Why Do Today What Can Be Put Off Til Tomorrow

It's human nature to procrastinate. We all do it. The problem is procrastination can be very costly in business.

When we are finally forced to act, we can spend 3 - 5 times more. Today we look at the challenge to acting now instead of waiting until later. Join us today to learn how to avoid making costly mistakes.

[00:00:00.00] - Dan Paulson

Hello, and welcome to Books in the Biz for Round 3, because for whatever reason, technology sucks.

[00:00:13.20] - Rich Veltre

Technology is great when it actually works.

[00:00:15.29] - Dan Paulson

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And heaven forbid, we actually have technology cooperate with us today. So Alice decided first go around that she wanted to do multiple sessions of her intro, which makes it interesting. We should have procrastinated this episode, Rich, because that's what it was all about anyway. And that might have actually helped us here.

[00:00:40.14] - Rich Veltre

That would have worked.

[00:00:42.08] - Dan Paulson

Anyway, Rich, welcome. We are live for the third time, and hopefully, as people are watching this, they're not hearing rogue commercials, and Alice, and everything else, and we're going to get this straight one way or the other. But how are How are you doing today?

[00:01:01.28] - Rich Veltre

I'm doing all right. I'm hanging in there. Excellent.

[00:01:05.16] - Dan Paulson

Well, good. I am doing well myself. And yeah, we came into this episode before everything went haywire, and we had talked yesterday about what we could talk about today. And what we realized is we both have run into some situations within the last several weeks where we've talked with people that probably needed to do something, but for whatever reason had put And both of us thought that it might be a good idea to talk about procrastination and all the things that it entails, and often why procrastination becomes a very costly mistake, especially in business. So what's your thoughts on that, Rich?

[00:01:47.28] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, I think procrastination to me, because I was always a procrastinator, right? Go back to college, I was a procrastinator. The report was due on Friday, on Thursday night, I was typing it.

[00:02:04.29] - Dan Paulson

At least I wasn't alone. There's other people like me.

[00:02:08.21] - Rich Veltre

So I get it, right? And the thing is, I think you can equate procrastination is, at least what everybody perceives as the easier path. I don't have to hit that brick wall. I can just put it off and see how things go and see if it gets a little easier. Maybe some of it will go away, which it never does. But you always think that there's a reason to keep putting it off because maybe something better will come along or maybe something easier will happen. But it doesn't always happen. And in today's day and age, I really don't think it's happening. So I think to a certain extent, I'm trying very hard on my own side to clear out the cobwebs in the old, what did they used to call it? They used to call it head trash. You got to dump the head trash. And the head trash is the procrastination nature that's in your head.

[00:03:01.25] - Dan Paulson

Yeah. I had a colleague once that said procrastination equates to fear, and I partially agree with that. I think there are certain times where we procrastinate out of fear of something. Medical. So we talked about medical a couple of weeks ago in my situation. You want to put off something because you fear what you might learn, because what you might learn might not be a positive outcome. And I think that's true in business. Sometimes we tend to put off things that might be negatively impacting what we're doing internally, might be negatively impacting our employees, thinking that it will fix itself or go away. And then all of a sudden we have an employee that gets frustrated and leaves, and they're a key individual. And now we're panicking like, oh, my gosh, what happened? Well, it's because you didn't take care of this or you didn't take care of that. So I think there is some truth to the fear thing there. But I also, as I was thinking this morning, and I put a post up on LinkedIn about it, it's really become more than that, because we become so accessible, we also procrastinate things because we just don't want to deal with them.

[00:04:26.04] - Dan Paulson

And you and I were talking, actually, before we went live here on the number of emails that you were getting today, and why you were getting all these emails, and going through and deleting. And I look at it and go, well, I'm the same way, too, because I'll get several hundred emails in a day. And part of the procrastination is I just don't want to deal with it. A, because I don't know who they are. So there's that level of trust you have in whatever emails you're getting. B, it's just flat out spam. So it's just ticking you off, and you don't don't want to deal with it that way either. So I think there's other elements now that causes us to procrastinate, because we're a lot more accessible now than we were even 10 years ago. I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but that's what I'm seeing here with my own procrastinating, because I believe we all procrastinate. You still procrastinate. I still procrastinate. We put things off for whatever reason. And it's a lot more work to analyze what's causing that procrastination now, than maybe it was a while back.

[00:05:32.03] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, I think more accessibility, being more accessible, being out there. When I was really a procrastinator, there was no email. We didn't have cell phones. There was none of that. Now everything is moving at a thousand times faster than it was when I was really developing that procrastination expertise. But when I look at it now, too, that availability or that accessibility couples the fact that the world moving that much faster and outside influence is a much bigger factor. 1992, when I was coming out of college, I wasn't thinking about world events. I wasn't thinking about, Oh, my president's going to sign a whole bunch of bills today or executive orders today. I mean, that stuff hits you 27 times a day, and that doesn't even necessarily come through your email. So that outside influence added to what you said is a bigger push to put it off because you don't know what's going on, because you're not 100 % sure, because you can't take enough time to read all those 27 posts, emails, everything that leads to, everything that just happened in the world. And you don't have a chance to evaluate it, because 27 things just came through, but 27 of them probably don't have any influence on you, but you're allowing it to.

[00:07:09.01] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, I think that's a good point. We are, what you said there at the end, we are all so busy because work is now where it used to be just sitting at your desk doing a task, or if you're in manufacturing, just working on the machine, whatever it might be, you now have emails, you now have phone calls, you now have technology. All this stuff has exponentially ramped itself up because, like we said earlier, we've become much more accessible. And it's become harder, I believe, for us to discern what are the things we should respond to versus what are the things we shouldn't. And now, because we are so busy, we tend to put off important things, looking at this from a business perspective instead of a personal one. You might know there's things you need to address in your business, but it's working fine right now. I'll let it go because I've got 10 other things I need to focus on instead of that one thing that might be indirectly impacting a future event. Like I said about the employee getting upset and then finally quitting. How many times have we seen that happen where you see high turnover because an employee can't speak to their boss.

[00:08:23.28] - Dan Paulson

There's no coaching there. There's nothing to give them feedback. So they get frustrated and they're like, well, I'll I'll go to the next job to get my feedback or my next growth opportunity because I'm not getting it here. And that's me on the operations side, that's what I often hear, when there's a lot of turnover happening, is because nobody bothered to talk to that individual. And when you talk to the manager, the leader, the owner, they're like, well, I don't have time because I'm doing 10 other things. They should just figure it out. Well, guess what? They don't want that, especially Gen Z and Gen Gen X and the millennials. Well, Gen X, we can say they're pretty self-sufficient. They don't need a lot of handholding. But millennials and Gen Zs do. And this is where you see that higher turnover or where you see that flat performance happening because people will do just what they need to do when they're not getting feedback otherwise.

[00:09:23.22] - Rich Veltre

Yeah, I think when you get stuck and you're getting into doing the actual tasks all day long, you can really forget what your overall approach was, what your overall style was. You forget what your, you know from a business standpoint, what's your overall business, what you're attempting to actually get out there. So you wind up in a very, very small subset of what you're trying to do, and you forget that the company was supposed growing this way. And the only way it can grow this way is to have that team behind you. And it's very easy for founders, for business owners, for people to get to a point where they just get so overloaded that they forget the overall mission. And then they wind up, and I say this from personal experience, you wind up thinking you're the only one who could do it. And you basically run into that I, I, I. And you stop saying, we, we, we, because you're no longer thinking that the team is what's it's going to get you the overall mission accomplished sticker.

[00:10:34.24] - Dan Paulson

Exactly.

[00:10:35.29] - Rich Veltre

So I think we have to figure out, how do we get past that? How do we stop? Because if procrastination is just the easiest way I can think of, that's going to get you into that rut. And somehow you have to break that rut. You have to get out of that rut and get back to, what was I about in the beginning? What was I about to keep growing? Otherwise, it's just going to be 10 people on your team sitting around doing nothing while you're doing 100,000 things, and then you're just getting angry.

[00:11:03.09] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, that's exactly what I see a lot of times, because I have yet to talk to a business owner that says they're never busy. Every business owner I talk to is, I don't have time for this or I don't have time for that. And I think a lot of that comes to, again, some of the decisions that they're making. And there is a certain level with business owners where I think they actually enjoy that busyness, even if that busyness isn't as productive as it could be, because it makes them feel needed and it makes them feel like they have purpose. So doesn't it feel good when people come to you to ask questions. Well, when you got 50 employees and all 50 employees are coming to you to ask questions, in the beginning, it might feel nice. Over time, it might become frustrating because it seems like you can never get any of your own stuff done. And that's what I often see on the operations side. Now, I'm curious because you deal with a lot more of the financial issues within business. And while I deal with that from a third party standpoint, I got to believe there's a lot of procrastination that happens on the financial side that most people don't realize they're doing that caused all sorts of potential challenges over time when they're not addressing certain financial issues.

[00:12:30.03] - Dan Paulson

I mean, what are you seeing on your end? Because let's face it, most business owners might understand the finance side a little bit, but they're not all experts in finance or in cash flow and whatnot, and that causes problems internally.

[00:12:44.19] - Rich Veltre

I think that it's a little bit of a loaded question, because depending on the size of the business and the volume of transactions that are happening, there's a little bit of a variation in how I would answer that question. The way smaller entities, your main guy, your founder, your CEO, whatever you want to call that head person, they tend to look at sales and receivables and their cash account. They'll never talk to you about payables. They'll never talk to you about what they owe, bills that have to be paid, unless the cash balance is too low and they know that there's a bill that's got to pay, and it's not collected. So now they come back to you and they say, hey, we have to collect that bill because I got to pay this other bill. So the focus is a little bit smaller. As they get bigger, then they have to find a way to pivot because now you have to look at the hole. Because you might be going for a bank loan or bringing in an investor. And now those people are asking for very specific questions about the hole and not just receivables and sales.

[00:14:00.22] - Rich Veltre

And they want to know bottom line, where a business owner who only talks about receivables and sales doesn't know his bottom line. He can't tell you his bottom line. So when you start getting to that next level, you have to pivot. You have to actually find a way to get to that next level. And I think at that point, that's where your example of one owner with 50 people coming straight to him, probably a really simple picture to say, that was the time to say, we have to reconstruct the company or we have to reorganize a bit. Because not everybody can get in to the owner, if the owner is going to be relied on to grow the company and have those people have goals within the company Yeah.

[00:14:45.26] - Dan Paulson

But here's also what I see, and again, this is the operations side, but I think it also ties to your end on the financial side. People tend to put off things that are an investment that are going to cost money, whether it's individual training, leadership training, whether it's buying that new piece of equipment. I think sometimes people wait maybe too long to make that investment. They don't do an ROI assessment on it. And then the old piece of equipment breaks down, and now you got to scramble to get a new one. Well, as you know, if now you have to buy something last minute, that price is no longer something that can be worked out. It's usually you need to get it now, and you're going to pay a premium because now they need to bring that component in right away, and that requires more resources to do that quickly. And that's what I see from the operations side, where people put off different things because they perceive there's a bigger investment involved. Then something blows up, and now all of a sudden, they're spending five times what they were, because now instead of urgent, but not urgent, but important, it's urgent and important, and it needs to be taken care of.

[00:16:03.13] - Rich Veltre

Right. Yes, that does cross over. I think the equipment part, our examples would be exactly the same. I think the other thing is, too, When I was reading an article the other day and somebody had written down that you're expanding your company, you're growing your company, and all of a sudden you run out of money. You're like, How? If I'm growing, growing, growing, how did I run out of money? It's like you needed to actually sit down and say, this is the way it works, because all those new big clients that you brought in have longer terms. So they're not paying you up front. They're not paying you in 30 days. Maybe they're paying you in 90 days. Maybe their industry is a 90 day pay. Now, you hired people or hired more people to take care of that account. They don't wait 90 days to get paid. So if there's a spread, you needed to be prepared for that, and you weren't. A lot of times people were not prepared for that. It's going to take 90 days to get the money in, but I got to pay people now. So that's either a banking issue, a cash flow issue.

[00:17:11.05] - Rich Veltre

You have to figure out how you're going to cover that spread. And if you haven't figured that out, don't wait till you're already in the throes of I can't cover. Because now try to see who's going to give you any money. Who's going to loan you a dollar if you actually need it, nobody wants to loan you the money because the risk factor goes way up. So there's definitely a correlation there that when you have these things come up, finance, you need to be doing things in advance. And if you've always been a reactive person, it's time to become proactive. And that's a hard switch.

[00:17:48.28] - Dan Paulson

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, it's good that you brought that up because I was actually talking with a banker last week about that exact same thing that they were meeting with the client. And it's a good client. Client has decent cash flow, but they're heavily leveraged. And now they're trying to invest in new equipment and whatnot, and they can't do it because the bankers are looking at how heavily they're already tied up as far as what their expenses are. And to do anything to reset that, at one point, he said, Well, they have physical assets like property. Well, can we put that on the property and do a refinance there? Now we can stretch those payments out over 30 years or 20 years. But the problem is you're taking a short term asset, you're tying it to a long term asset, and the problem is going to now pop. It's a short term solution because in a couple of years, they're going to still be buying more equipment, and now they've used up all that equity in their property, and they can't do that again. So they're in the same problem all over again. And you brought up a good point.

[00:18:56.19] - Dan Paulson

How many businesses in that growth phase don't realize that the terms change or that the cash flow changes? And now they get in this situation where they're upside down. So yes, they're going fine, but they haven't planned for that. Now they're in a situation where they can't grow and ultimately is going to start going the opposite direction again, because they'll level off and they'll start regressing because the money is not coming in as fast as it's going out. So what What are some of the recommendations that you would have to overcome the procrastination part? Because as I said, we all do it. We're all going to continue doing it. What do you do to get over that hurdle?

[00:19:45.22] - Rich Veltre

I think it's going to sound philosophical, but I think the thing that you have to do, and it's something that I had to do, I keep having to refocus myself on the the end goal, on the overall goal that I'm trying to achieve. What am I trying to accomplish? Because if I let that go, I wind up going back to taking on smaller projects or just thinking that I have to do that. And instead of being focused on, I can get somebody to do that smaller project if I stay focused on this bigger project. So I think it's a focus issue for me. I think if more people would focus on this is what I have to accomplish, and this is what I to do, then I think the rest of the stuff that is leading towards the procrastination goes away, or at least goes into the back of your mind, as opposed to allowing it to get in the front. And then you realize, well, I spent all this time on this little project, then the big one sat. To me, that's procrastination. Either you didn't want to get to it, or you allowed something else to get in front of it.

[00:20:54.02] - Rich Veltre

And I think that that's really where my challenge says that people just have to stay focused on what you're trying to accomplish. Overall, that old saying about the 50,000-foot view, if you're running the company, you've got to be at the 50,000-foot view.

[00:21:10.10] - Dan Paulson

And so many owners are more at the 500-foot view. They're really in day to day operations in the weeds, where often they don't see those problems, because let's face it, a lot of these issues don't just pop up right away. It's over a period of weeks, months, years before finally comes to a head and where it needs to be addressed with. If you're not at that 50,000 foot view, where you can take that long term look and start realizing where some of those issues are going to come up, that's when you get into the some of the problems that you were talking about, especially with things like cash flow, employee issues, equipment issues, growth issues, you name it. That's where this all comes in. From my standpoint, it is getting to that 50,000 foot view, and it's is doing an ROI assessment. It's going through and saying, what's the value of acting on this now versus waiting? Because, again, we're all going to procrastinate. Nothing's going to change. There's always going to be situations where for whatever reason we can't act now, maybe we do need to act later. But we need to make a determination if there's value in taking action right now.

[00:22:24.21] - Dan Paulson

And that really requires just a few asking yourself a few simple questions. What happens if I put this off? What's going to be the cost to doing that? If something breaks in the next week, month, year, is it going to be far more expensive than if I did the maintenance procedures on it? What's the safety issues related to it? Could it possibly injure somebody? I'm talking a lot about equipment here because of manufacturing and construction and whatnot. But those are issues that I think we often put off on the back burner and just hope things will be fine, but then all of a sudden something goes wrong and somebody gets hurt or a machine fails to the point where it now needs to be replaced. And now you're replacing it again because whoever that distributor or that equipment manufacturer is realizes they need to get that equipment to you right away, they're going to charge you a premium to do that, to get you back up and running. So you have to understand that and realize it. And to me, that's where any time you can take a self assessment of your business is going to be helpful, and it should be done at least once every two years, in my opinion.

[00:23:37.17] - Dan Paulson

You might say sooner, but I would say at least once every two years, you need to be asking yourself some of these questions and analyzing it. You and I have talked about the 20 questions rule. So if everyone's heard of the game, 20 questions, well, you and I have been going into companies now and saying, well, what's our 20 questions that we need to ask to help these owners determine what are some of the pitfalls, the roadblocks, the issues that could come up and help them prioritize? And with anyone who's listening to this, if this is something that's important to you, this is also a service we offer pro bono to anyone who wants to jump on this. It's a half hour procedure, maybe 45 minutes when we get through the questions, and we'll give you a brief report saying, Okay, based on here, what we discovered, here's where your biggest opportunities are at. And if we can, we'll even put some cost behind it. And that's really something you don't need us to do it, per se, but you definitely need to take yourself through a process like that.

[00:24:45.09] - Rich Veltre

I agree, 100 %.

[00:24:47.23] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, so if they want to go through that process with us, how is the best way to get a hold of us, Rich?

[00:24:53.29] - Rich Veltre

Send me an email, rich@exexo. Net.

[00:24:57.00] - Dan Paulson

And you can do the same to me, dan@exexo. Xexo. Net. You want to learn a little bit more about XCXO. Bob will take us out. Hopefully, Bob will do this once and not six different times over and over again. And we will talk to you next week.

[00:25:13.14] - Rich Veltre

Take care, Dan.

[00:25:14.25] - Dan Paulson

Take care.

[00:25:16.05] - Bob

Want to boost your sales and profits but need the talent to help you grow? Xcxo is a one of a kind platform to find skilled fractional executives to help develop your team into a high performance powerhouse. Fractional leadership is a great choice when when you consider the average executive-level candidate can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries, benefits, and incentives. Xcxo finds you the executive and utilizes their talents to build your team's experience, all for a fraction of the cost of a full-time C-suite leader. Contact XCXO today to fill the gaps in your leadership team. Visit xcxo. Net to learn more.