Your Work Systems are Broken! Here's How to Fix It NOW

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So what if your problems in your business aren't people,
but they're actually systems.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
What if the solution is right.

Speaker 1 (00:12):
There available to you, and it could actually be there
before before you get to the problem. Today, we're going
to discover how to recognize and fix what's not working
in your business before it's too late. And we have
with us an expert in systems, Doug Hall, who has
a lifetime of experience in developing systems for very successful businesses. Doug,

(00:38):
it is absolutely a pleasure to have you on the
Wealth Ability Show with us today.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Thank you so much, Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
If you would, Doug, give us a little of your background.
How do you start?

Speaker 1 (00:49):
You know why this topic of all topics for somebody
with your experience.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
Well, I growing up way way back nineteen seventy nine.
My dad calls me into the living room and at
Christmas time, and I was more excited about this lady
I was getting that I was engaged to who we've
been together now for forty nine years. And he sat
me down and I knew it was something serious because

(01:14):
he didn't usually do that, and he said, Douglas, I've
been working with a guy named doctor W. Edwards, Deming.
He's a guy that went to Japan after World War
Two that created quality that is killing American industry right now.
And he says, I learned that ninety four percent of
the problems the system six percent of the worker. I go, yeah, Dad, whatever, Yeah,

(01:39):
he said, no, you got to listen. This is the future. Well, literally,
that conversation in the living room up in New England
changed my life. I was a chemical engineer. I ended
up going to Procter and Gamble working in marketing of
all things, with a real focus on innovation. And I
slowly but surely took the work of doctor Deming, which

(02:02):
was grounded around factories, and I said, how do I
turn this into innovation? How do I take innovation from
an art and it'll still have some art to it,
but add science to it and make it a reproducible
system that can enable everyone everywhere to innovate and to

(02:22):
make it work. So, long story short, did a lot
of amazing things at PNG, shipped eighteen products in twelve months,
still considered a record, left and created the Eureka Ranch,
working with multinational companies and small companies, over two thousand
companies over many, many years, helping them increase speed and
decrease risk with innovation generally a focus on disruptive. Then

(02:47):
a few years ago I got this idea to create
a whiskey company because I've worked in whiskey for many,
many years, many many years on products for companies around
the world. And when I did that, I learned that
the important thing about whiskey was the wood, and that
seventy percent of the flavor comes from the woods. So

(03:08):
what I did was I created, vented some technologies, created
a company and it worked. The products exploded, it went well.
We went from a few thousand cases to over one
hundred thousand cases in a year, and this is all
during the craziness of COVID. But in the process I
learned that my work on innovation, which have been around

(03:30):
the big idea, while it's useful, most of those big
ideas had challenges when they tried to go through the
process in the organization. And what you needed to do
is you needed to get the employees engaged in the
process with you in growing your business. Because I had bottlers,

(03:52):
not fancy folks, but good people, hard working people. And
when you're doubling every three to six months, if you
don't have the employee engaged, you're dead. You're dead because
you got to have them there. They can't be disengaged.
You know, right now we've only got about thirty or
forty percent of the employees research says are fully engaged.
We needed to get them all engaged or we were

(04:13):
going to die because myself and my co founder Joe Gergash,
we couldn't do this by ourselves. We had to have
the entire organization with us. And so that's what created
what is now the book is called Proactive Problem Solving
that we're doing. We've got a workshop on it that
gets ridiculous ratings from employees, and it is changing my

(04:36):
life because I've taken all of my work doing big
ideas for Nike and Disney and American Express, and now
it's all about helping that worker make a difference in
the organization. And the way we light them up is
we say we're going to start by stopping the stupid,

(04:56):
and we talk directly to the employees. With Proactive problem Solving.
The first place to begin is you've got to give
employees something that's going to make a difference for them.
So you say, what are the stupid work systems, the
stupid communications, the stuff that gets in the way of
you doing meaningful work to do your job. And they Goliah, baby,
somebody's listening to me. And suddenly you light a fire

(05:20):
and the organization is transformed faster than you can ever imagine.
You can't imagine. You hired these people because you gave
it to him about and they cared and then they
suddenly became droids. Well what happened? Did they change or
did we not ignite them? And so I am on
a religious and I apologize for getting so excited. I
am on a quest right now. I didn't realize at

(05:41):
this point in my life I would be this fired
up about taking years of work, big, big time stuff
and bringing it down to help employees do great things.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
Now I love that. Stop the stupid.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
A number of years ago, I had the extreme privilege
of sitting across the dinner table from Richard Branson and
I said, so, you've changed, fundamentally changed multiple industries.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
Said what'd you do?

Speaker 1 (06:11):
He said, Well, first of all, we listened all the
things that we didn't like, and.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Then we did the opposite.

Speaker 3 (06:17):
It's not that hard, sorry, but you know, and you
know what's what's crazy? I mean, this is like so
mind boggling. We did a survey of managers and say
and asked, what how much how much time do you
spend each day dealing with employee mistakes and broken systems?

(06:42):
And the data came back and I said, guys, this
can't be right. I told my guys at the Eureka Ranch,
I said, you know, check this, check this. You know,
because before I put it in practical problem solving, before
I put it in the book, I got to know
that this deal is right. They went back through the data,
they said it's good. I said, can you check one
more time? Because their data said the average manager weighs
three and a half hours a day. That's not a week,

(07:05):
that's not a month, every single day, every single day
dealing with employee mistakes and broken systems. I go, oh
my god. So I go out and I started talking
to people and say, oh, I think that's a low
estimate for me. And interestingly, eighty percent of that is systems,
only twenty percent employee mistakes. It's not the employees of

(07:26):
the problem, it's the work systems. It's how we set
them up to do their work. It's the resources, the training,
the communication systems, those are the things that are getting
in the way of people doing meaningful work.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah, so you talk about proactively instead of being reaction
to problems, proactively actually having somebody identify the problems. So
can we start there, because you know, the reason people
are reactionary, I think is because they're not seeing the
problem and tell it's really too late. How do you

(07:59):
proactively actually identify the problem before it becomes a problem.

Speaker 3 (08:04):
Well, there's two elements to this. I mean, the first
thing you got to do is you got to get
employees to understand because we asked employees why they weren't
doing practice problem solving, why they weren't doing it, and
you know, seven out of ten of them said, it's
not my job, and I don't know what to do.
So first we've got to declare it is your job.

(08:26):
And we start by doing the things that are hurting you,
which is the stuff near you, to get you to
believe that you can make a difference. And then we
get them to move. And then once you build their momentum,
because you know, once they start doing it, then amazing
things start to happen with it. But and managers and employees,
we tell them what you The way it starts, the

(08:48):
whole process starts, is you identify what and why. You
identify what is the problem, What's the thing that's frustrating you.
What's the thing? It's if you ask them what's frustrating
it's so easy. I mean it's the lists are there
and they're not huge things to make a difference. But
when you solve those problems, Like there was a lady
in one company we work with. She said, my back hurts.

(09:09):
I said, what do you mean your back hurts? She says, well,
we build these machines and we have to lift them
and put them into boxes. And there's three of us
and we're not very big, and my back hurts at
the end of the day as we load them in.
It's okay. Her manager says, anything we do? What do
we do about this? He said, I don't know. They

(09:30):
started to talk and they connected, and sure enough they
found that they could instead of building the box and
putting the ed in, they could take the machine, roll
it onto the cardboard and build the box around the machine.
So just reverse the order, and suddenly her back didn't hurt.

(09:51):
So now she's brought that up said what the problem was,
why it was important, you know, because it hurt them,
and then we fixed it, and then she went on
to another one and another one, and then the team
starts believing they can make a difference, and that what
and why, as it turns out, has a pedigree to

(10:13):
the big Eureka inventing that the ranch does, because it
actually comes from the military, from something called the commander's intent.
In the military, the leaders tell the troops what the
missions to accomplish and why it matters. Because when you
know the why it matters, that gives you more motivation

(10:35):
to do it, as opposed to just do this, don't
ask any questions, just do it. When I know why,
you've opened me up to not just do the task,
but to think. When you don't tell me why, you
don't want me to think, you just want me to
do it. And if you find out halfway through it's
stupid you keep going when you know why, you say, hey,
wait a minute, I've learned something. This isn't solving the

(10:57):
problem that we need, or this is going to cause
the problems for us.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
So what I hear you saying is that go to
the employees, have them discuss what the what their problems
are and come up with the solutions for the problems.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
And then you build the system around that.

Speaker 3 (11:15):
So if they're getting this, fix the broken systems that
the employees have. Start from the bottom. Build a strong organization,
starts from the front line. Get those folks engaged solving
the problems that are frustrating them. As they get confidence,
then you train the managers, and the managers start putting
out projects. We call them blue cards that define the

(11:35):
what and the why and a scope. And the employees
have had wins and seeing benefits to them. I mean,
tell them we need this so that the owner can
make a lot more money. Nobody cares, but make it
so their back doesn't hurt. Make it so that they
can get more satisfaction. Now, you want to change an
organization or not? Okay, if you want to change an organization,

(11:56):
you've got to change the people first, and you start
to build from there. And as they build confidence, suddenly
they take on. This is the thing that drives me crazy.
I do strategic planning with companies. They put together plans
and they put together vision, and then they take the
plan that they want and they make it smaller and
smaller and smaller. I said, what are you doing? They said, well,
people can't do that. So I say, now you subverted

(12:18):
it down. This big idea is now something not worth
doing because that's all your employees could do. Well, I
got to tell you your problem is you're freaking people.
Fix your culture. Fix your people. And just even saying
culture change, the BS meter goes off. Everybody listening to
this thing. Yeah right, I'm telling you, I've seen it.
I've got a distillery now. It was easier because I

(12:39):
took people in. Who are I'm sorry? I took people in.
And the only way you worked for us is if
you worked on systems and you took responsibility. So we
set them up from the beginning. We trained them in
the beginning and that's how they started the job. And
they didn't know anything else. And we took young people
and they're amazing. And just me saying young people today

(13:02):
are amazing, there's a whole lot of people saying, yeah right,
I got droids. You're right. When you give them what
and why and you enable to empower them, they're amazing.
And if you don't, they're the worst puke heads on earth.
Because back at Procter and Gamble. They would tell me
to do something, I'd stay there at eight o'clock. I
didn't know why I was doing it because we just
did it. Today, you try to do that, they'll say,

(13:23):
hell with you. And who's the idiot me for sitting
until eight o'clock just married to this incredible woman and
not going home because I just do what I'm told.
Or the ones today who say I don't get it.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah, good point.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
I've long been a believer that if you give people
want more responsibility, they want to do more, they want
to grow in their jobs. And really what happens is
I think a lot of times the leaders just don't
trust them and don't let them do it. And I
love this idea that you're going to the employees and saying, look,

(14:02):
what I'm hearing is what's not working for you?

Speaker 2 (14:06):
Right?

Speaker 1 (14:06):
The woman's back hurt, it wasn't working for her. It's
not what's not working for the organization, but what is
your problem?

Speaker 3 (14:15):
But that's where you start, because that's where you get
their engagement, and then you can start to work on
the bigger things. But you've got to start with that
stuff that gets them engaged. And we actually I'm prone
to like Ben Franklin us weird spelling and capitalization, and
Tom Peters and Ben Franklin both did that same thing,
and I do it as well. So it's proactive with

(14:36):
all caps on both the training program and the book
Proactive Problem Solving, because what you want to get is
them driving them looking the people close to the work. No,
when you're working on a big new product, go to
the people close to the work. They will problem solve
and figure it out if you've got them engaged. And
it's getting their engagement that's the key. So we start

(14:58):
with those things. I can tell I guarantee you I
will transform your culture. You put people through the training,
they will be transformed. In fact, the bigger problem is
you got to keep the managers on it because once
the employees get lit, you better be ready to manage
proactive people because if you don't, they're gonna quit. They're
gonna quit, and they're gonna go to a place where
they can because once they find that they can have

(15:20):
joy and work because that's what people want. They want,
and I mean the real purpose of proactive problem solving
is joy and work. That's it. That's it. And when
they have joy and work everybody out. Everything else works.
The owner makes money, everybody's happy. Try to make money,
you'll fail. Light up your people to truly become proactive,

(15:41):
proactive problem solvers.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
And you got it all right, So how what do
you do to actually get them thinking about that?

Speaker 1 (15:52):
So you got them, So you started with that first step.
You've got them engage, you've got them. You know they've
solved some problems. But how do you what's that next
step to get them into that proactive problems on me
and looking for those problems.

Speaker 3 (16:07):
So the principle we have is sphere of influence. And
it actually came from Kevin Cahill, who is doctor Deming's
grandson who runs the Deming Institute, and he says, everybody
has a sphere of influence where they can do things. Okay,
and to your point, we don't want the inmates running
the asylum. I mean, this is not about letting them
go crazy and do that. That's not what we're talking about.

(16:29):
What we're talking about is start with the sphere of influence.
So say you've got a work team and they've got
frustrations like the lady with the back, or I've got
multiples of those stories that I can tell you, and
and start with them where they've got control over that
sphere of influence. Then they work on their work to
build system improve the systems. Okay, you don't bring the

(16:50):
experts in. They do the work to do it because
you teach them how to do this, okay. And then
they change the sop and you get approval to the
new sop and you've got a system. Then team leader
starts to work on team projects. Then that team with
the next team, so the team that say you're an
IT group and you've got stuff comes in and stuff
goes out. You've got customers coming in and customers going

(17:11):
out from your IT group. Then you start to work
with maybe the people coming in, and you improve the
systems between your work unit and the next work the
work unit feeding into you, okay, and you keep doing
this and expanding it and expanding it until you get
to the department and the division and the corporation. And
so now that's how you do it. You grow it

(17:31):
from the bottom up. The key is you've got to educate.
And that's why broad to Problem Solving the book was
ready a year ago. We ran a pilot with people
across companies, large, small, nonprofit, for profit, and because we
give a lot of scholarships to small businesses. Okay, I've
always been I mean, because we're crazy expensive, but rich

(17:51):
people can pay it, so that's good. I like take
it from rich people to big companies, but small businesses
we give huge scholarships to help them out on all
of our work that we do, the training and stuff.
And we brought them together and they said, this is spectacular.
It's going to work with the employees, and if you
ship this, I'll kill you. I said, that's a bit severe.
I said, okay, I'm exaggerating. One of the CEOs said,

(18:13):
he says, but if you light up my employees and
you don't get my managers and my executive team bought in,
we're gonna you're gonna cause chaos for us. So we
pulled the book. We pulled Proactive problem Solving and instead
what we did is we built a training for the
and in the book, I explained here's the basic thing

(18:33):
for employees. The book itself's only fifty thousand words instead
of one hundred and fifty thousand like my other books,
because I wanted it as simple and clear as possible
for everybody to be a probe not right, really simple
how to and then we have a program for their manager,
and then we have a separate program for the executives.

(18:54):
And now we've got we light it up at the bottom.
We teach the executives. Now we're going to che culture
from the top down and the bottom up. And also
the middle part, which is the key part. That's where
these programs usually fall apart, you know, is the people
in the middle, of the managers. And so when we
got the three tiers of training and we started to

(19:16):
do that, then they said this rocks, and that's when
we gave the go ahead for practical problem solving to
come out.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
So how do you keep from allowing the whole idea
of systems from taking over. I've seen this before where
everybody's caught up and we're building the system.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
We're building the system, and.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
Pretty soon what you have is everybody's working on policies
and procedures and nobody's actually doing any work and they're
stuck in I have to follow the system. I can't
do my thing. So how do you balance with you
got people that you're delegating to you on the front
line to solve their problems. But at the same time,
you go, but here's the system, So how do you

(19:56):
combine those two.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
Well, that's why they need keep training. They need training
because most people don't know how to work with systems.
I mean, doctor DEMI pirating, I agree, and we have
gone forward. It starts with the aim of the system,
the aim of ninety plus percent of systems that put
in reactively because they don't know the difference between special
cause and common cost. Special cause it's a random area

(20:19):
that just happened. It's not gonna happen again. You take
that and put in systems, you've got needless bureaucracy, common costs.
You need to nonstandard common cause, which I explain in
practice problem solving. But what you have to do is
the aim of the system is the aim of the
system to control and constrain or to enable. Okay, and

(20:40):
so the first principle is the systems I'm talking about
to enable people to do great things, to do their work,
to get the junk out of the way, so we
can use that incredibly wonderful brain they have that we
hired them for. We took a lot of time to
hire them because they were gonna this way and then
we don't treat them that way is to get into
to get them engaged. And so the first part is

(21:02):
make sure the aim of the system is as much
to enable as it is to control. And then the
other thing is you have to build in a culture.
How many people they're doing an ISO thing. They write
a whole bunch of systems, they put them in a
book and they never use them. I go into a
company and they show me your SOPs and do it
first time, said, they go, I've never seen one. Well
you've never seen one, and you're running this line and

(21:23):
you never seen it. You go, you go into my
brainbew accillery. They'll they'll bring the book right to you.
They do it, and they'll show it. And here's the
important thing. The way I quantify the transformation, because boards
and executives want to quantify it, is the number of
changes in your SOP, your standard operating procedures. So it's

(21:43):
about the second part is versus the aim, and the
second is never ending continuous improvement of the SOP. Okay,
never ending continuitions improvement. And as with small companies, sometimes
they're not written in their word of mouth, and we
do it that way to begin, but we want to
get them to written systems, written SOPs. And every time
that soop means that means a person's made. You know,

(22:05):
I see you know what I say, How would you
like to have three improvements to the SOP every couple
of months by every employee to be a miracle? They say,
they said, that's what I'm talking about doing, and they
get a sense of accomplishment that not only is their
work better, but the work for others is better, and

(22:26):
it's documented changed, not random change, because we got to
be proven about how we do it for insurance purposes
everything else. And so when they have never and they're
looking for ways to work, Smart infestor a group that
I was working with just yesterday I was at they
had a team that was doing they do assembly, so

(22:47):
other vendors make parts and then they do an assembly thing.
And they had work teams, and their work teams were
doing an average of five machines. They're pretty complicated machines,
five machines a day. That five machines a day went
for them over it six months and went from them
same team making five machines to ten machines to twenty

(23:07):
two machines. So I just heard yesterday their goal for
this year is forty machines a day by that same
work team. That's what we're talking about. That is the
promise of deming. That is the promise of systems. That
is what proactive problem solving is about. This is not
just This is not a little thing. This is not
a could be Heck, I'd be just on my sailboat

(23:28):
sailing right now. I mean I'm in Social Security now, okay,
so I'm old and so you know it's time. But
this is like a cause. That is the because the
people want to do great things. Managers want to do
great things. Are you having fun as the CEO today, No,
you're not, I know it because you're dealing with junk.

(23:51):
You can't go on vacation because you got to deal
with it, and you worry. I'm giving you freedom through
enabling the asset. As you said in the beginning, there
are already there. You're paying for them. Why don't you
get a full ROI out of them?

Speaker 2 (24:05):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (24:05):
So so let me ask a a today post COVID question,
which is, Okay, you have a lot of a lot
of businesses where you have some employees are.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
In the office. Some employees are out of the office.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
How do you deal with that in your in these
systems that you're creating when they're not you know, when
you're when you're in the office, you have that conversation
with each other, it's easy. How are you dealing with
that with this hybrid work environment?

Speaker 3 (24:38):
Well, and I got to tell you, I my my
personal views on this is I hate it all and
it's very frustrating and it drives me crazy. And uh
and I uh, I mean I actually I live in
an historic home and I got eighty acres here in Cincinnati,
a beautiful lake in that, and so I built the
Eureka Ranch and the distillery because it's like the family farm.
I can just walk over to it. So I really

(25:01):
love people in person. But I got to get over
that because that's not the case.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
It's not it's not.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
There's just so I can continue to whine about it. Yep,
here with it now. The good news is is the
bigger problem is me getting used to this digital stuff.
I mean, it's not my first thing. But these young
people they do it without even blinking.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
They do.

Speaker 3 (25:25):
And I mean the company I was with yesterday, there
were people up on the screen participating in the session
at the same time, and they don't think anything of it.
To me, it's weird. It's weird. I don't like it personally,
it's not how I like to do it. But that's
the new reality. And and so you use those digital

(25:47):
systems and these digital systems, and you know, the Eureka
Ranch has had to build. We've got a whole software platform,
a PDS plan Do Study, Arkipedia app for doing projects
digitally and for managing your projects steadily. And we've got
create tools that are digital and there's a whole suite

(26:07):
of things that when people go through the practical problem
solving training that we have built to make that easier
to do. Now, I'm going to tell you I'm not
building them. I got really smart young people who are
building what they need to do their stuff. Where because
like our head of training lives in Maine, the ranch
is in Cincinnati. You know, I travel three million I
traveled three millionaire miles, so I'm usually all over the

(26:31):
place and it's actually become liberating, but I still get
a little frustrated. So you can do it, but you
got to commit yourself to the systems and stop whining
about it.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
Got it? I like that, all right.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
So if you're talking to a small business and you're saying, okay,
owner CEO, here's three things that you ought to be doing,
that you could probably that you could do in the
next couple of weeks. What would those three things be.

Speaker 3 (27:02):
Well, the first thing before you even begin is you
have to be honest with yourself and say, do you
believe in your people that you've got, Because if you
don't truly believe in them, then fire them and get
some new ones. Because if you don't believe, this won't
work because they smell it. These young people are really good.

(27:26):
They do they know it when you're full of it.
So you either care about them and truly care about
them and commit yourself to changing the system. You know,
my dad worked with doctor Deming when he first came
back to the US, and time, as I mentioned, and
he had all timers in the end and passed and

(27:47):
his mind was gone, and he would sometimes recognize me,
sometimes not. But whenever I said Deming, he would say management.
Management is the problem. And he would say, ninety four
percent of the problem is management, six percent a worker.
Because only management can change the system. I mean, it
was like it was so deep in his being that
he would say this coherent statement and we and it

(28:09):
was just it was all I mean, you giggled because
you know that's how deep it was in my dad.
Which is part of why this practice is ironic. That
I did practical problem solving that is so much more
aligned to where my dad was versus the big innovations
that I did at this point in life. But you know,
so management, you've got to doubt take responsibility for the system.
So first you can care about them and you believe

(28:31):
you've got them, and you'll be shocked because people you
think who whine a lot, oftentimes they are the ones
that care. And when you enable them, you're going to
be amazed. I've seen things when somebody says I volunteered
to be the project leader on this, and people are like, oh, no,
he's terrible. No, it's because they care, but they don't
know how to verbalize it. And so you've got to

(28:52):
put in the systems. You got to first start with
what and why? How you know what's the problem and why,
So if you're talking to somebody asking them about something,
take the time to explain what the problem is you
need help with and why? It matters what and why?
Then the second stage, which is actually the second stage
of the Practical Problem Solving book. The first is identifying

(29:14):
the problem. The second is creating ideas. To create ideas,
what you've got to do is there's three principles. And
this has been published in academic journals that we've done
and in my books that I've written. There's three things
for creating ideas. You need to get stimulus, diversity, and
drive out fear. Stimulus is get them to go no more,

(29:37):
and so challenge them if they come to you with
the problem is how could we learn more about this?
How could we learn more? You know? Second is diversity.
It's an exponential kick. Who could we talk to about this?
Who could we learn for? Is there another company that's
doing this? You know? So the first one you go
on the internet. I mean it's easy now these times.
Then we get this and then now you've got the idea.

(29:58):
With the stimulus and diversity, so what can we learn?
Who can we talk to? And then people will get ideas,
but they'll kill them. So the last thing is to
drive out fear. And you drive out fear by experimenting
and you say, how could we fail fast, fail cheap.
That's the straight talk way of saying it. Demming world,

(30:18):
it's plan, do study, act, it's a discipline cycle, not check.
It's study. That's how new Luft's discovered, which I explained
in the Practical Problem Solving book. But you say, how
can we try a little experiment and fail fast, fail cheap,
run it, get a hypothesis, try a little experiment and
teach them and get this into the culture. And then
having done that, the last thing is to how you

(30:40):
accelerate it. And that's a matter of Now you're going
to have to get enrollment. And that's where things like
the communications and how we define ideas. We have a
whole system where we define like say it's a new
offering we're going to do, or something we're going to do.
For our distribution system, we do customer problem promise and
proof and we have the same format all the time

(31:00):
so that we get clarity of what our ideas are.
Because communications is one of the big things we've found
is people say an idea management has known, it's because
they didn't understand it, because the employee didn't do a
good job explaining it.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
No I agree. I agree.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
So the book is proactive problem solving, or my subtitle
for the book would be stopped the Stupid And.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
I love that. I love that.

Speaker 1 (31:27):
Our guest has been Doug Hall and the Walton Billy Show. Doug,
where can they get more information about what you do?

Speaker 3 (31:34):
So the proactive problem solving the book as well as
the workshop that we do for you for your folks
that they get certified in and your managers go to
Eureka ranch dot com. That's eu r Eka ranch dot
com is a website. And I know there's a lot
of small businesses. Don't get scared off by all the
big companies. We offer ridiculous scholarships. We have a thing

(31:58):
called Planet Eureka ideas a better world and part of
what keeps you. I mean, at one point a big
company came to buy me and they said, we're going
to buy you into this, but we're going to stop
all that small business stuff you do. And I said, well,
thank you very much, I really appreciate it. The answer
is no, it's what do you mean It's no. I said,

(32:18):
then you will kill my soul, because yes, big corporations,
it's wonderful to work with them. But my heart and
soul is with these people. They said, But you don't
make any money, they said, you have a ready grasp
of the obvious. You charge for small businesses. So if
you just go to Eureka ranch dot com, and if
you want to learn about my foolishness, if you just
go to Doug haul dot com. I've got a blog

(32:40):
and you can sign up for that and hear my
dribble and stuff like that we put out as well.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
I love it. Thanks so much, Stegan, and love your passion.
I'd love your passion.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
For the capabilities of the workers, because I'm a huge
believer in that, long believe that I've actually launched more
businesses because of employees who said, well, hey, you've taught
me how to run the business, and now I can
go run my own business. And that's probably the thing
I'm proud of stuff over the last forty years, how
many businesses we've launched. And that's what I'm hearing you

(33:16):
saying is, look, when they're passionate about the business, when
they're passionate about what they're doing, they will find the problems,
they'll get engaged, and then they'll actually help you create
the systems and then it works from the bottom lop.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
It's the front line.

Speaker 1 (33:29):
And when that happens, what we're always gonna find we're
gonna make way more money. I mean you, if you're
producing forty machines a day instead of five machines a
day for a team that last I checked, that's eight
times the production, which means that it's either eight times
the money or an eighth of the cost. Either one works.

(33:51):
And when we do it in everything we do, we
do it in our investments, we always make way more
money than pay wayless text join us on the next
wealth Ability Show, and if you love what Doug's doing,
please go to his book Proactive Problem Solving. Go to
Eureka ranch dot com and follow us and send this

(34:11):
out to your your CEO friends, send this out to
your business owner and entrepreneur friends, because man, my experience
in my lifetime has been systems.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
And people will make you or they'll break you. Thanks everyone.
This podcast is a presentation of Rich Dad Media Netflork

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