Gag Me With Your BHAG

I love this quote from Anthony Russo, who was most recently the director of Avengers Endgame, and obviously has directed many more films. He said, what Joe and I love about the film industry, it's like the Wild West. We're two guys who grew up a million miles away from the film business. It doesn't matter where you come from or where you go to school. All that matters is can you find a way to practice the craft and express yourself in a way that people respond to.

So put away your mission statements, vision boards, company value posters and your big hairy audacious goals and let's get to what really matters.

Welcome to the Business Brickyard Podcast with Howard Mann. Concise lessons learned the hard way about business, strategy, and life.

Business is supposed to be fun to run. This core truth has been the through line for most of my work and career. It has stayed true through the ups and downs of businesses I have owned or led and for the many clients I have worked with. Just like in a marriage or relationship that has lost its fire, not feeling the love for your business anymore impacts your life, leads to flailing strategic decisions and creates a stifling resignation to just endure. So how can you make business more fun, more fulfilling and capable of bringing you joy?

It is not enough to just want it or lament not having fun, what can you actually do? The typical prescription is to focus on growing revenue and more importantly, profit. In many cases, it was the best way to stop a business from losing money, but it merely stops the bleeding without curing the patient. I am sorry to tell you that the solution also will be not found in your mission statement, your purpose, your why, I just made air quotes there or your big hairy audacious goal or BHAG as coined in the book Good to Great by the equally great Jim Collins. You probably have done your BHAG exercise, you may have your three year strategic plan set up and write out your quarterly rocks every month.

Bringing you any joy? Fulfillment? Fun? Yeah, I didn't think so. Never did for me either.

Here's another good one, figuring out how you can only work on your business instead of in it. This is the ultimate if only refrain from so many business owners I meet and the aimless quest of entrepreneurs around the globe. If only I could make my business a self running business. I want to spend all of my time working on my business and none working in it. It's business nirvana.

I am calling bullshit on all of it. If any of you have actually succeeded at this and your joy returned, it is likely because the truth is that you hate your business, are bored by it or have fallen out of love with it. If your joy is derived from not being involved in the day to day, then why are you in that business? What I want to propose is what is really at play here. You are not practicing your craft anymore, unless your craft is creating self running businesses, or unclear about what your craft even is.

Many months ago, I wrote a short article about the need to focus on your craft. You can find the link in my blog at businessbrookyard.com. The core idea of it is to stop thinking about growth as the key measure of success, to not let your pride about what you think a business owner must know and do suck the joy out of your work. Instead, be more like a great unknown chef in a kitchen the critics just haven't found yet. One who relentlessly focuses on their craft.

It is in the practice of their craft where they will always find their joy. It is what keeps them connected to why they chose to do what they do. If you are an accountant, focus on your craft so you are always working on becoming the very best accountant. Geek out on obscure tax laws that save your clients money in ways other accountants would not bother to check and do. If you run a service business, then spend all your time honing how to deliver every single aspect of that service with perfection.

It has nothing to do with what you do and please stop believing that craft is only for those in creative pursuits. If you want a visual example of people turning mundane tasks into their craft, then simply jump over to YouTube and watch that now famous video clip of the airport ground crew person dancing as he directs a jumbo plane away from the gate. So I ask you, how much time do you spend practicing your craft? When work is no longer fun, it is because we are just involved in activities and not practicing our craft. Everything has become busy work and fulfilling work should not simply feel like being busy.

What is your craft? What, if you could spend all day doing it, would make you smile? Even if that smile is only on the inside? What would leave you driving home at the end of the day with real satisfaction about all you did that day? You have a craft.

Even if you just manage people all day, you have a craft that is worth perfecting. To borrow from every infomercial out there, but wait, there's more. Changing your work into working in your craft does not mean you drop everything you currently have to do and only focus on your craft. Every task can be drudgery or an opportunity to express craft. Let me give you a recent example.

Last week, I was walking with a client back into his office building, an office building he had completely renovated and rebuilt. You see, he is a super creative entrepreneur who builds truly remarkable buildings. You might think he is in the real estate business, but that is not his craft. Yes, I digress, but I do so to keep hammering home my point until it is stamped in your brain. Electricians were standing out in front of the building, trying to decide where to install power outlets for the two electric cars my client had purchased.

While they were going to just bolt the outlets anywhere on the side of the building, my client jumped in and sketched out a super creative solution that showed the electricians a better way to practice their craft. We then walked into the office and one of the younger members of this team came running at him with a crisis with papers that he had to sign in the next two minutes. My client stopped and taught him how these deadlines really work and a different way to think and handle it. Sounds like a typical day at the office, not how my client saw it. He turned to me and said, you see the stuff I have to get involved with, This is why it's impossible for me to work on my business.

Nope. Not what I saw. What I saw was someone practicing their craft. In short five minutes, he had taught electricians a more elegant way to install a power outlet and taught a key member of his team a few important lessons. He was a teacher and a coach to all of them in the process.

If he can change how he looks at these interactions, he would see he was practicing his craft. When I pointed this out to him, he smiled, always a good indicator, and said he actually loves doing that type of stuff. Somewhere along the way he had decided that doing what he loved was not the role of a business owner or entrepreneur. Amidst all of the marketing noise and mountains of business books, we have lost the plot about how we spend the bulk of our working hours. Was he working in his business and not on it?

Perhaps. More importantly, so what? He was practicing his craft and doing so brought him joy. Many little things about his company were improving as a result. If only he could stop hearing the entrepreneurial echo chamber about needing to create a self running business with a world dominating b hag.

Just gag me with your freaking b hag, please. Now for some extra credit. What is their craft? I challenge you to take this concept across your entire organization. What is the craft of every single person working for you?

Do they know what their craft is and are you encouraging them to perfect it? Do you honor their craft? When someone from your accounting department brings you a spreadsheet that took them hours to create, do you acknowledge the skills it took to create it? When the head of HR deals with a tough personnel problem, do you tell them how you admire how they handled it? When they fail to do their very best and not treat their job as their craft, do you tell them they could do better and challenge and teach them?

Or do you say nothing or just tell them their work was lousy? Imagine your business filled with people that are continually attempting to do their craft with perfection. Do you think that company could fail? Do you think that company would develop a reputation for being consistently excellent? Do you think revenue and profits would grow as a byproduct?

How do you think it would feel to work in that kind of business filled with craftspeople? How would it feel to run it? Consider all the things it would become known for. Consider how that would translate to sales and marketing. The stories you could tell the market.

Think about all the ways you would become memorable to your clients or customers. In the same way that great chefs ultimately get discovered and become famous and wealthy, so will you if you focus on business as a craft instead of focusing on the goal of growth, wealth and fame. What if you stood up in front of your company and told them that you were a business filled with craftspeople? No endless stories about three year strategic plans and organizational charts. What if those meetings became ways for everyone to share and perfect their craft?

To borrow from the chef analogy once again, what if everyone was sharing their latest recipe or dish and getting feedback on how to make it even better? To me, that sounds like a lot of fun. A business I would love to work in versus on. Yes, of course, you need to spend time working on your business and you naturally will do so because you will not be able to evolve your craft without looking at what else is required to continue to be the best at it. You want scale?

Shift your focus to how to scale your craft versus scaling your business. There is nothing permanently exhilarating about thinking about how to scale your business. How to deliver the highest level of your craft to more people is the problem to enjoy solving. Not every business can be Apple, Amazon or Google, but every business can be one that delivers its particular craft with joy. Every business can be fun to run.

Making your business your craft makes work fulfilling. It will make you smile. It makes work less like work. So, again, what is your craft? Start writing it down, make it real and spend your days practicing and perfecting it.

Until next time.

This has been the Business Brickyard Podcast with Howard Mann. Be sure to subscribe wherever you like listening to your podcast or hop on over to businessbrickyard.com.