How to Execute: The Discipline of Following Through

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WAYNE RIVERS: Hi everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at Performance Construction Advisors, where We Build Better Contractors.

This week I want to talk about how to execute the discipline of following through. First, don't forget about Boot Camp. Contact Charlotte, and she'll get you all the information you need. And somebody sent me this article. I'm not exactly sure where it came from. It's not annotated, so I'm not exactly sure where it came from, but it was really neat, and it talks about execution.

So, let's just begin with that concept. Most people can make a plan. Planning's fun. You get to dream, scheme, and visualize a future where everything is awesome. But executing plans, a lot of people struggle with that. We did a poll asking what our members are struggling with the most. The most common answer was executing and sticking with plans. The gap between what I intend to do and what I actually do is so common that it has its own name in psychology. The intention behavior gap. Who knew? You decide you'll start running three times a week. You mean it. You may even go once or twice. Then life happens. Weeks later, you're running shoes sit in the closet collecting dust. If you want to make progress in your life, you've got to learn how to overcome the intention behavior gap. You've got to start executing plans. Thankfully, execution is a skill you can develop, just like you can develop any other skill. All true. All I agree with. Okay.

Seven tips then for getting better at execution. I think before I go any farther, there was a great book on execution that I read. I couldn't find it in my library. It was Execution, the Discipline of Getting Things Done by Ram Charan, who's a consultant, and Larry Bossidy, who was the CEO, and I can't remember the company, but I must've read it 15 years ago. Thought I could put my hands on it easily. I couldn't. But that's a great tutorial. It's probably 300 pages. But a great tutorial on execution. So, if you want to dive deep, that's a great book to get.

Seven tips here from this article. Number one, focus on less to achieve more. Absolutely right. Focus means that you drill down, and you have a laser focus on one or two things. Warren Buffett said make a list of the top 25 things you want to do or accomplish in life, and then circle the top five, and don't look at the other 20 until you've completed the top five. That was his advice. I would take that down even. If you can focus on one thing, or two at the very most, three things, that's going to improve your effectiveness quite a bit.

The second thing is plan the how, not just the what. The what is just kind of pie in the sky, but you've got to know step by step by step how are you going to execute this thing? Smart goals versus undefined goals. Gosh, Zig Ziglar did hours and hours of lecture on this 50 years ago. Smart goals are simply specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, and timely, versus a goal that, oh, I'm going to lose weight. How much weight, by when? How are you going to do it? Et cetera, et cetera. That's what Zig would say. James Clear, if you remember the book we reviewed, I think we may have done two vlogs on that. It was called Atomic Habits. And he talked about micro habits that led to the fulfillment of longer-term habits.

And then we think when people do strategic planning, that they absolutely need a weekly plan for how they're going to achieve. So, if you have your three-year strategic plan, and you put it in the folder up on the bookshelf, it's not going to magically radiate invisible rays that make you execute. You've got to have a way to reach up to that 30,000 foot view. And the way you do that is with weekly planning and execution, tracking.

The third thing, visualize obstacles. So, you've heard about SWOT analysis, right? Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. But we added a B to it. B is barriers. So, you've got all these, okay, you've identified your opportunities. Now, great, how are you going to go out and get those? Well, you might have a plan for that, but you've got to realize there's always barriers. As our Doug McCright says, there's always trade-offs. No business decision is without trade-offs. And so, if you're going to execute on your opportunities, you've got to know what your barriers are going to be and how you're going to overcome them. For example, we need to borrow $2 million to buy different equipment. Well, that's a barrier right there. Can you borrow $2 million? Where do you borrow? Where do you get effective rates? How do you create competition for that? So, understand what the barriers are and what you need to do to overcome them.

The fourth thing, use the Jeff Bezos’ 70% rule. I would say it's the Dan Sullivan 80% rule from Strategic Coach. But hey, Jeff Bezos is famous, so let's go with that. But it's a simple rule. When you've got 70% of your decisions made, you've developed a general course, go ahead and start taking action right then versus waiting to make sure you have 100% of the things planned out. That tends to fall over into analysis paralysis, which I've seen happen to, gosh, innumerable contractors over the years. Just they want too much data. They want to be too sure. There's no such thing as sure in business. There's always calculated risks that you take.

The fifth thing, track actions, not just outcomes. We've talked before about leading indicators versus lagging indicators. Your income statement, your balance sheet, they are lagging indicators. Okay. Now, let's say it's your fiscal year ended in June, middle of the year, now it's September, and there's nothing you can do about those numbers from June. You cannot go back and relive that time and fix those numbers. Those are lagging indicators. What are your leading indicators? That's what you need to know. You can only control behaviors and activities. If you have the correct behaviors and activities for yourself, and in your organization, that's going to give you a much better opportunity of hitting your targets, which then become, of course, your lagging indicators.

You may have heard us talk about the Sandler Sales System; I think it's called. Sandler does what they call a cookbook. And they have their students put together the actions and behaviors, activities and behaviors that they need. So, they begin with the end in mind. They say, what units of sales do you need to hit? How much money does that represent to the company? And they work backwards from backwards to front. And they say, these are the behaviors and activities I need to do on a daily and weekly basis. Hit those numbers. It's so commonsensical, it just works.

The sixth thing, keep track of your to-dos and your schedules. This sounds so elementary, but I can't believe I'm saying this, but some people don't even really, they might have a paper calendar they keep somewhere, but they don't live with it. I don't know how anybody gets by without a very organized calendar and to-do list. We've talked about two books in the past. Measure What Matters and What Gets Measured Gets Done. And I agree with both premises in those books. What gets measured gets done, and that includes your daily activities and the events on your calendar.

And finally, this is sort of a, oh, pat yourself on the back a little bit, but you're going to screw up. There's no perfect path to the successes and the goals and the outcomes that you want. There's going to be some setbacks. Forgive yourself when there are setbacks, when there are problems, but also congratulate yourself and celebrate the little victories that add up and up and up to amount to the larger victories.

So, what do you think? Let's hear from you, [email protected]. This is Wayne Rivers at PCA, where We Build Better Contractors.

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