This is the Inside BS Show, and it's show number 826. Welcome to the show today. I'm Dave Lorenzo, I'm the godfather of growth.

And if you're just joining us, we do this show every day here on, well, wherever you get your podcasts. You might be watching us on YouTube. So this is 826, show number 826.

It's the 826th show that I've done, hence the number. We're doing something different starting today. I'm recording this on June 1st, 2025.

I normally don't date these because I want the shows to be evergreen, but I'm throwing down a marker here. And here's the reason why. I have taken an approach with this show that I really don't care how many listeners we get.

My goal is to have a one-on-one conversation with you. You're the only listener that matters to me. So if you're Dean Arfanis and you're listening to this, thank you for listening.

If you're Randy Carpinia and you're listening to this, thank you for listening. I know those of you who are listening, I know those two people listen almost every single day. So I wanna thank them.

And that's the reason I'm doing the show. I'm doing the show to help people make their business stronger, to help them make a great living and live a great life, make more money and enjoy yourself doing it. But what's going to be different as we move forward from 826 on is that I'm doing the show now in three segments and all three segments are available on the audio.

All three segments will be available on YouTube as a video podcast. But each of these segments is going to be split up and we'll distribute them starting tomorrow on LinkedIn. So they'll be distributed in blocks that are 10 minutes or less on LinkedIn.

So segment one will be one block that's posted on LinkedIn. And then two or three hours later, segment two will be posted, two or three hours later, segment three will be posted or we may post them on different days. Also in the future, we may use this content in other places.

So for me, chopping it up into three 10 minute segments after it's distributed as a podcast has additional value. Now, the segment length being 10 minutes, well, that's the length that you can put a video on LinkedIn. So that's why the LinkedIn videos will be 10 minutes or less in each of the segments.

So if you're watching this on YouTube, thank you for bearing with me for the last two and a half minutes as I explain where we're going from show 826 on forward. All right, so segment one today is about the three habits of family business CEOs. So there are three habits that family business CEOs need to follow.

And these are the three habits that I teach my clients on a regular basis. We'll jump right into it. Habit number one for the habits of CEOs are that they must learn something new about their customers every day.

Why is this a habit that CEOs must follow, especially family business CEOs? If you don't learn something new about your customers every day, you're not growing. And if you're not growing, you're dying. So if you're a family business CEO, you've got to learn something new about your customers every day.

If you are like me and you create a daily checklist for yourself, and I have a checklist of things that need to be done every day, your checklist should have on it, have at least one conversation with a customer. If you're not having at least one conversation with one of your customers every day, you're not doing your job as the CEO of the family business. This was instilled in me by Marriott and Mr. Marriott.

Mr. Marriott made it a point to speak to at least one client and at least one employee, frontline employee, every day. And the reason was because he wanted to learn something new about his customers and about his employees every day. And that's what helped him grow, and that's what helped his focus on the growth of the business.

So if you're a family business CEO and you want to be successful like Marriott, you will learn something new about your customers every day. The second thing you're going to do if you're a family business CEO every day is you're going to teach your team something. Every day, you're going to teach a member of your team or multiple members of your team something.

I used to do this in my businesses when we all worked in the same place with a morning meeting, a daily morning meeting. Some companies call it their daily morning huddles. We would get together for 15 minutes standing in the hallway every morning.

We would have a focus point that we would focus on for that day. We would have a learning topic that we would learn for that day. And then we would have something new that we were focusing on related to our customers or our clients.

Every day, we would do this. And every day, we would highlight something new that we would learn. Now, here's the thing.

You're going to do this every day, five days a week in your business, and it may go over everybody's head four out of the five days, but that one day, people in the business are going to get something valuable out of that opportunity. So for you, as the family business CEO, you need to teach your team something new every day. The third thing you need to do as a family business CEO every day, your three key habits as a family business CEO, the third thing is thanking people, expressing gratitude.

And you're going to thank three different types of people. You're going to thank a client or a customer. You can do that by writing a thank you note.

And I write thank you notes every day. Very simple, handwritten note. Write a thank you note every day to a customer, to a client.

You're going to thank an employee every day. You can send them a thank you note or hand them a thank you note, or you can just go up to them, shake their hand and say, thank you for doing this. It was a great job.

I really appreciate you. And you're going to thank a vendor every day. This third one is something that you don't hear about very often.

Without our vendors, without the people who provide us with the products that we use every day to take care of our customers, we wouldn't be able to get stuff done. And you don't think about thanking your vendors. You think to yourself, well, I'm paying my vendor.

That's the thanks they get. No, no, no. You also need to say thank you to your vendors.

They prioritize you. They prioritize the business that you provide them. They make sure you have what you need to do what you do for your clients.

So say thank you once in a while. Reach out to one vendor every day and thank him or her for providing the goods, the services they're providing to get the job done. So those are your three habits of family business CEOs, the three habits of successful family business CEOs.

You're listening to, and you're watching on YouTube, the Inside BS Show. My name is Dave Lorenzo. I am the godfather of growth.

If you're watching on YouTube, at the end of this video, another video will pop up. I want you to watch that one because it's just as important. Okay, the second segment of our show today is on succession planning.

And succession planning is really leadership development. Here's the thing. You guys are worn out, I know, because for the last, I wanna say three weeks, if I look over the shows, we started talking about succession planning, yeah, it's at least two weeks ago, a solid two weeks on succession planning.

The reason we started talking about succession planning here on the Inside BS Show is because, number one, it makes your business more valuable. Number two, it saves you from a lot of heartache. If somebody in a critical role is out, you got somebody who can step in and at least do the job for that day.

But number three, succession planning is leadership development. You should spend time every day developing someone to do one of the leadership aspects of your job. So you're a CEO of a business, a family business.

You should spend some time every day teaching somebody else to do one of the aspects of your job. So if you're listening to this right now and you're a CEO and you've got a daily checklist like I have, on this daily checklist should be teach blank, and put the person's name in there every day, how to do blank. Every day you should teach one aspect of your job to somebody else.

That's not just succession planning, it's leadership development. And then as you're teaching them, document what worked about the process and then refine how that process is taught throughout your company. In a year, if you do this every day and you do it five days a week and you do it every working day, you'll have 200 different sessions.

You will have a training program for how to replace someone, not only in your job, but you'll have developed a training program that everyone in the business, everybody in the organization can use to do their job and to teach other people how to do their job. This process, teaching someone else how to do one thing from your job every day is succession planning and it's leadership development. And it should be practiced by everyone in a leadership role in your business, from top to bottom.

Candidly, it should be practiced by everyone in your business. Everybody in your business should be teaching someone in the organization how to do one thing from their job every day. That's leadership development, it's succession planning, and it's continuous improvement.

It will make your business more valuable. This is the Inside BS Show. My name is Dave Lorenzo.

If you're watching this on YouTube, there's another video on succession planning that's gonna pop up right now. You need to watch that video. It's powerful, it will help you.

All right, segment three. How to select a business coach. So you're gonna see all kinds of crap on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on Instagram, everywhere, TikTok, everywhere.

You're gonna see all kinds of crap about who you should hire as a business coach. I'm gonna give you three criteria right now that you should use. And you don't have to hire Exit Success Lab.

You don't have to hire me or someone from my team as your business coach or your business development coach. You don't have to hire us. But use this criteria to hire whoever you want.

Okay, point number one, criteria number one, is you have to understand what your needs are. What do you wanna get from the coaching process? Do you have mental barriers you need to break through? That's one type of coach. Do you need strategic guidance and direction? Do you have to plan out the path that your company is going to take? Do you need tactical aspects of your business? So strategic is do you need to know where to go? Tactical is do you need to know what to do? All three of those things may be separate coaches.

The mental aspect, the strategic aspect, or the tactical aspect. Those are three different things. In fact, if you need tactical guidance, you probably need a consultant.

You probably don't need a business coach. You probably need a business strategy consultant or a business consultant. So understand what your needs are first.

Don't fall in love with someone you met at a networking meeting. Don't go to an event and fall in love with the event person because they're at the front of the room teaching you how to weave baskets. If you're not in the basket weaving business, that person might not be a good coach for you.

So understand your needs first and go into it with a set of criteria for the person who will fill those needs. The second thing you need to do if you're looking to select a business coach is find someone who's done what you want to do. People come to us at Exit Success Lab because they wanna grow and scale their business and eventually transition their business either to the next generation or they wanna plan for a sale, for an exit.

When you come to us, we will help you break through that growth barrier and we will help you set your business up so you have the most options when you're ready to make that transition. You wanna give it to your family? No problem. Your business will be in great shape to give to the family.

You don't wanna retire and you wanna just treat your business as an investment and have it keep spinning off cash to you? God bless. We will help you create the business that will spin off cash until the day that you die. And when you die, you can donate the business to charity, turn it over to the employees, do a management buyout, whatever you want with it.

We can help you with all of that. But you need to find someone who's done that and that's why Exit Success Lab is the right place for many people because I've grown businesses from zero to 50 million in three years, from zero to 250 million in six years. I've participated in the exit and transition of dozens and dozens and dozens of businesses.

Last weekend on Saturday, I was sick as a dog. I helped with two business transitions. A business that is wholesale in the distribution space.

The gentleman is working on a deal that will ultimately lead to his exit. And I went through a letter of intent with him, sick as a dog, had the flu. And he's a client, he called me on a Saturday, went through it with him.

The same day, same day, a law firm owner called me, his number one person was threatening to quit unless she got a right of first refusal to buy the business if he ever retires. He's not near retirement age, he doesn't want to retire, but this person, as part of her performance review, has asked for a right of first refusal. He'd never thought about that, wanted to talk it through with me.

Again, on a Saturday, he called me. Sick as a dog, I was. And I talked to him about it.

I coached him through how to do it. And that's playing out, it's taking place as we speak. But those conversations are the exact conversations I have with my clients every day.

So if you want to do something, work with someone who's done that and had practiced doing that and has seen a lot in the space. Don't work with a business coach who just bought a franchise. Don't work with a business coach who was a failed realtor yesterday and is a business coach today.

In fact, if a business coach has purchased a franchise, ask them why they chose to purchase the franchise and ask them how many people they've coached. If they're in a franchise and they're a franchise business coach and they've coached 100 people or more, you can feel comfortable they know what they're doing. If they purchased the franchise and they've only coached 10 people and they started six weeks ago, I wouldn't work with them.

Why would you work with someone who's only been doing it for six weeks? You can't trust that person. That person should be working with people for free until they get enough experience to earn the right to work with people who are paying them. So your business coach should be someone who's done what you want to do.

And then the third thing is pick somebody you like. This is so important. So there are many people out there who are the quote unquote teachers of harsh reality.

I give it to you straight. And all they're doing is getting their jollies by abusing people, right? If that's what you want, if you want somebody to kick your ass, okay, fine, no problem. But I'll tell you that if you're not working with someone you like, you're making a big mistake because you need to want to see this person over and over again.

You need to feel comfortable reaching out to this person like my clients did on a Saturday, asking them questions because your needs come up when they come up. You gotta feel great about talking to this person, connecting with this person and working with this person all the time. So the three things that you should look for when you're selecting a business coach is first and foremost, understand what you need and make sure that person can fulfill your needs.

Second, find someone who's been there and done that. And third, pick somebody you like. Work with someone you like.

That's how you select a business coach. Now another video is gonna come up right below this one. That video is gonna be on business coaching.

You're going to want to watch that video next. Be sure and watch that video next. My name is Dave Lorenzo.

I'm the godfather of growth. If you're watching on YouTube, stay with us to watch the next video that shows up. If you're listening, thank you for listening.

And we'll see you back here again tomorrow at 6 a.m.