If You Started Your Business Today, Would You Build It Differently?

Let me give you a question that could make your leadership team really uncomfortable.

If your business disappeared tonight and tomorrow morning you got to start it again, same knowledge, same experience, same market, same resources.

You know everything you know today. Would you build the same business?

Would you have the same departments? Would you sell the same things?

Would you have the same roles? Would you use the same technology?

Would you have the same processes?

Would you even do some of the things you're currently spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars doing?

Because if the answer is no, I've got another question. Why are you still doing them?

Sometimes the biggest thing keeping you from building the business you need is the business you've already built.

Welcome to the Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show, folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are.

I just recently spent several days doing the exercise we're going to be talking about today with a phenomenal team.

It's a great leadership team, during one of our strat plans. And I'm telling you, it was powerful.

We weren't sitting around trying to come up with another list of goals. We weren't tweaking last year's strategic plan.

We weren't asking, how do we make everything we're already doing 10% better?

We started questioning the business itself. Why do we do this thing over here?

Why is it structured this way? Why are we spending this many hours in this area?

If we didn't already own this, would we build it? If this role didn't already exist, would we create it?

If we weren't already offering this, would we start offering it today?

And you can absolutely feel the room change.

Because once you give a leadership team permission to stop defending what already exists, they start seeing possibilities they couldn't see before.

And there were things that had probably, you know, felt fixed because they'd been part of the business for so long.

And suddenly they weren't fixed anymore. There were choices.

That's what I want for you in this episode.

I want you to imagine getting your leadership team in a room, putting everything on the table, and for a few hours, which this is actually a few days, forgetting about what you've inherited, what you've always done, and how things currently work.

And asking, if we were building this company today, knowing everything we know now, what would we build?

Because the answer might show you exactly where your business needs to go next.

So here's what we're diving into. Your business probably wasn't designed the way that it currently is.

Here's what I want you to understand.

03:08 Your Business Evolved, It Wasn't Designed

Your business probably didn't become what it is today because you sat down with a blank sheet of paper and designed the perfect organization.

It obviously evolved. Something happened, you responded.

A customer needed something, you created a process.

Something got overloaded, you created a role.

Someone left, responsibilities moved. They shifted.

New technology came along, you added it. Then you hired somebody to manage the thing you added to the thing.

And years later, you look around and say, what the heck? How the heck did we get this way?

And somebody says, I don't know. We've just always done it this way.

And listen, that doesn't mean, you know, somebody messed up. Most of those decisions probably made sense when you made them.

You know, you made the best decision you could with the people, the information, the technology, the money and the resources that you had at the time.

But the business changed, your customers changed, technology changed, your team changed, the market changed.

And sometimes the solution didn't.

Now you've got people maintaining it. Budget is allocated to it.

Hopefully you've got processes supporting it, maybe even an entire department built around it.

And instead of asking whether we would create the thing today, we're asking how do we make this old thing work better?

That is a completely different question.

A good decision five years ago can become a bad strategy today.

So look at your business and ask, what exists primarily because it's been there for a long time?

This is a powerful, powerful question.

Stop asking how to fix it. I'm not saying that's not the right question.

I'm just saying let's back up a little bit. Let's spend some time.

And by the way, this isn't gonna work in 30 minutes. There's probably no way it's gonna work in an hour.

Like I say, this is something that we do spending days free from distraction, free from pressure, and free from the next phone call you've got to get to, or the next meeting you've got to get to.

This is just time spent together as a solid leadership team asking this question. What would we do differently?

This is where leadership teams get trapped.

Something isn't working, so immediately we start fixing the problem.

How do we make the process faster? How do we improve the department? How do we reduce the cost?

How do we get the person who's performing it to do a better job? How do we automate the process?

05:52 Challenge Its Existence Before You Optimize It

And those are not bad questions. But there's a question that needs to come before all of them.

Should this thing that we're discussing right now, this process, this department, this area, this thing that we're selling, this add-on that we're selling, should it exist at all?

And I know that is absolutely uncomfortable.

And there's only one way that you're ever going to be able to do this.

And that is if you are not emotionally handcuffed to everything you do in your business.

I remember years ago, we had a great guy sit in as part of our own internal strat plan.

And as we were going through for a couple of days, just ripping apart our own stuff, you know, what do we think is wrong? What can we change?

He stopped and he said, listen, I have to push back on this.

You're talking about the very things that have changed my life. My business, my family.

And he said, Chris, you're calling your baby ugly.

And I sat there and I looked at him and went, okay. Yeah, I get where you're coming from.

Let me explain what we do. We hold it with an open hand.

Everything that we do, we hold with an open hand.

We love what we do. We love the things that have changed your family, your life, your business, but we know that they could always be better.

So we don't think it's done, it's completed.

We ask the question, can we make it better? If so, what would that look like?

That's very uncomfortable. You have to be vulnerable.

You have to be okay with saying, do we stop doing this thing over here?

And I can tell you, there's been multiple times that I have gone to God and I'm like, Lord, we're doing this, we're doing this, we're doing this. Should we cut anything out?

And every single time I have felt that was not what we were supposed to do.

We're supposed to continue doing what we're doing because there's a reason, there's a purpose behind it. Things help other areas.

And it's just something you've got to be willing to do, right? And that's uncomfortable.

So you have to start questioning. You have to take a look at what you're doing.

If you're spending hundreds of hours on something, don't automatically ask how do we get this thing down to 150 hours.

Ask, if we had those hundreds of hours back, would we put them all here? That is part of strategy.

Your past investment is not automatically a reason for your future investment.

So before you optimize something, challenge its existence.

Don't spend another year getting better at something you shouldn't be doing anymore.

Now I'm not telling you you have to shift gears and go in a completely different direction. And some of you out there would love to do that.

And I don't want you to destroy your moneymaker, right?

I don't want you to destroy the thing that's actually getting the money to your bottom line.

I'm saying, let's start questioning. If we rebuilt it, would we build it this way?

And I will tell you, one of my favorite comments from this event was from one of the great leaders who said, you know, I just asked myself, if we were to build a business that would compete with our current business, what would it look like?

And that's what we focused on. What would that look like?

So here's why, when you get outside of your own business and take a look at something like this, it's difficult for owners.

You know too much. You know why things are the way they are.

You remember why that role was created.

You remember the customer situation that caused that policy that you've put in place.

You remember why the system broke the first time. And you remember who built it.

You remember how much money you spent on it.

All of that history gives you context, but it also can give you blinders.

10:00 Stop Defending the Past and Design the Future

So one of the things we have to do in a process like this is get outside of your own business.

Stop being the owner for a minute and become the architect.

Imagine someone handed you the company today and said, Chris or Frank or George, whatever your name is, here's what we're trying to accomplish.

Design the company that gets us there.

Would you design the exact same company that you currently have? Or would you maybe take it a step further?

Imagine your biggest competitor is starting tomorrow.

They know everything you know. They're coming directly after your customers.

Would they copy your operating model? Would they structure their team the same way you have?

Would they spend money where you spend it? Would they use their people's time in a way that you do?

Would they sell everything you sell? Would they sell things you're not selling?

So when you think this way and you can get outside of your business, now you can stop defending history.

You're just designing the future.

You can't redesign the future while you're busy defending the past.

So here's where this starts getting really interesting.

Look at your resources, your people, your money, your tech, your time, your leadership attention.

And I want you to ask, if none of this were already allocated, where would I put it today?

If we didn't already have this set up, where would we put it?

That is a crazy powerful exercise because activity can fool us.

We can think that because we're busy, because we're doing stuff, because people are filling out weekly reports of the 73 things that they've done, that we're being successful.

A department can be incredibly busy. People can be overwhelmed.

Everyone can be working 50 hours a week, but that doesn't automatically mean that those resources are in the right place.

There are many things that tell you the story of your previous decisions, things like your budget, your org chart, your calendar.

But strategy isn't about where you've been.

It's about the destination, the vision. It's about where you're going.

So, where would these resources create the greatest value today? That's the question.

And let the destination drive the redesign.

Now, I don't want you listening to this and walking into your office tomorrow saying, Chris told me to blow up the business.

This is not a Jerry Maguire moment. We're changing everything. We're only doing one client.

Nope, that is not what I'm saying at all.

You don't eliminate something because it's old. You don't fire people because your org chart isn't perfect.

You don't replace a functioning system just because somebody showed you some shiny new tech.

You need a destination.

Before you ask, what should we rebuild? Ask, what are we building toward?

What do you want this business to look like? Where are we going?

What does winning look like three years from now?

Now I will tell you the definition that I use for mission, vision, and strategy, because people mess this up all the time.

People make mission, vision, and strategy nothing but a set of goals. That's not how we do it.

So mission is your purpose for existence. You can have one mission for your business.

Why does this business exist?

Don't create a mission to put a plaque on the wall for your clients to see. That's not what it's for.

It should be for every single team member who shows up every day. This is why we exist.

Vision is your destination. You can have 700 visions.

We're headed here next. We're doing this next.

We're creating this process, this product, this service next.

We're solving all these problems in our business next, whatever it is. That's your vision.

Strategy is how you get there. It's the steps of how you get to that vision.

So you have to ask yourself the question: where are we headed?

Then hold everything in the business up against that next destination.

Does this service over here that we're doing move us there? Does this role get us there?

Does this process that we have in place help us get there? Does the meeting we're having get us there?

What about the technology? Do we have the right clients to get us there?

Does this next initiative that we're working on get us there?

And if it doesn't, why is it consuming resources?

Why does it take up money, space, people, whatever resource?

So starting from scratch doesn't mean abandoning everything.

It means giving everything permission to be questioned.

So the goal isn't to build a newer business, right? It's to build the right business for where you're going.

15:39 The Blank Whiteboard Exercise for Your Leadership Team

Now, hopefully you've got good enough people on your leadership team that it would be a mistake to do this without that team.

I will also say it may be the very thing your team needs to do without you, the business owner.

It might be. It just depends on what's going on.

Those are decisions that we make on the fly when we're doing events. What discussions do we have? Who's doing what? Who's focusing on what?

So here's what I want you to do.

I want you to get your leadership team together and don't open your org chart. Don't open your budget.

Don't pull out last year's strategic plan.

Get a blank whiteboard and across the top write, if we started the business today, what would we do differently?

Then start asking questions like, who would we serve? Who is our ideal customer right now?

What would we sell? What wouldn't we sell?

What are we only selling because we've always sold it?

What roles would we create? Would we structure the team this way?

What processes would we never build again? What would we simplify?

What would we automate? What would we outsource?

If we weren't attached to our existing tech, what would we choose today?

Where would we put our best people hours?

And here's the final one. What does the owner still do that you wouldn't put on their job description if you hired them today?

Now, again, I want you to go through the entire business. I think that's the power of spending this time.

I'm only throwing out a handful of things to get you started.

Then compare what you just designed to the business you actually have, right? That's the gap.

That's where the conversation gets interesting, because that gap may be where your next strategic plan lives.

And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, man, I want to have this conversation, but I don't know how to get my team there.

Well, that's part of why we created the Leader's Table.

One of the hardest things about owning a business is that you're too close to it.

You know all the history, you know all the reasons.

And sometimes you need other business owners and leaders around you who aren't emotionally attached to your answers.

People willing to ask, why? Why does it have to work this way? Why does it have to be you?

Why does this still have to be what you offer? What are you actually trying to accomplish?

Sometimes you don't need another answer.

You need somebody willing to challenge the assumptions behind the answers you already have.

And if you want to learn more about the Leader's Table, check out the link in the description.

Folks, businesses accumulate things. They accumulate roles, processes, policies, products, meetings, technology, departments, assumptions.

And every one of them has a story.

But remember this. History explains why something exists.

It doesn't automatically justify why it should continue.

So every once in a while, get your team in a room, start with a blank sheet of paper and ask, knowing everything we know today, if we were starting this business from scratch, what would we build differently?

Then have the courage to look at the difference.

Because sometimes the biggest thing keeping you from building the business you need is the business you've already built.

Well, folks, that is all the time that we have for today. I hope this has helped you out.

As always, take this information, change your leadership, change your business, change your life, and join us on the next episode.