IAM2073 – Founder and Coach Helps Business Owners Suffering from Chaos
Podcast Interview with Scott Beebe
In this episode, we have Scott Beebe, founder of MyBusinessOnPurpose.com and the host of the Business On Purpose Podcast.
Scott and the BOP team liberate Small Business owners from the chaos of working in their business and help them get their lives back by articulating and implementing intentional Vision/Mission/Values, Systems and Processes.
The conversation covers the importance of having a written vision before implementing processes and goals. Also, he mention a resource available on mybusinessonpurpose.com that provides step-by-step guidance for creating a vision document.
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Transcription:
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Scott Beebe Teaser 00:00
And as we were talking one time, I'll never forget this. He said, Scott, you help people see what they can't see themselves. You help people see what they can't see themselves. And for me, that's where I looked at this situation and went, okay, That's what I do, and I've got a passion for small business because, the heroic small business owners are the ones that create all these new jobs. They create these innovative ideas.
Intro 00:28
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, start ups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?
If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I am CEO podcast.
Gresham Harkless 00:53
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Scott Beebe of MyBusinessOnPurpose.com and the Business On Purpose Podcast.
Scott, it is awesome to have you on the show.
Scott Beebe 01:06
Gresham, I'm excited, man. I've been amped up since you and I had a phone call. I'm ready to go.
Gresham Harkless 01:10
Let's do it. Let's do it. So first thing that I wanted to do was just introduce Scott so you can learn a little bit more about him and his background and all the awesome things that he's doing. So Scott Beebe is the Founder and Head Coach of MyBusinessOnPurpose.com and the host of the Business On Purpose Podcast.
Scott and the BOP team liberate small business owners from the chaos of working in their business and help them to get their lives back by articulating and implementing intentional vision, mission, values, systems, and processes. Scott, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?
Scott Beebe 01:41
I'm ready. Let's roll, man.
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Gresham Harkless 01:43
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. First question I have was just build a little bit more upon your story, your bio, to hear a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to get started in your business.
Scott Beebe 01:52
Yeah. Mine was a little bit hysterical and accidental, honestly. So I had the privilege of being a international director for a real small faith based non governmental organization. Working in Nigeria, we've been volunteering there for some years and then the organization asked if I would come and lead that.
So I actually left Pfizer, a company we've been with for a while, loved it. My goodness. Learned so much from that experience and went into that role. And a couple of years in, man, I got a baptism by fire into the world, into the inner workings of a board. And now I wasn't a member of a board, but my role was simply responsible to the board. And as the board kind of melted, I realized that there was nowhere to run when you're in a role that's directly answerable to the board.
And so on February 27th 2015, my role was gone. It just within literally a 3-hour period from 9AM to 12PM on Friday, February 27th, it just went away. And so at noon on that day, I had no role. I had no job, which meant I had no income. I was thirty nine years old. Ashley and I were staring down the barrel of forty years old. We have three kids, and so I got on a plane back to Savannah. And that next Monday, I called a couple buddies of mine. Both were business owners, still are. And said, hey, guys. I wanna start a business, and I wanna do some work for you.
And they were like, great. What do you wanna do? I said, I don't know. What do you need? And so we hammered out a proposal really geared around patient mission guys, which had been a lot of my background in helping them develop this great clarity around where the business is going. Because the problem is really true. If you don't have vision, then you're scattered. Where there's no vision, people scatter. They run away. And they were feeling that way in their business, and they knew growth was on the horizon.
But they also knew it could have been very dangerous, that growth. And so we sat down. We went through a day long scenario of vision, mission, and values. And then one of them looked up at me when we had a follow-up meeting and said, so what's next? And I said, I think we meet every week. And he's like, okay. That sounds good. So we started meeting every week. And those guys, I'm still coaching them three and a half years later. I still have the privilege of being able to coach those small business heroes. And, man, it's so much fun. So I became a CEO of my own company largely by being pushed into the necessity of needing to build something that would serve other people.
Gresham Harkless 04:16
What I wanted to do was hear a little bit more about, what you're doing with BOP Business On Purpose and tell us a little bit more about how you serve the clients that you work with.
Scott Beebe 04:23
We do one thing every day. That's why I tell people Mondays are my favorite day of the week. It's the first day of the week we get to wake up and go liberate small business owners from the chaos of working in their business. And we've landed on that point because we realized that chaos is all around us. And cue the kids screaming behind me while I'm sitting in a conference room in a hotel, ironically enough.
Literally, as I'm talking about this, this has been the quietest place in the hotel. And while I'm talking about chaos, you're hearing all of these sounds behind me. Listen. Chaos, we're never going to be able to quell it. We're never gonna be able to make it go away. It's always gonna be around it. The book that we've got in with in an editor's hand right now. The first line of the book is chaos hates you and is looking to destroy you.
So we've literally personified chaos, and we realized that most heroic small business owners are swimming in it and don't have any idea how to be liberated from it. You're not gonna kill it. It's always gonna be around, but you can be liberated from it. And so that's what we get to wake up and do every single day. Every podcast we do, every piece of curriculum we write, every daily huddle we have as a team, every team meeting we have as a team once a week, everything we do is driven towards that one end game, and that's to liberate the small business owner from the chaos. Think about this. Look around and go, okay. There's fires burning.
So how do I take the unique, what we call narrow brilliance that's inside of you, that unique skill set that God has deposited inside of you, and how do you live that out within the boundaries of chaos? And so that's what we're trying to help people do.
Gresham Harkless 05:51
Nice. Nice. Nice. And now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce or you said, like, your narrow brilliance. What would you say your narrow brilliance is for yourself and for your organization?
Scott Beebe 06:00
You're gonna get man, you're gonna hang up on me when I say this. Our narrow brilliance is liberating small business owners from chaos. Now there's a uniqueness to that. And so I'll give you a deeper understanding of that. I was sitting down with a buddy of mine. He's a civil engineer, and we used to meet weekly and, just hang out and just chat. And as we were talking one time, I'll never forget this. He said, Scott, you help people see what they can't see themselves. You help people see what they can't see themselves. And for me, that's where I looked at this situation and went, okay, that's what I do.
And I've got a passion for small business because the heroic small business owners are the ones that create all these new jobs. They create these innovative ideas. They, are also having to figure out how to have a family and figuring out accounting and all of these different elements all at the same time. So we just had a real deep, even hesitate to use the word passion. It's a move. We're like we're moved when we get to spend time with small business owners.
And so in that, and the reality that I can see things maybe that you can't see. And so for I listened recently to a podcast with, Coach Dabo Swinney, which is crazy because I'm a Carolina guy, so he's the arch nemesis. But he's a successful one, and I listened recently to him. And he was talking about all of the different elements that go in to a successful football team. But when Dabo Swinney looks at a football field, he can see things that you and I can't see because that's his narrow brilliance.
Well, in a small business, for whatever reason now there's a lot of things I can't do in this world. In fact, the majority of things I cannot do in this world. But man, when I see a small business, I can see it. It's like it unfolds in slow motion for me. And so I can start to see things. So that's really how we try to live that out.
Gresham Harkless 07:48
What I wanted to do was switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this might be an app or a book, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient and efficient as a business owner.
Scott Beebe 07:58
Yeah. This is gonna be pretty there's probably a lot of listeners that are using something like this, but I'll I'll flesh it out. So Google Drive is a hack for us. I hate to say it because I know they're probably ripping off my personal information. In exchange for me to be able to use it. But I would say probably 90% of our business is run on Google Drive. Here's what I like about Google Drive, and I put it metaphorically this way.
A lot of people would say, we use Dropbox. That's great. Dropbox is a really fancy filing cabinet, but it doesn't have an art studio with it. Google Drive is a fancy filing cabinet with an art studio, all embedded in one. And so we can literally take a small business. We can map it out on a Google Draw, which is just a little simple little draw sheet with blocks and shapes and stuff like that. And we can map it out on a draw, and then we can link each one of those blocks back to a Google Doc. And so everything's linked, and then you and I can get on a Google Doc. You'll be on your machine. I'll be on my machine.
As I'm typing, you can see me type real time, and I can see you type real time. So we can literally work. So we've got a a partner that we run an architect's group with, and that's how he and I do our planning. So we simply open a Google Doc and we start planning. Nothing fancy, nothing creates, just simple. It's really simple. So I wish I had something more complex for you, but we're into simplicity. We're not into rocket science, and Google Drive allows us to be overly simplistic.
Gresham Harkless 09:21
No. I think that's a perfect, CEO hack. And I think a lot of times people are looking for more simplicity. And, so I think that's a phenomenal CEO hack. And now I want to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this might be a word of wisdom or piece of advice you might have for entrepreneurs and business owners.
Scott Beebe 09:34
Write the vision down so those who read it may run. Now you can put that little kind of quote on a poster or something like that. It sounds really cool. But I really want you to take it and think through it reasonably. Write it down. Michael Gerber, the guy who wrote E-Myth, which if you're a small business owner, haven't read E-Myth, then go get E-Myth. You gotta read it. So he writes in there, if you don't write it down, you don't own it. If you don't write it down, you don't own it.
And that's a modern prophet, Michael Gerber, not necessarily a religious prophet, but a modern prophet who's saying if you don't write it down, you don't own it. He's hearkening back to thousands of years ago in this, recorded conversation. Write the vision down so that those who read it may run. So one hack is you've got to write either document digitally or handwritten. You have to write your vision down.
Gresham Harkless 10:22
And now I wanted to ask you for, which is my favorite question, the definition of what it means for you in being a CEO.
Scott Beebe 10:29
There's three elements. Let me put this in context of three elements. And I'll contrast CEO with the role of the owner, which is a role. It's a defined role. And the role of it's called a Systems Manager, somebody who leads a particular system within the business, the admin, sales, marketing, whatever. If you look at the role of an owner, the owner should be flying 60,000 feet above the business. So you can't smell the grass. You can't even see the trees moving. All of these macro level trends. You can see the entire river from mouth to delta. You can see the entire mountain range.
The Systems Manager is walking on the ground, literally. Feet, step one, step two, step three, step four, in the grass, in the weeds. You can feel the wind, you can see the trees blowing and all that. The CEO is hovering, not flying, hovering five feet above the business or ten feet above the business. So they're not necessarily able to see macro trends right away. They've gotta go to the owner for that. But the CEO also periodically gets in the plane and flies up to 60,000 people, the owner, and then comes right back down to hover five to ten feet above the business. So they can see the grass blades. They can feel the breeze.
They can see the the trees moving. And periodically, they can catch a glimpse of the forest all at the same time. That's in my mind what it takes to be a CEO is to have that mindset perspective.
Now, of course, there's a gazillion things outside of that the CEO's gotta be responsible for. But having this mindset of I'm in the day to day. I need to extract myself for a minute to go look at the 60,000 foot. Now I'm back in the day to day. And when I say in the day to day, I'm not saying you're walking on the grass and cutting the grass. I'm saying you're hovering. And everybody that's walking on the grass, you're asking constantly, how can I support you? How can I support you? This is where we're going. This is where we're going. How can I support you? Over and over and over again.
Gresham Harkless 12:18
Awesome. Yeah. I'd love that perspective in the visual as well too to get an idea of what exactly a CEO is and what role they play and how they're able to switch and go lower to see a little bit more, but at the same time, they have an overarching view of not just where everybody is and how everything interchanges and connects with one another, but also how the future is going to pan out as well too.
So I love that definition, Scott. About what I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know, and also how best people can get in touch with you.
Scott Beebe 12:44
Gresham, thank you. I told you offline, it's a lot of work to start a podcast, and I'm overly humbled that you would share your platform and the stage with us. So I'll be very brief. We talked about vision. We push it. It's the number one thing that we have our small business owners do when we have the privilege of being able to coach them. We will not move to delegation, to team meetings, to weekly schedules, to twelve week goals. We won't move to any of that until the vision's written down.
And the reason is because when you've got all these great processes that are functioning with no vision, then your processes are scattered. It's no different than getting in a Ferrari and having no destination, just driving around. Eventually, you're going to run out of gas. And I'm sure Gresham, with everything from I really don't have a vision story. When I say that question, three to six pages in detail. I'm not talking about a paragraph. And so having that written down in physical form for other people to be able to read and embrace and see, we took our entire vision tutorial, about a 20-minute video tutorial, with our full vision template.
We've held nothing back. We haven't given you half, and then you can buy the other half nothing. It's there. The exact same thing that our hero clients go through step number one. We put it up online. And if you're willing to commit two to three hours to it, then we are willing to give that as an investment into your business. And so if they just go to mybusinessonpurpose.com/vision, go there.
We don't make you run through a bunch of email hoops where you get sixteen emails. It just puts your email address in, and as soon as you hit submit, it'll pop right up. You'll see the video. You'll see the template. It's there, and you begin to invest that time. And that's hundred percent of the time. That's the first step. Even if you've gotten it written, I want you to go back and review it because we say that your vision is never more than 90 to 95% complete.
And so, Gresham, I'm curious from you because you hear from CEOs all the time. From your perspective, is it obvious to know when a CEO's got a vision well thought through, written out, shareable versus a CEO who doesn't. Are you able to see that just to and feel that when you have these conversations?
Gresham Harkless 14:59
I'll tell you because I do a lot of digital marketing, I usually try to drill down. That's one of the first questions I have when I sit down with somebody. So and I guess innately, I'm always asking about that. Like, where are you trying to go? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish? And then you like, quote unquote reverse engineer and figure out how to get there.
But a lot of times, a lot of business owners do not. I constantly have the conversation where I'm having to have those kind of, I should say, more maybe strategic business analyst business solution type conversations because a lot of that is not in place.
Scott Beebe 15:31
Yeah. There you go. You can take that template and tutorial, and you can make that step number one for the people you work with. And just tell them to go there, and they can have that. Because once you've got that, especially addressing for a guy like you, you'll be able to take once they fill this out, you're gonna know where they're going with their family, where they're going with their own personal free time, where they're going with their money, where they're going with their product, with their team, with their clients, and with their culture.
All seven of those categories. You'll know that when you write out the vision story according to this template that we've laid out. So it's step by step. There's no strings zero strings attached at all. It's just, something that we've decided as a business. We are so laser focused on liberating small business owners from the chaos. We've just decided to make it available.
Gresham Harkless 16:14
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I appreciate that, Scott, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
Outro 16:19
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase. It's a community. Want to level up your business even more? Read blogs, listen to podcasts, and watch videos at CBNation.co.
Also, check out our I AM CEO Facebook Group. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.
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