As a small business owner in Atlanta, whether your team sets short or long-term goals, goals do several important things. For one, goals give your team a target…something to reach for. When asked how that impacts a small business, Best-Selling Author of the book 
“It All Matters”, Speaker, leadership coach and international speaker Paul Cummings has a lot to say in this interview with ASBN.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Hi, everyone. I’m Jim Fitzpatrick with The Atlanta Small Business Show. It’s 2018 and, as a small business owner, you’re wondering what do you need to focus on right now, early on in this new year, to ensure that you reach your goal by this time next year? Well, on today’s show, we’re joined by the man that can help you succeed in 2018. Mr. Paul Cummings is a best-selling author, sales trainer, leadership coach, and international speaker.
Listen, when push comes to shove, business owners want to know what are the things that we really need to focus on early on in 2018 to ensure that we’re going to hit the numbers by the end of the year?
Paul Cummings:
Yeah. I think there’s a couple things, Jim. I think we could start there, but I think it makes a little bit of sense to really take a look back. 2017 left an evidence trail for every business owner. If you look at your business as equity positions … so you’ve got people. That’s a valuable resource in any company. Throughout the course of 2017, there was either equity developed, equity maintained, or equity lost in relationship to the type of equity you built with the team members to help you go out and execute your business plan. I think you need to take a look back at what did you do to establish more equity with your team? Did you grow your people? Did you train them properly? Are your people growing in their positions? Have you left gaps there that don’t allow them to operate at their highest efficiency?
The same is true with how did you allocate your time? One of the most valuable resources any small business owner has is time. Then the third thing is how did you take care of your money? How were your sales results? What were your margins? Did you really invest your time in the areas that allow you to drive your business forward? I think, before you can go forward, you really need to be willing to take a really hard look at 2017.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
An honest look.
Paul Cummings:
An honest look. My grandfather always said, “You just got to look in the mirror and say, ‘I’ve met the enemy, and it is me.'”
You need to be honest enough with yourself to do that. That’s what I would tell everybody first. We have tools that we do to do that. We do internal surveys in our own company. We audit everything in our business. We have gap measurement process for every single person to see if they have incrementally grown or not, and we hold ourselves accountable to that moving into the next year.
You talked about one of my favorite subjects, which is goals. In 2018, the first thing I would say to any small business owner is are these new goals that you set, are they inspiring to you? Are they going to make you stretch? Are they going to get you up a little bit earlier, keep you up a little bit later? Are they going to make you focus your mindset on the actual achievement more than you did in ’17?
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yeah, yeah. Many small business owners and managers of businesses fail to set goals, don’t they?
Paul Cummings:
Yes.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
They’ll go right from the 2017 into 2018 and never really put pen to paper or even bring the rest of the company in to say, “Here’s where I see us going, and these are the goals that we need to set, not just for each other, but also, as a group, for the company.” Right?
Paul Cummings:
Yeah. I think it’s human nature to say you’re goal-oriented. I think most people do that. They say, “Yeah, I have goals. I got them right here.” Well, that’s fine if everybody in your company is clairvoyant and they understand what’s in Jim’s mind, but yeah, a major shift for any company is your goals need to be so present that people can see them. If you walk into our offices, every single goal we have, new client acquisition for online learning, we have that goal up and present, and it’s charted every single day. The same thing on revenue. The same thing on product acquisition, any of the things that we do.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Anything that matters, right?
Paul Cummings:
Yeah. Well, in goal setting, it kind of all matters, but the big thing about goals is goals give people targets, right?
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Right.
Paul Cummings:
Your team members, when they don’t know for certain what it is you want them to achieve, you’re not going to get the most from them. A small business owner can literally dramatically improve his business or her business instantly by becoming more efficient at goal setting.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. I spoke to one business owner that said, “We only have five people in our company. We don’t really need to get into any of that.” Well, what do you say to a small business owner that might only have 5 or 10 people on the staff? Do they need to set goals along with the rest of the big companies out there that-
Paul Cummings:
Sure they do. I’ve got a business that I own that has four employees that produce $1 million a year in net profit, right? Those four people are very important because they’re very efficient. Yes, I mean every company started out with one, one person with an idea.
5’s not going to become 10, become 15, become 20, become 100 if you’re not goal directed. I think, in smaller groups, it’s actually more important in that stage of a business because what gets taught early becomes habit, then becomes process. It becomes the normal way you do business. Entrepreneurs, we have a wing-it mentality sometimes anyway because we believe we can do anything. You can’t kill us with a stake. You can drive it through our heart. We’ll just get back up.
We’ll go invest our money somewhere else and try it again. That’s just our nature. We don’t scare off easy. That’s also kind of like taking off in a plane without a flight plan, without checking your fuel, without making sure that you know where you’re going. That old saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there-”
You just may end up at the wrong destination, so it’s really critical for a small business.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. Do small businesses owners make the mistake of saying, “Money always needs to be the goal”? in other words, “The goal is to do X number of dollars this year. That’s our goal,” and leave culture on the roadside and leave developing your people and your managers and your leadership as one of the elements that should be developed?
Paul Cummings:
Well, I think that comes about for a pretty obvious reason. When you’re a brand-new company or you’re a small business, if you’re out of money, you’re out of business, so it becomes this front-of-mind thing, and it’s, “Well, you got to have the money. We got to have the money.” You’re borrowing from this credit card to pay this credit card. We’ve all been there. We’ve all done that. You get a house paid off, you remortgage it. I mean small business owners will put everything up for sale to stay in business, but what they don’t realize is if they really slow themselves down to build their mission, create their vision, establish their values, create their core culture, set and establish the real goals, the money is much easier to acquire and a lot easier to retain when you’re riding on that highway with those foundational pieces in place. I would tell any small business, “If you can’t tell me in a sentence what your mission is, your people are confused.”
If you can’t tell me in another sentence what your vision is … I mean a vision just has four things. It’s got to be clear where people can understand it. It’s got to be concise where they can remember it. It has to be compelling where they’re engaged by it, and it has to be inspiring so they’ll actually do the work.
Right? If you can get those things done … and your core values become the guideposts for conduct, and if your people don’t know what your core values are, then how do you really establish a business framework that’s foundationally sound and fundamentally sound?
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Yeah, that’s true. It’s not something that should just be reviewed in the beginning of the year-
Paul Cummings:
No.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
… and then maybe once again in June. It needs to be constantly talked about and brought up and reviewed, maybe on a monthly basis?
Paul Cummings:
Well, especially culture, right? Mission is something you establish and, hopefully, you get it right. Vision is something that gets adjusted as you grow because your vision will brighten or broaden. Small business owners, we fall in love with our own stuff, and sometimes we’re hard to sway away from it, but I will tell you that if you work on culture all the time, that little incremental shift in change, I tell people it’s a matter of polishing. It’s not going to all be smooth. It’s not going to all be perfect.
Paul Cummings:
If you stay to it and you continue to work on those things and polish and just make the little adjustments, you’ll be surprised. Just a minor shift, given enough time … If you’re going this way, but you just take this little 1% shift in 2018, well, give that five years. Look at the growth.
Time can be your friend or your enemy, but a minor shift that you stick to that produces a better result will pay a massive ROI.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. The key, then, is hanging in and sticking with it before it changes, right?
Paul Cummings:
Yeah, it is, Jim. The thing about entrepreneurs, and I don’t think that we realize that we do this to our people … An entrepreneur will go away to a seminar, go away to a conference, and he’ll hear a new idea. He comes back in, and he gets on the intercom, “Every body come here.” His people are sitting there with their eyes this big, and he says, “Listen, we’re gonna do this and this,” or she says, “We’re gonna do this and that.” What the entrepreneur doesn’t know, when he walks out of the room, they’re going, “Hey, what’s the over/under betting line this time? How long do you think this one’s gonna last?” because we tend to start, stop. Finishing what you start, having that ability to be consistent gives you leadership credibility as an owner of a small business.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Often times, you’ll see a business that will just start taking grasp over a 60- or 90-day or a 6-month period of time where everyone is now rowing in the same direction, and then that entrepreneur will come in from the conference and say, “We’re ready to change. Here’s a new idea,” and they’re like, “We just got going in the right direction on the last great idea that you had.”
Paul Cummings:
It’s not that ideas are bad, right? But all ideas aren’t equal, and all ideas don’t apply equally, so because somebody in a different market is having success with it, here’s what I’d ask. Is their market like your market? Is their team like your team? Because if the guy you heard the idea from has got an experienced group and that idea is working, and you’ve got an inexperienced group, the idea may not be able to be actually put into place in the same way. You got to make sure it fits your culture, back to what we talked about earlier. Is this idea something that, culturally, is sound, that fits your mission, your vision, your values, your market, your people?
Jim Fitzpatrick:
And that you can develop buy-in from your people.
Paul Cummings:
Absolutely, yeah.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Best-selling author, as I mentioned in the opening here. It All Matters, a phenomenal book.
Paul Cummings:
Thank you, sir.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
For the people that are watching right now, tell us what they can learn from this book.
Paul Cummings:
Well, Jim, there’s a lot of things they can learn. The thing about the book that’s a little bit different is it’s a story that’s real that started in 1975 when I knocked on doors from 7:55 in the morning to 9:55 at night six days a week in West Virginia as a high school senior for a summer job. The whole book’s based on what I learned over those 14 weeks, but I think the reason the book’s important is that it’s not a theory book. At the end of every chapter, there’s an action plan, and there’s a tool kit. We’ve gotten so much feedback from the thousands of people that have gotten their hands on the book, but it’s the most comprehensive book on goal setting, I think, that’s ever been written. I really mean that, not in a pompous way. I spent so much time studying that for the last 40 years of my life, and I wanted to make sure that I gave people that formula.
Anybody that reads that book’s going to learn how to develop a real, sustainable confidence. They’re going to learn how to build business clarity and personal clarity around mission, vision, values, and outcomes. I believe they’ll be able to operate with a much higher degree of certainty. I’m not sure the moment of absolute certainty ever arrives, but having a feeling of certainty when you go to do anything is really important. Then that will allow people to really plug into their inborn creativity. Then I think that, from the people we’ve talked to, the book will help you live a life that’s better lived and produce a better outcome.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
That’s what we’re all after, isn’t it? Yeah.
Paul Cummings:
Yeah. It’s a great investment, and it’s a good read.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Sure. Well, I know it’s been a hot book on the market, phenomenal reviews. Congratulations to you on it.
Hopefully, there’s another book coming soon?
Paul Cummings:
Yeah. I can even tell you the title. It’s Great Leaders Leave No Doubt.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Wow, awesome.
Paul Cummings:
We’re excited about that.
Jim Fitzpatrick:
Awesome. Paul, thank you so much for joining us on Atlanta Small Business Show.
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