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Welcome to the Entrepreneur Sound Off. This is your host, Randy Wimmer, and today we are discussing a common problem faced by nearly every small business owner/slash CEO. And that is accountability. How do you hold yourself accountable to do the things that you need to do in order to be successful rather than the stuff that you naturally tend to want to do as an executive of a small business? Now that sounds like, hey, that was so what's the deal? Of course, you want to do the things you need to do. That's not the case. I'll give you a perfect example. As a small business owner, the whole world is against you. The whole world. And it is so rewarding as a small business owner to do something and see a positive come from it, to see a reward. Things like develop marketing material, develop a website, develop infrastructure. Um those things are so rewarding. You can create a logo and you can see it in front of you. It's done. You can admire it. You can appreciate it. You can create a website and you're guaranteed to have success. In fact, most people start with a template. So as soon as you spend the$49.99 on a template, you've already got a website. All you got to do is just kind of transform it into your company's website. So you're guaranteed success. You're guaranteed success. Those are great feelings when you can take a step back and look at something that you just accomplished based upon your hard work and innovation. Incredibly rewarding to do that. However, that website, although it may be a critical component of your business growth, because that's the very first thing that most people do nowadays, is they, hey, let me check this guy out. Let me look at his website. It is not the primary mover in growing your business. Not even close. Your primary mover uh for business growth demands that you invest in emotional equity. Now, what it what do I mean when I say emotional equity? Well, it's emotional equity is when you in when when when you're at risk, when the probability is not certain. And um, in the case of small business uh ownership, uh it's not just a neutral outcome, like, hey, I tried this, but I didn't get it. Oh, okay, no big deal. No, you that's not how you that's not how you internalize it. You know, you don't write a proposal, you don't spend literally months of your life bleeding through the eyes, writing a proposal, submitting it, and not win. That's not winning is is is I would consider a neutral. You lose. You lose. You got so hyped up and excited about this bid, you invested everything into it, and you lose. You lose. You didn't get it, you were found unworthy of that contract award, and it makes you feel bad. It's that sense of rejection, and that's the life of a small business owner. It's like 90%, 99% rejection. You reach out to a potential business partner, uh, you're trying to get on one of their bid teams, and you have a capability uh briefing, and at the end of it, they say, Well, you know, Randy, I just want to be honest with you, your uh your company's not what we're looking for. And you know, your first inclination is to get a little defensive, and that's why, and and that's probably the worst thing is they'll tell you, they'll say, Well, you got the bad performances, you got you know, corporate credentials, uh, you you look like a really immature small business, and we don't think you really know what you're doing. You know, that that's you know, that's a little bit of honesty there. And for many small business owners, that's the case. And you know, having a having that reaffirmation is is never a good thing that, well, the whole world is against you. Uh, this is tough to start with nothing and to create something uh uh from thin air. That is a very challenging thing to do. And I'm not trying to talk you out of uh small business um ownership or or launching a startup. I'm just I'm just telling you the realities of it. In order to be successful, you've got to acknowledge that you're gonna be rejected 99% of the time. And that's okay. Uh from a math standpoint, that's okay because nobody counts your losses. This is not like baseball versus three strikes in or out. In small business ownership, you get to walk up to the plate and swing as many times as you want. Now, the problem with the swing is is every single swing costs you emotional equity. When you swing and miss you, it makes you feel bad. Makes you feel bad. You don't want to do it. Like, man, I don't want to go out there and swing again and whiff, whiff at the ball. I don't want to do that. However, that whiff doesn't cost you anything other than that emotional equity. But that emotional equity typically costs you more than anything else. Costs you more than resources, it costs you more than your time, because it takes a little bit of you away. You got to be able to manage that. You have to force yourself to get up to that matters box, step up to the plate, and swing at that ball, even though you're gonna miss. Because the only consequence in business that's swinging at the ball is the emotional equity that you're investing and the the way you feel after you miss not hitting the ball. You don't strike out. You get to swing as many times as you want. There are no strikeouts in small business ownership. Now, that's assuming you don't go like massively into debt and those type of things, but that's I'm not talking about that kind of striking out. I'm talking about reaching out to a potential partner and um and trying to get on a big team. What's the worst that they can do? Say no. Okay, you move on to the next one. You know, there's there's there's uh and I've counted this, this I'm embarrassed to say it. There's over 40,000 business development executives from big businesses in the federal contracting community. Over 40,000. So you got 40,000 swings before you get to you know start hitting them multiple times over. 40,000 unique swings. That's a lot of swings. You don't have to hit the ball every single time. Hell, you can have a 99% you know hit rate or failure rate because that 1% is all that matters. So, does it really matter that it took you 100 phone calls to get the one business opportunity? No, that's just effort and emotional equity. So, the real point that I'm trying to make when I say uh accountability is who's going to hold you accountable to doing the things that force you to invest in emotional equity, the things that make you feel bad when you fail. I um I became my my my first small business became successful, really successful, when I started holding myself accountable. And I can tell you when that happened to the day, to the day almost. Um I won my very first prime contract in 2010. I was on the verge of losing it because I lacked corporate maturity. I was a one-person company when I wanted. I went from like one employee to 30, like boom, almost overnight. Like, gee whiz, what do you do? And uh now 25 of those were were like billable people. They, you know, they were people on contract, and I needed corporate staff to help me do all the things that uh a corporate office needed to do to manage a prime contract, manage a security program, manage uh a DCA auditable cost accounting system, um, manage you know human resource functions, do formal contract management of a$15 million prime contract. I I had to do, I had to do some stuff. And uh it was more than one person could could possibly do. So I uh I liked corporate maturity, I liked corporate infrastructure. And even though I was hiring people for my corporate office to help me perform these functions, I did a very poor job in doing, you know, allocating uh this this work. And the reason why that is, is because I had no processes uh to tell people to follow. I had no roles and responsibilities that I had to find for each individual employee. I had no process owners, I had nothing. And I was so inefficient that that I couldn't leverage the brilliant team that I had comprised uh you know in my company. So that was the challenge that that I faced. And I thought, like, man, I gotta get some corporate maturity in a hurry. So what did I do? I I used the ISO 9001 framework to help me create corporate maturity, and that's what I did. Now, an unexpected unexpected things. The first unexpected thing that happened is with that corporate credential, all of a sudden I started looking like a low-risk bidder. And I I leveraged uh, you know, I leveraged that to kind of reinvent my pipeline and my business growth strategy, and it was it was wildly successful. However, it also gave me a mechanism to hold myself accountable. Management review board meetings, a keystone or you know, of of any ISO program, management review boards. Now, I changed that MRB um acronym to stand for monthly review board meetings. And because we had a monthly, monthly. Now, the gist of ISO Um 9001 is you take whatever's important to you, your your critical business processes, your critical um goals, and you measure them. You measure your progress, you know, in attaining them. You you measure your performance and performing these things. And uh that's what we did. The first week of every month, we looked back at the previous month. And I had key performance indicators for everything that mattered to me. This was a simple one. I wanted to have all of my new employees uh fully matriculated into the company within seven days, seven calendar days. And um, that was important to me because I had you know hopped around quite a bit as uh before I launched the company, and I hated it when I reported to a company, let's say on January 1st of a new year, and it would it would be like until like March or April before I had I was fully checked in and everything worked the way it should work. My email worked, I had business cards, I had a phone number, I had a place to sit, had an office or you know, whatever it was. You know, I wanted all that kind of stuff done within seven days. And I we we started measuring that, um, and that's easy to do because we had a check-in sheet. Every new employee had an escort. Uh, this is part of our ISO program, and had an escort, and they they in-processed them uh for every single activity that was necessary to make them fully matriculated within the company. And we we looked at their hire date or their their start date, and when that when that check sheet was completed, and uh we tracked that and we collected that data at the end of the month. Well, I, you know, the HR person did, the HR director, and um they presented that information at the MRB. And let's say we had 10 people um that we hired that previous month, and you know, eight of them were um, you know, easily within the seven days and the all good on the those day. One was like, you know, eight days or nine days. And uh so we asked a question about that, like, hey, what was the issue with this guy? You know, why did it take me nine days uh for this person to get uh to get fully matriculated and say, oh well, you know, he got sick for three of those days. Oh, okay, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. But what about this tenth person? Oh my gosh, it took three weeks to get this guy in processed. What was going on? And then it would be something like and it was hadn't this is not a reflection of of the the escort or the individual. It it you know, because non-conformance typically reflects a uh um a misalignment in your processes. And you know, the guy would say, Oh, well, he's a 1099 employee. And I said, Ah, we're applying a normal employee check-in sheet to a 1099 employee, which is different. We need a new process for 1099 contractors, independent contractors. And that was that we would, you know, we we realized that we were missing something in our company that just you know that that would make that easier. Now, that's the politically correct um example that I provide people. Here's the real example when I say uh that you need to track the things that are important to you as a small business owner, if it's not the most important thing to you, it should be in your top three very easily. And that is growth. Growth. And um, so now all of a sudden, how do you manage or how how do you evaluate your performance and grow in your business? Well, what are the things you need to do? Well, you need to start measuring how many business outreach emails you do, how many uh capability briefings do you attend, how many teaming agreements that you were awarded, how many subcontracts were you awarded, how many prime contracts um did you did you did you bid on? Um you know, so there's there's two metrics. Uh they they call down into they they they break down into two different categories. One is success, and as you grow your success metrics, you know, wins versus losses, you know, bid awards versus bid non-awards, you know, that becomes important when you are a larger company, but when you're a smaller company, you measure equity investments. How many times did you bid? How many, how many you know, capability briefing meetings did you attend? How many um business development phone calls did you make? How many business development executives from large federal government contracting companies did you meet with? You know, those types of things. And you you measure your ability and your and your willingness to do the emotional equity activities. And that was the game changer for us. Absolute total game changer conducting those management or uh management review board meetings or monthly review board meetings where we were reflecting upon our performance, not just the wins and losses, but more importantly the activities that were necessary. It's like trying to lose weight, but never stepping on the scale. In order to lose weight, you measure the activities you need to do to be successful. You count your calories, you step on the scale weekly or every three days, or you know, whatever the periodicity is. If you measure things, you will achieve them. If you don't measure them, you won't do them. That is a fact. You cannot expect what you don't inspect. And I had uh my very first ship when I was in the Navy, I showed up as a as a butterbar, um, brand new minted ensign. And my exo, I remember a severe scolding because he was walking around my division's you know enlisted um birthing areas, and they were not clean. And I I got dressed down really, really uh thoroughly for that. And my big takeaway was is what the exo said. He says, you cannot expect anything that you don't inspect. And you know, I know that kind of sounds you know cynical, but there's an you know uh you know, but but but there's an element to reality to that. Because not that people need the fear of an inspection, in many cases, they simply need to know that it's important to you. If my sailors knew that that was important to me, that they had a clean and healthy environment to live in, they knew that that was really important to me, then they would focus on that more. And high stakes, high stress environments, everything is quote unquote important. Everything. So what you need to do is you need to show them what's really important to you. And those were the things that I addressed at my management review board meetings or my monthly review board meetings. And I didn't want to let this thing get any further away than a month. Because if we were doing something that we needed to be doing for successful, why in the world would I wait three months? Three months to take corrective action on that. Why? Um, you could do it weekly, and we kind of had like little mini review board um, you know, meetings, you know, once a week, like, hey, how'd the last week go? What did we do? You know, we so we we had weekly meetings too. Every company in the world has a weekly meeting, like, hey, you know, let's wrap up the week. You know, what are the loose ends and what do we have coming up this week? That is the probably the most effective thing that you can do to encourage your success as a small business. Hold yourself accountable. Measure the things that truly matter to your success. And I can guarantee you, they're not the traditional level of effort things. Those are the things that make you feel really bad when you quote unquote lose. Losing sucks, but here's the deal: nobody counts your losses in the small business world. They only count your successes. Collectively, I I probably won around$2 billion in federal government prime contracts, you know, as as the the the managing executive, um, either for a business unit for a big company or as a small business owner for my own company's bids. Nobody needs to know how many I lost, how many I did win. You know, I I'm a little I'm a little embarrassed to tell you that number, but nobody cares about that one. Nobody cares. Nobody's ever asked me, say, hey Randy, how much work did you lose? Or or not lose, but how much work did you not win on bids? Nobody ever says that. It's like saying, like, hey, how many uh, you know, how how many contracts does your company have? You know, what's the value of this? They don't care about how much you lost. So we have to desensitize ourselves to to that bad feeling. This is gonna suck. I'm gonna be rejected 99% of the time, but it's the one percent account. It's the 1%. I hope this is helpful, and I will talk to you um in our next podcast.