Podcast

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

---

Carol Bartlett is a senior level executive with broad experience in Oil and Gas and Transportation industries managing $200M+ annually in sales. 

Using a combination of proven techniques, Ms. Bartlett focuses on growth results. She bridges theoretical business principles and philosophies to strategic actions that give profitable results. Deploying integrated proven strategies, she adds value to companies looking for sales growth and increase in profits.

Jol Hunter has spent a lot of portion of time as a partner with the national firm of chartered accountants and business advisors. In the last few years, he has been a business owner of a fairly substantial Atlantic Canadian business with three other gentlemen, and is currently experiencing the joys and challenges of ownership and operation of a medium-sized business.

Chris Spurvey spearheaded the growth of Plato Consulting to the point it was acquired by one of the largest management consulting firms in the world (KPMG). In the process, he sold over $300 million in consulting services.

Following the acquisition, Chris turned his focus to helping other “non-sales sellers” find a way to grow their revenue in a consistent, stress-free manner. He published It’s Time to Sell: Cultivating the Sales Mindset, founded Make Sales a Habit University and today is a growth advisor to business owners and their management teams throughout the world.

---

The Manifesto

In the first five episodes of the show, we deep dived into a manifesto that Jol Hunter had written a number of years back, following his 500 or so visits with leaderships of organizations throughout Atlantic Canada, the rest of Canada and some in the United States.

In the manifesto, he talked about the four factors/themes that cause that gap between current and potential performance in businesses.

In this episode we gave an overview of the manifesto that you can download when you scroll down to the bottom of the show notes. And in the next episodes we talk about each point in detail.

There’s a lot of value to gain a from listening and listening closely, and also following along the document. You’ll find some excerpts from the show below.

If you have feedback on the show, by all means, reach out to any of us. Enjoy!

Growing Business Manifesto

So over a period of 4 years I had the immense privilege of visiting approximately 600 businesses across Canada. A little while into that journey I clued into the fabulous privilege that was and in most cases included very intimate conversations with the owners of those businesses.

After a little while I started to pay more attention to the themes that were coming out of those conversations.

I essentially came to the conclusion that, collectively, we are not performing to our potential. To put more positively, there’s a bunch more upside potential in our businesses, and the gap between our current performance and potential performance was essentially wrapped up in four themes/areas that perhaps if there was more attention paid to them, that gap would close.

Digging into the findings

Let’s think in terms of four creators of a gap between actual performance and potential performance.

Of course, not all of these exist everywhere. And this isn’t the only potential four gaps, but it’s four creators of the gap that seem to recur, and therefore perhaps it’s helpful for folks to be thinking about them.

So number one is all wrapped up in how the CEO invests his or her time in the business.

It’s my belief that the single biggest determinant of how a business or an organization will perform rests around the behavior of the CEO, the nature of investments the CEO makes with his or her time, and the shadow culture created by the behavior and attitude of that CEO.

So it really behooves the CEO to be thinking in terms of what is the best use of my time, how do I apply it? What’s the culture I want to create through that time? And really thinking about that strategically.

There’s a couple of offshoots to that. One is, in small businesses a person may not be a full-time CEO. They may be a CEO and also a production manager, or a CEO and something else. However, a portion of their time is CEO time and that CEO time needs to be thought through very strategically.

The second thing that flows out of it is many CEOs have not really thought it through and they’ve just been tossed hither and yon by whatever comes along, versus thinking deliberately about being in control of it – both the nature of the time and the culture they create through how they interact through various things.

That was the first gap creator that rose to the surface through these conversations.

Averages of how we spend time

We are the average of what we spend time on as an accumulation of every day, that wraps up into a week, that wraps up into a month, that wraps up into a year.

It’s everything from what we eat, how we exercise, how we learn and who we interact with.

If we can average up the quality of that time then we lift the whole organization with us.

I think that can be done very simply by doing one thing at a time. I don’t even think that it has to be a dramatic change. I’ve just been experimenting in my own life by just adding one extra thing and the compounding effect of that is just amazing.

When you look at the averages of that coming out, I think it would be phenomenal to implement that throughout an organization. It would really be phenomenal if we implement that in the organization.

Looking at organizational performance you would want to take it as a whole but if you’re just looking at just one thing and incrementally effecting that everyday then you would have huge effect over the year. People will notice that there’s something different about the organization and that will start to have a compound effect on their time and performance.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller