Susan Solovic: Hi, welcome everyone. I’m Susan Wilson Solovic and you’re watching our featured advisor series with Sam Carpenter. And Sam is a widely successful entrepreneur, but he is also the author of “Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Working Less and Working More.” And it really can keep any better than that Sam.
Now, in our earlier session we talked a little bit generally about why you wrote the book, and an overview of the book, but let’s talk today about getting to work the system mindset. What do you mean when you say, “Getting it.” What’s the methodology here?
Sam Carpenter: Well, and we used that term getting it through the first part of the book. It means that you can go to college and get a degree and maybe I learned something and maybe I didn’t, right?
Susan Solovic: Maybe you just attend the class to get the grades and graduate, right?
Sam Carpenter: That’s the possibility. And I don’t mean to discourage the educational system or you could be terrifically passionate or you could be really good-looking with the wonderful personality. Whatever your attributes are and you would want to use them to your advantage and exploit them and create something for yourself. How about controlling freedom in your life?
Well, what I talked about in the book is that so great, but when we put this over here for somebody else to take care. What I want to talk about are the mechanics, what underlies the results that you get in your life. And so the epiphany thing has to do with getting it. I like to say a visual epiphany in your belly rather than something wearing in the head. And I go back to whack-a-mole.
Susan Solovic: Yeah, I mean that’s really popular on the internet so.
Sam Carpenter: Well, whack-a-mole has just come in about. I’d say 60% of people know what it is so I briefly explain but it’s a kind of a game or an internet game with the moles pop-up through the holes and you whack them with a mole and anybody can figure out that they’re going to come up faster and faster. How good are you in whacking these moles every time you whack one you get a point.
Another one, you have mole and you can’t. Well, so many of us live lives that way and I did for 50 years, and I was good at it. I was really good at it. And the one realized when I came to crisis was that I needed to take the mileage. Put them down, put the head lamp on, metaphorically speaking, crawl down on those holes and eliminate those moles where they live and then make it an hospitable place for their mole relatives to return. And so the gut thing is that our lives are made up of systems and in the case of whack-a-mole the system or the tunnels and the moles coming up to bug you, to make life difficult.
So, the systems that underlie the results that we have whatever they are, relationship or in a job or whatever it is. There are systems that are creating those results and most of us don’t think about going to these layer deeper and seeing the systems that are there, and so the visceral epiphany has to with seeing the systems of our lives, seeing the systems that create the results of our lives.
So what if we could pull a system that was dysfunctional, our sales presentation. How you do a sales presentation for example? How you answer the phone will be the ultimate in business, the ultimate simplicity. What if you figure out the very, very best way to do it and did it that way every single time, and or what if you took a system of power and found out, “There’s the problem.” That’s why we keep having the same problem over and over again. Let’s fix the system and let’s document it, so it’s permanently fixed and move ahead and that we won’t have a motive to hammer.
And so back to epiphany, the epiphany has to do with seeing the systems that underlying the results, and once you can see the systems this thing that comes from the belly and stop looking at the results then you can actually fix the system to create the results you want or at least eliminate the systems that are creating the bad results.
Susan Solovic: Sure. Well, I can see how that happens because when you start a business and it’s really just you buy yourself in most cases. You’re running around. You’re doing everything and then you’re bringing a few employees, and there’s a crises here. There’s a fire to put out there. And you don’t have the time that you need then to be proactive in really growing the organizations, so important employed but I also want to talk a little bit about this because one of the things that you said in your book which I found fascinating is that control is not a bad thing. But you often hear, “Hey, you’ve got to let go or just kind of be easy, go with the flow.” But you’re saying, “Hey, control is good.”
Sam Carpenter: I’m here in the Woodstock generation, so why would I be sound a traitor to my times, but go with the flow light them if everybody else around they would lighten up everything would be fine. “I’m okay. I’m fine. Why can’t you lighten up?”
Well, the truth is we get caught up with all the uptightness and people are handling details in the wrong way around us. But if we could bring that in that circle of influence into the immediate surroundings and get control of the systems that are within our command then we stop having to kill fires. And if you stop having to kill fires you have more time, and for any business I do interviews about how do recession prove your business? And what I say is—
Susan Solovic: Is that possible because I want to know?
Sam Carpenter: What you do is you the same thing you do on the good times as you do in the bad times. You become more efficient and that’s what this is about. So what if in the bottom of recession you became more efficient than everybody else. What if in the best of times you became more efficient. So that’s what this is about. There’s no magic buttons. It’s a visceral epiphany where you get underlying systems and you fix them and you make them permanent which we talked about it before, but the documentation is critical because it takes an organic process.
What I call organic process first is a sales presentation. Who is giving the sales presentation? What time of the day is it given? What is the target the person that’s maybe going to buy the service? What do they like? What is their personality at that time? What is the mood? These organic processes have no basis in mechanical, physicalness. For instance, your car or our bodies or the studio, they’re mechanical they stay the same all the time, but the human processes don’t. So how do you make a human process permanent? You document it. I can’t think of any other way in this reality.
Susan Solovic: Right.
Sam Carpenter: It’s boring but true. You document it and in the book, “Work the System” I talked about the three essential documents to make it organic process perfect permanently.
Susan Solovic: Well, and you know I have to say that I am typically not a detail person. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs are visionaries, but you know I’ve seen as our businesses grow that you do have to have those systems in order to keep reinventing the wheel every time something new comes in the door. It’s an important element.
Now I also want is a transition because the other myth is you know you have to learn work long and hard in order to become wealthy and become successful, but you say, “That’s not the case.”
Sam Carpenter: And I take you from my own experience, the 100 hour work weeks. I worked two hours now to run the same company which I make more in a month now than I used to make in a year with my 100 hour work weeks, but working hard all the in the product and stay kinetic I supposed and how heroic in all that, but it’s not necessary. The long, long hours typically come from inefficiency and whacking those moles. Whacking those moles down if you can get the underlying systems to be efficient and especially get them to be automated. Every recurring process can either be automated or delegated suddenly you have more and more time.
Now I work 40 hours a week, but I run four corporations now. And the 40 hours, 38 of those hours I’m very creative and I’m enjoying what I’m doing, and I choose to do that. But when you become super efficient you don’t have to spend those long hours and so I’ve really got something to say that folks are working long, long hours, and they think they’re going to get ahead that way. It’s a problem.
Susan Solovic: Well, and also and you said this in our first segment that we did a while back. You said that, “You can actually get sick.” I mean you work so hard. You work a 100 hours a week. It affects your health, and you’re really not doing anybody any good.
Sam Carpenter: No, you’re not doing your family any good. You’re cutting your life span and all the things that come along with too much stress. And I was on all kinds of anti-depressants at the head. And I finally went into my doctor, and this is maybe interesting is that I went into a doctor and I have had this visceral epiphany of systems, and I said to the doctor, “I don’t think I’m depressed. I think my brain chemicals are fine. I’m just working too many hours and so I appear to be yes, I’m depressed. You would be too. I’m working 100 hours a week. Give me every blood test known to man because I’m made up of systems, chemical systems. Test my systems doctor, and the only way I know and correct me if I’m wrong. A good way to do that would be blood test.”
So I have seven days some blood test and found out there were four problems I won’t go through them, but they were taking care with one of them will say, “I was dehydrated, terribly dehydrated.” And there was I was low on a hormone and another problem over here, but I was able to take supplement and change things a little bit. And get back on track.
Susan Solovic: So you identified the underlying problem which is exactly what you’re saying to do with your business.
Sam Carpenter: Right, exactly and so for my health. My whole health was going down hill, but I just had a few small problems that I could attack by segregating my health in to systems that I could identify these separate systems that were wrong and then fix those systems.
Susan Solovic: It’s fascinating. Now I have to tell you that the whack-a-mole story. I love that. So I think what I’m going to do in my office I’m going to get like a little mole or pairing animal and a sludge hammer and I’m going to start thing. You also have a website where people can go to get some more information. And I guess also to order copies of your book.
Sam Carpenter: Right, WorkTheSystem.com. And the book will be available in bookstores at the end of the year, but if anybody wants the book to have they have to go to the website right now. And we do have a boot camp in the fall where people can come. And they will have the visceral epiphany by the time they leave. And that will be in vendor I get enough information about that is on the website as well.
Susan Solovic: Well, and what a beautiful place to go.
Sam Carpenter: It is. It’s a wonderful place to live.
Susan Solovic: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Sam, thank you so much for the great advice. We appreciate you’re here as part of the team of our featured advisors.
Sam Carpenter: Thank you, Susan.
Susan Solovic: Great, thanks to all of you for watching us and be sure to tune in again for another great segment with Sam Carpenter. He was I said a successful entrepreneur. Four corporations this gentleman runs plus the author of “Working the System”. So stay tune with us and remember that here on SBTV.com, small business is our only business.
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