast as me the first time they do it. But the expectation is, well, if I'm going to give this up, I want it done as well as I would do as fast as I would do the first time they do it. And it's an unrealistic expectation. So what are some things that owners can do to transition that part of it, the speed and the quality?

Delegating, Piece By Piece

Josh: Yeah, great, great point. And I guess the other question is, even if they're a little slower, and they're not quite as good as you, isn't it still worth it to give it up? And it usually is still is. But over time, even if they're just doing this one thing again and again and again and again, they're actually going to get better than you and faster than you and higher quality.

And they're going to innovate on it and come up with new ways, which helps with people when they specialize. But I think, you know, all the things we mentioned with regards to hiring are key, and training are key. But what we do in Work The System is we also give each employee the vision for the whole business so they understand why does this one piece matter. Okay, this piece matters because this is where we're going.

This is who we serve. This is why we serve them. This is how we serve them. And then these are the principles that we bought into with regards to speed, quality, you know, timeliness, innovation, like we have certain principles that guide how we make decisions. And a big part of that comes through those two documents, the strategic objectives and the operating principles. And so any new person brought on board has to understand that, you know, the way we do things here is different than anywhere else. We actually have these high standards.

We actually have, we actually are pursuing greatness. We actually are going somewhere that's going to be amazing. You know, join us in getting there. And I think that's part of it, is that owners inherently naturally have these high standards because it's their livelihood, right? The business is a reflection of them and they take it very personally. The team doesn't, right? So you have to explain that vision to them, help them have ownership in the results and get them excited about where they're going as a business, right?

If they don't feel like what they do matters, and the standards aren't raised, then they're just going to do the bare minimum. So I think that partly answers your question, but on top of that, I would say that, it's like Sam Carpenter always says that he's an extreme obsessive micromanager in the very beginning because he doesn't want you to go off track. So he's gonna be on every single thing you do that first day and then a little bit less the second day, and then a little bit less the third day, and then a little, you know, and then just kind of work his way into not really checking anything you do it all.

And he said, it's just smart. Like, you're not going to hand somebody a new position and then walk away for a few weeks and then hope they do a good job. It's just never going to happen. So you have to actually be highly involved whether you have documented systems which does it. Or if you don't, yourself, in the very beginning, so they don't go off track, so they do know the standards, so they don't build up bad habits. So kind of a long answer to a short question.

Ryan: Definitely a balance in that. Yeah, there's definitely a balance in that. Like, letting go enough that you're not microing them long-term but also not letting go too soon and going to chase the next thing that you're passionate about or that you have to deal with that only you can deal with. So really finding that balance, I absolutely agree with that. So for those people that are listening right now going you know what, this sounds awesome, Josh.

I want this but I really don't know what it looks like on the other side of doing all this. Do you have a couple of case studies, if you will, some stories you can share of some owners that said, You know what, I'm ready to make this decision. I'm gonna go do it. But really what did the outcome look like? Like what was the benefit to them? Are there a couple stories you can share?

Josh: Yeah, definitely. Well, I mean, if they want to get a whole year full, like go to workthesystem.com. I mean, we've got a podcast like you do. And so there's lots of stories there. You know, pick the industry you want to learn about and we've got clients who've gone from, you know, hundred-hour workweeks, to two hour work weeks. We have people who have sold a business, I'm thinking of a property manager who was literally about to die working 80 hours a week.

And then after six months, he documented all the systems, his work went down dramatically, and he sold his business. So you can certainly go that route. Got a fitness studio, who was again, you know, his fitness was going down dramatically because he was always there working the business. Brought on a few employees and then he finally came with his whole protocol of doing things and then he opened up two new locations, right? So you can definitely decide how you want to apply the method. As in what you want apply your time and money to.

I had one commercial appraisal firm that I worked with and the owner, his team didn't need him anymore. So he put systems in place and then he said, Josh, now what do I do? I've got all this time on my hands. So he got into road bike riding and then he joined a band. So he started playing guitar in a band. And then he realized that he actually really loved his work. And so he went back and, you know, he grew his sales dramatically and they opened up another location. So I mean, you could have a lot of freedom once you put these things in and decide what you want to do with the time and money you make.

You know, reinvest it, sell, all sorts of things. But the main thing is you're providing more value to the world, to your customers, to your team and a bigger future. And it's just, I mean, business is fun. And you want to expand it. And if you are holding on to it too tightly, you're actually you're killing your potential. And you're being a bottleneck in your future and you don't want to do that. You have to open the grip a little bit and see the potential for what you do actually is far greater.

Ryan: Yeah, I love that. Just staying focused on the potential and what could be when you're willing to let go. So hey, I know you already mentioned again, but I want you to do it just in case they didn't, Josh. How do our listeners get ahold of you? How do they learn more? Where do they find the podcast? If you could just repeat that that would be great.

Josh: Yeah, definitely. So go to workthesystem.com. That's where we give away the book for free. Of course, you can buy it if you want to, but it's downloadable there at workthesystem.com. That's also where all of our coaching and consulting events and folks who are curious about what I do, and they want to get certified, I'm also certifying consultants around the world to spread the message.

Ryan: Awesome. Thank you so much, Josh. I cannot believe our time is over already. I really enjoyed our conversation today. For those of you that are listening that want to know how do you get out of the business so that you can work on the business and really have that potential, check out Josh's website and his podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks, Josh.

Jeremy: Thanks, Josh.

 

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