Process Management with Mike Brcic | E044

Better outcomes through process management.

In this episode of Financial Planning for Canadian Business Owners, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, and writer, interviews Mike Brcic, Founder and Chief Explorer at Way Finders, a company that hosts entrepreneurs in some of the most amazing places around the world!


Episode Highlights:

  • 0:57 – Mike Brcic introduces himself and Way Finders.

  • 2:09 – How did Mike get started in this business?

  • 4:11 – Mike goes deep into badass monks.

  • 5:15 – What does the Way Finders process look like for entrepreneurs?

  • 8:00 – Jason and Mike talk about tracking efficiencies while scaling a business.

  • 9:56 – How does Mike help entrepreneurs re-engineer their businesses?

  • 12:52 – Jason and Mike discuss the importance of not just throwing jobs you dislike to an assistant.

  • 17:40 – Mike breaks down the accountability aspect of his system.

  • 19:20 – How long does Mike typically work with his clients?

  • 21:40 – What kind of feedback does Mike get from his clients?

  • 25:24 – Jason and Mike discuss getting mentally ready for retirement.

  • 27:00 – Mike shares some tools available that can help business owners with their process management.

3 Key Points

  1. Way Finders focuses on creating a community of entrepreneurs who are like-minded in that they are looking for new ways to create successful businesses.

  2. Mike helps entrepreneurs re-engineer their businesses by offloading those tasks that drain their energy to a person or service that maximizes efficiency.

  3. Having a tried and true processes in place helps business owners use their time more efficiently while making sure the business can run smoothly

 

Tweetable Quotes:

  • “If you set a very clear vision and some very clear guidelines and principles, that does a lot of the work for you.” – Mike Brcic

  • “The reality is...as you grow and scale, you have to reinvent the company over and over and over again.” – Jason Pereira

  • “If the business model is broken, throwing more gasoline onto a dumpster fire is not going to put out the fire.” – Mike Brcic

  • “Without a properly defined process that cuts to the heart of what you want to do, you’re just passing crap onto other people.” – Jason Pereira

Resources Mentioned:

Transcript:

Producer: Welcome to the Financial Planning for Canadian Business Owners Podcast. You will hear about industry  insights with award-winning financial planner and entrepreneur, Jason Pereira. Through the interviews  with different experts, with their stories and advice you will learn how you can navigate the challenges  of being an entrepreneur, plan for success, and make the most of your business and life. And now your  host, Jason Pereira. 

Jason Pereira: Hello and welcome. Today on the podcast I have Mike Brcic, founder and chief explorer at Wayfinders.  Mike helps people better organize their processes within their business in order to basically maximize on greater efficiency. I brought him on the podcast today to talk about this as a general practice  management conversation. With that, here's my interview with Mike. 

Jason Pereira: Mike, thanks for taking the time. 

Mike Brcic: Great to be here. 

Jason Pereira: Mike Brcic, tell us about what it is you do. 

Mike Brcic: Yeah. There's a number of things that I do. My company, Wayfinders, I host entrepreneurs on these  events in spectacular places around the world, places like Greenland, and the Amazon, and Rwanda.  While these are amazing adventures and lots of fun, it is really under the guise of creating an amazing  community of people who are all exploring what it means to be a successful entrepreneur beyond just  this narrow definition of financial success or growing our companies. 

Mike Brcic: We're exploring questions of how to have a meaningful life, how to have an aligned life so that your  company fits into that vision, stuff like that. Part of that is exploring how we can run companies and not  have our companies run us, and so living a better life that way. I also do consulting with a handful of  people just about helping them put in systems and processes in their business so that it can run  smoothly without them. That's the ultimate goal, is the company can completely run without you. Then  you have the freedom to work where you feel most aligned and have the most joy. 

Mike Brcic: That's it in a nutshell. I do a bunch of other stuff as well, but that's the relevant stuff. 

Jason Pereira: Excellent. Tell me about how you got started doing this. 

Mike Brcic: I've been an entrepreneur for 25 years. My previous company that I sold in February of 2019 did high end mountain bike trips all over the world. We were in about 45 different countries. Very big, complex  business. 2017, I launched Wayfinders, so as I was making my way out of the other company, I was  starting up this other company. 

Mike Brcic: I attended a number of entrepreneur conferences, and had been attending a number of entrepreneur  conferences. They all kind of follow the same format. Two or three days you go to a hotel, or you're in a  conference venue. There's speakers on stage and there's workshops. It was great. I got a lot of value  from them, but really the primary value I got was from the connections I made with other  entrepreneurs, and being able to share journeys and learn from each other. The format really wasn't set  up for that. 

Mike Brcic: I'd been in the adventure industry for 20-plus years at that point, and I knew that if you take people  outdoors and you're doing fun, challenging things together, that tends to bring people together quickly.  I thought, "Maybe I can take this conference idea and mesh it with this outdoor adventure stuff." that  was the genesis of it. 

Mike Brcic: It's taken on a bit of a different direction where I go to these pretty remote places around the world. My  last event was November in Bhutan. I incorporate a lot of local culture into it, so we spent quite a lot of  time in these remote monasteries hanging out with some pretty bad-ass monks, and learning about  Buddhism and learning about the Bhutanese approach to life. That's all in the service of exposing people  to different ways of thinking about life, and ultimately answering the question of what makes a  meaningful life. 

Mike Brcic: That's how I got my start, and it's taken off very nicely right from the get-go. I sold out my first event,  and I've sold out every single event since. I've approached it very differently than my last business,  which was just about scaling all over the world. I keep this company intentionally small and nimble. It  earns me a great living, and I don't have to work very hard at it. It's a different approach to  entrepreneurship. 

Jason Pereira: I've never heard the term "bad-ass monk" before, so that's kind of cool. 

Mike Brcic: If I can go a little deeper into that, just telling you how bad-ass they are ... When you want to train to  become a monk, you go to this monk university type of thing for two years. You learn about Buddhism,  you learn about monk practices. Then if you want to further your practice, you go basically into isolation  where you're completely on your own, and you're meditating. Food is brought to you, but you don't  have interaction with those people. 

Mike Brcic: The first stage is three years. They go into isolation for three years where they're basically just eating,  and sleeping, and meditating. Then if you want to take it another level, you do another six years. Then if  you want to take it to the ultimate level, it's another nine years, so 18 years in total. I met a lot of these  monks. You think, somebody spends 18 years in isolation, they must be completely bonkers, but they  were some of the most amazing, compassionate, loving, glowing human beings I've ever met. A little  aside there about bad-ass monks. 

Jason Pereira: I do find it interesting that they do three years of that, and then they opt to go back in and keep doing it  and stuff, so get the habit. They're all so ... 

Jason Pereira: All right. Let's talk about, when it comes down to it, you go in to basically help entrepreneurs. What  does that process look like, and what it is you bring to the table? 

Mike Brcic: With my consulting work, when somebody comes to me, it's typically they are totally overwhelmed.  They're working way too much. They're stressed out. Their company is more or less taking over their life.  That's where I was, that, with my previous company. The genesis of this work is that I hit the breaking  point where I'd been. I had my foot on the gas for many years, and I was just really pushing growth and  scale in my company. I decided to get off, and I spent about six, seven months really putting in a lot of  systems and processes so it could run without me. By the end of it, I was down to two and a half hours  of meetings on Tuesday. That lasted for about a year until I decided to sell the company. 

Mike Brcic: The work that I do is implementing a lot of these things, which I pulled from different sources, and some  of them I've modified. I'm a big fan of simplicity, so I simplify a lot of tools and have developed some of  my own. Really, there's a lot to it. Lots of different pieces. 

Mike Brcic: Some of it is setting the foundation, where we work on setting a very, very clear vision for where people  want to take the company, so that ... If your staff don't know what your vision is for the company,  they're just going to make it up. Often they're going to be coming to you for guidance all the time.  Whereas if you set a very clear vision and some clear guiding principles, that does a lot of your work for  you because people know, "This is where we're going, and this is the lens that I should be looking at this  through." 

Mike Brcic: Then there's very specific things. There's a huge financial piece to the work that I do. Really, most people  that I work with, they're in the same boat that I was in where they're pushing growth. Maybe their  revenue is climbing, but often as they're growing, their expenses are climbing even faster, and they're  growing themselves out of business. Then they have to take on more debt, they have to raise money,  and whatever. It's a bit of a hamster wheel. 

Mike Brcic: Part of it is just looking at the business model and diving deep into the financials, and understanding ...  Often, most businesses, especially if they're growing quickly, you're not spending a lot of time looking at  the P&L statements. It's going through that with a fine-toothed comb, looking at the balance statement,  developing cashflow projections, stuff like that. Most businesses are a little bit bloated. Some of them  are very bloated, and they have way too many expenses. 

Mike Brcic: If I look back at my previous company, once I started really diving into our P&L statement, it was like all  these line items ... Like our software. I don't know, I think we were spending like 50,000 a year on  software. I'm like, "What the heck? What is that?" I start digging into it line by line, and then asking  people, "Are you using this piece of software?" It's like we signed up for a subscription three years ago,  and nobody's even using it anymore. I spent a few hours on that process, and ended up cutting over  $10,000 off our annual just on software. 

Jason Pereira:[crosstalk 00:07:53] expenses. 

Mike Brcic: That's one example. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. The bigger the company bloats, the more likely you are to find those things. I like to say, probably  every two years, we do a pulse check on all the different categories. Because everything gets lumped up  into one thing, you just don't see the breakdown. When you do, yeah, the number of times that either  it's, "You added all these cell phones to it, and no one went to back to the carrier and renegotiated the  cell phone plan now that you have 50 phones as opposed to 10." There's just so many ... Unless you  have someone basically looking for those efficiencies constantly, which, unless you have the scale to  afford someone just to do that, you're just not going to have it. 

Jason Pereira: As for your comment on efficiencies of scale, the reality is, yeah. This was a previous conversation with  Chad Davis of LiveCA. Is that, as you grow and scale, you have to reinvent the company over, and over,  and over again because systems will just break, because what worked for five people is not going to  work for 15 people. What worked for 15 people is not going to work for 50 people. What worked for 50  people is sure as heck not going to work for 100. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah, if you're just focused on the top line, just, the amount of bloat and problems you're going to  create for yourself ... You're just going to work harder and harder to get the profit number higher when  you already had the profit, you were just blowing it. 

Mike Brcic: Yeah. A number of the companies that I've worked with, their revenue is great. Either their margins are  terrible or their operating expenses are too high to support their gross margin. We have to address both  of those things. A lot of people just think, if they're not profitable or they have cashflow problems, they're like, "Okay, we just need to do another marketing push, another sales push, and bring on more  customers." But if the business model is broken, throwing more gasoline onto a dumpster fire is not  going to put out the fire, and so 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. You can't do better on a rental building by adding another floor if your foundation's already  cracked. It's just not going to work. 

Mike Brcic: Yeah. Exactly. 

Jason Pereira: Basically you go in and dive in. Tell me about ... You talk about the financial aspects, and basically going  in and taking a deep dive on those and making sure they understand what's going on. They're looking at  margins. What else do you do in terms of the process management? Tell me how you help them re engineer the company altogether. 

Mike Brcic: Yeah. I feel the big things that I see, one, the owner, or owners, or founders, they spend a lot of time  putting out fires. That's a big one. Generally, people, if there's an issue, they delegate it up to the owner  and they expect them to deal with it right away. That's a big one. I have a system for that. 

Mike Brcic: They don't have good meeting rhythms. It's just like, "Okay, we need to talk about something. Let's set a  meeting." I help them implement really good daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly meeting rhythms. 

Mike Brcic: Process. Operating procedures. If a company is growing fast and they're bringing on people, there's all  kinds of new procedures happening all the time. Very rarely does it ever get documented. I help them  implement playbooks. 

Mike Brcic: Also a big part of it is helping the owners dump what is it that they do on a regular basis, and dumping  that into playbooks, because that's the first step in being able to delegate or outsource something like  that, putting in really good systems for execution. So that when you do have a vision, "This is our three year vision," "one-year vision," whatever, you can crunch that down to the quarter. Then you crunch  that down into a weekly or biweekly sprint so that everybody knows what they're focusing on at any  given time. 

Mike Brcic: Those are a few of the big ones. Then for the owners specifically, we start by doing a time audit. Over  the course of a week, or sometimes two weeks if their weeks change a lot, it's just auditing, "What is it  that I do on a regular basis? What are some of the recurring things that I keep doing?" Then we make a  big list of all of those things.

Mike Brcic: Then for each of those things, we classify it as, "Is this something that I'm really good at and it energizes  me," and that it drives a lot of value to the company? Or, "Is it something that I'm not very good at?" Or,  "It really drains my energy." We go through that list, classify all that stuff. 

Mike Brcic: Then I tend to start with the stuff that that drains people's energy. Everybody does this in a company to  some extent. They're just doing it because it's how they've always done it. They don't know. They feels  scared to offload it for whatever reason. 

Mike Brcic: For me, in my previous company, for many, many years, I did all of the financial stuff. Once a year I'd  prepare everything for the accountant, and then he would prepare it for tax returns. Then I brought on a  bookkeeper and the bookkeeper did a bunch of stuff, but I was still dealing with suppliers, I was paying  invoices, all that kind of stuff. I hated doing it, particularly when we were in a cash crunch and I had to  delay payments to my suppliers, and they would be angry at me. Whatever. It just killed me, just sucked  all my energy. 

Mike Brcic: Once I started writing out playbooks, in the initial stages before we actually fixed our business model  and became profitable again, part of that playbook was writing out, "What is the decision tree that I use  to figure out when and how to pay suppliers when we're running low on cash?" All of that stuff got  offloaded to my bookkeeper. Being able to get that off my plate and not have to deal with that was such  a huge energy boost, because every time I had to deal with that stuff it just sucked my energy. It made  me really ineffective. That's a big thing that I do with 

Jason Pereira: What I love about what you talked about there in particular, and it's endemic, especially in my industry,  it's the old, "I need to hire an assistant to do all the stuff I hate." There is a semblance of truth to that,  and there's a semblance of a mistake. 

Jason Pereira: If you take a really crappy job with no structure and without that playbook mentality you've taken, and  pass over that really crappy job to someone else ... Don't get me wrong. There's some people who are  perfectly content doing administrative work. That's fine. But if you do this inefficient, crappy, pain-in the-butt job, and just say, "I'm not going to handle this. You handle this," and give them some cursory  direction, you haven't solved the problem, you shifted the problem to someone else, right? 

Mike Brcic: Exactly. 

Jason Pereira: What you've done is you're using, basically, design thinking and the almost engineering thinking to  basically say, "No, you know what? I've been running this in my head. For my sake and for the sake of  the company, I'm going to standardize the process of decision making for this."

Jason Pereira: Either a whiteboard, a piece of paper, or any one of the flowchart softwares out there can help you with  this. Say, "Okay. If this, then that. These are the situations. This is how this is going to work." Hand it off.  Now you've created a low stress system for the other person. Even if you can't, you can't hire someone  else, you created a low stress cognitive burden reduction for yourself. 

Jason Pereira: One of the resources I'll point people to on this, I'm sure you're familiar with it, is The Checklist  Manifesto. I can't remember who the author is, but it's a well known book that talks about the power of  highly effective checklists. It sounds a little bit ridiculous, like, "Yeah, I'm going to make all these  checklists," but the reality is is that if you take the time to actually think through a process and develop a  strong checklist, then you basically, when the time comes to do these things that are coming up and  repetitive, but you don't like doing them or they happen seldomly, you will do it efficiently without any  ... Reduces your cognitive burden. You'll do it right. You'll do it efficiently. You'll do it the first time. You'll  do it faster. 

Jason Pereira: I'm going to plug one more thing. There's a software that's called Process Street that helps you develop  these processes and these checklists. They can stay static, or if there's any way you can automate part of  it, it will help you automate it. Anyway, that's my little plug there. 

Jason Pereira: Again, love what you're saying there. Because very much how I view the universe is that, without a  properly defined process that cuts to the heart of what you're trying to do, you're just passing crap on to  other people. 

Mike Brcic: Yeah. Exactly. Tying into that, our playbook ... It's pretty simple. An individual playbook for whatever  process, we would write that out in a Google doc. It's step one, step two, step three. Then at the end  there would be a checklist, just like you said. Those checklists were so valuable. 

Mike Brcic: I'll give you one specific example. When we would launch a new trip, my previous company, it would get  entered into our booking system, all the details, the pricing, what questions the customer has to ... Blah,  blah, blah. There's a lot of different moving parts to that. But there's one part that's really crucial, which  is the tax, selecting the appropriate tax for that trip. 

Mike Brcic: For trips that we ran out of the country we didn't have to charge tax. For trips that we ran in Canada, we  had to charge ... The company was based in BC, so we had to charge 12%. If you're looking at, this  happened to us a couple times, a $4000 or $5000 trip, and somebody forgets to check off that tax  button, that customer doesn't pay taxes on that trip, but we still have to give the government tax for  that trip. We can't really go back to the customer and say, "Actually, you owe us another $500 for the  taxes." They're going to be like, [crosstalk 00:15:59]-

Jason Pereira: You got to work it backwards and be like, "They paid me X. Therefore, if I had charged tax, that would  have been Y." Yeah, I've been there, and it's painful. 

Mike Brcic: You look at that like, you have a trip with three departures a year and 10 people on it, and each of those  customers should have paid $500 in tax, that's $15,000. That happened to us, where somebody forgot  to check that checkbox. We never charged tax. Then we were on the hook for $15,000 that we should've  ... Just having a process where it's like, "Okay. Here are the steps. Before you're done, here are the  check boxes that you have to check." That's massive. 

Mike Brcic: Then we had a Google sheet that was a table of contents of marketing processes, sales, customer  service, everything, that went in there. It took us probably three months. I made it a goal to get two  playbooks written every week, the stuff that I do, and I told my staff, "Write at least one playbook a  week." By the time it was done, we documented almost every single process that happened in the  company. Then when someone goes on vacation, they need somebody to cover for them, they just say,  "It's all in the playbooks. They're right there." 

Mike Brcic: That's huge. It, as you said, cuts down on a lot of stress and ensures that things get done right. When  you delegate, you're not just delegating a mess. 

Jason Pereira: What I liked about what you did there was you had the staff also help carry the burden. I take it you  probably all reviewed these all as a group, so you had this joint expectation of delivery. 

Jason Pereira: Too often I see, the business owner is like, "Okay, I'm going to develop this stuff," and then they get  distracted by everything else. There's no accountability mechanism on there. They don't know that they  have to also ... Their staff is working on something, and they have to deliver because they don't want it  to look like they're the lazy one. Creating that accountability mechanism like you did was one of the  reasons why it was highly successful, I would say. I take it you're the accountability coach in these  coaching sessions, basically. 

Mike Brcic: That's a big part of why people hire me, is the accountability. I was working with a group out of Texas  yesterday, or maybe it was a couple days ago, and for the vision part of it ... My reference is, my friend  Cameron Herold wrote a book called Vivid Vision. It's just fairly simple concept, like, "Be very descriptive  of what your vision for the company is." Talk about, "What do your customers look like? Where do you  operate?" And all that kind of stuff. 

Mike Brcic: One of the guys who's in this group that I was working with, he said, "I read Cameron's book, and it's  been on my mind to write down my vivid vision for the last two years, but I've just never gotten around  to it. Now that I'm working with you, I finally got it done." Part of it is just accountability. 

Mike Brcic: I'm not bringing anything particularly magical, I just bring all this stuff together, present it to them as a  system, and then say, "This is what we're going to do now. This is what we're going to do two weeks  from now. Get it done." Then most of the time they get it done, otherwise they feel bad showing up,  saying, "I didn't do my homework." 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. There's entire industries built around the concept of accountability. Everything from personal  training to even financial planning, I would say, basically, the accountability they must answer to, and  either deliver or continuously make an excuse. No one feels good about, "This is the sixth meeting we've  had, and every time I failed to deliver, and I always have this list of excuses." No one wants to be that  person. 

Mike Brcic: Exactly. 

Jason Pereira: Tell me about how long your engagements with these companies typically last. You go in there, you help  them fix what's wrong with them, and you eventually say, "Okay. You're taken care of." At what point do  they say, "We've got this," or, "Thank you so much, but we're good to go," or you say, "You've done it.  You're through. Moving on." How long does that experience typically last? 

Mike Brcic: I work with companies, either a six-month engagement or a full year engagement. We meet every two  weeks for 90 minutes. Ultimately, obviously it partially comes down to their budget and how motivated  they are to get this stuff done. It also depends on where they're at and whether they have any of this  stuff implemented. 

Mike Brcic: I've worked with companies that, they're just flying by the seat of their pants every single day. There's  barely any structure in the company at all. They don't even have regular meetings. It's just meeting  whenever they can. Then I've worked with companies that have some semblance of structure  implemented, but they're missing a few key pieces. 

Mike Brcic: Part of it, too, is if they're overwhelmed, which is why they're coming to me, they only have so much  capacity to do some of this stuff on top of their regular workload. I operate on the assumption that they  may only have an hour a week or maybe two hours a week to work on this stuff. It's a patient process. I  meet people where they're at. 

Mike Brcic: Everybody I've worked with, if we're working together for six months, by the end of that process they've  massively cut down the workload. Like I said, my goal is to get them down to few hours of meetings  every week with the key team. Typical person that I work with is five to 20 staff. It's where they've kind  of grown 

Jason Pereira: You're still doing the small side. 

Mike Brcic: I've worked with larger companies. But they've kind of grown out of that solopreneur, "me and one  other person" type thing where they have a team, but maybe they've grown quickly and they haven't  really implemented anything along the way. Now this company with 15, 20 people, it's growing quickly,  but it might be a little bit of a mess, so to speak. 

Mike Brcic: My goal, like I said, is to get them down to the few hours of meetings and have the right people in place  to run the company, and have a good system for running the company. Then the owner or owners, they  can choose to have a lot of free time, or they can choose to spend their time in the company where they  really love the work that they're doing or they're driving a lot of value for the company, or ideally both. 

Jason Pereira: Okay. Excellent. I take it the end result is nothing but raving reviews? Frankly I can't imagine going  through a six-month process with you and actually living up to it without seeing substantial  improvement. I'm curious as to what the feedback is beyond, "This is great." What are they telling you  you've helped accomplish in the time? 

Mike Brcic: Yeah. The start of the process is, they fill out a detailed intake form. One of the questions is, "I want you  to dream a little. What does success from us working together look like beyond your wildest dreams?"  Then I ask them on a deeper level, "Why is that important?" 

Mike Brcic: To give you an example, one of the guys that I'm working with, success beyond his wildest dreams is that  he can take off a full year and go RVing with his wife and kids for a full year. He's had this dream that he  wants to buy an RV and just go explore America for a year with his family. Right now his company is  really anchoring him down, and so he can't. 

Mike Brcic: He's not going to be able to just fully step away from his company for an entire year without a single  phone call or anything. I told him, "That's not realistic, but we can definitely get you to the point where  you've got a team running the show, and you check in once a week and do a few hours of meetings and  calls, and stuff like that." He's super motivated and inspired by that. That's the outcome that he's  looking for. It's not just about stepping out of his company, it's about, "Why do you want to do that?" 

Mike Brcic: Most of the people that I work with, they don't want to just sit in the hammock for 60 hours a week and  do do nothing. They still want to be meaningfully engaged with the world, and they want to be engaged  with their company. 

Mike Brcic: For some people success is that most of the time that they're spending at work is doing work that they  love and that they feel really energized by. Most of the people I work with, they started a company  because they love whatever it is they were doing. But as the company has grown, they've gotten away  from doing the thing that they love doing. Or, for some people, it's like this guy. His dream is to be in an  RV, so he wants to work as little as possible. Varying things, but it ultimately comes down to some  emotional reason behind it, not just some logistical or practical reason. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I've done various process management exercises. I'd  say that I'm in need of a bit of an overhaul, given the scale we reached. I reached that inflection point  yet again. The reason I'm going into this is because I oftentimes get questions like, "How are you  involved in so many things? How do you basically podcast, run your business, do this technology stuff at  the same time, and eventually teach on occasion, and all this other stuff?" 

Jason Pereira: What you got to realize is that, if you can properly rightsize the work you're doing in your business, and  delegate the work that is basically not the kind of stuff you love or the core value of the business stuff  that's mission critical that you want to hold on to, it frees up time. So many people think that that  concept of time is like, "Okay. Great. I don't have to work," but the reality is that, no, it's just more time  to do the things you're passionate about. Right? 

Mike Brcic: Yeah. 

Jason Pereira: Even when we talk to people about retirement, when people start getting within five years of  retirement, especially the really high stress executives and business owners, they're working towards  this thing that they know they want to get to. Then when they get close, they suddenly start to almost  panic, right? 

Mike Brcic: Mm-hmm (affirmative). 

Jason Pereira: They're not psychologically ready for retirement, because they haven't really worked on purpose or  meaning outside of that. For those who want to hear more about how that can be solved for or how  that can go wrong if you're not doing it right, listen to the Dave Sinclair episode where he shares his  story. 

Jason Pereira: The reality is that I think it's because we frame it wrong. I always tell clients, "It's not about the  obligation to retire. I want to give you the option of retirement, because then what I'm really telling you  is that you have the freedom to do whatever you want after that point." As long as, of course, it's within  your normal expenditure, right? 

Mike Brcic: Exactly. 

Jason Pereira: What you're talking about with this is the same level of thinking. It's not that we're trying to liberate you  from your job. You have a job. We're trying to redefine it and focus it so that they have freedom to do  whatever it else is that matters in their lives. 

Mike Brcic: Yeah. Exactly. I think there's very few humans that can handle that full life of leisure. You can do that for  a little while, but years on end of just golfing and hanging out on a beach, most people just lose their  minds. They need some deeper engagement. They need intellectual stimulation. They need some sense  of purpose, and meaning, and all that. 

Jason Pereira: Community. 

Mike Brcic: Yeah, and community, and all that kind of stuff. 

Jason Pereira: There's the old joke that the number one leading cause of death is retirement. The reality is, it's true. It's  a half a joke because, yeah, it's because you're older and therefore you're doing something, but  regardless of that, yeah, it's that loss of a sense of ... Not just sense of self in terms of your purpose  being defined around your job, it's, we are going to go stir crazy. There's a reason why solitary  confinement is considered cruel. It's a lack of stimulation that basically makes you go cagey. 

Jason Pereira: The same thing applies in life. If you're not doing enough to occupy your mind and your interest, you're  going to suffer for it. There's even studies that show that cognitive decline is increased due to lack of  cognitive stimulation. The old saying, my belief is, the brain is like a muscle. If you don't work it out, it's  going to get weak. Lots of nuggets there. 

Jason Pereira: Let's just say people want to get started out. We're going to give you an opportunity to tell from where  they can reach you afterwards. But if they're looking for some light, "Let me investigate this world," you  already mentioned a couple of resources here. I mentioned Process Street. I mentioned ... What was it?  The Checklist Manifesto. 

Jason Pereira:Of course your story immediately resonated with me in terms of The 4-Hour Workweek and Tim Ferriss's  writing, there, although you beat him because you got down to less than four hours. Good on you. You  almost halved him. Those are some ones that come to mind. What other resources would you say  people should check out? 

Mike Brcic: Yeah. If they go to my website, it's way-finders.com/autopilot. There's a bunch of free tools that they  can download. One of them that I would recommend, it's pretty easy to implement, but the ROI is pretty  big. It's called the issues list. I'm rebranding it the solutions list, because it's more about solution than  issues. 

Mike Brcic: As we talked about at the beginning, one of the big things I see and that's common in businesses is the  founders are always putting out fires. There's some sort of crisis, some sort of problem that's come up.  Often they're recurring issues that just keep coming up, time and time again. What happens is  somebody brings that to us, we're in the middle of something, and then we're expected to deal with  that right then and there. 

Mike Brcic: Number one, it interrupts our workflow when people bring these things to us. That could be they pop  their head in our actual office, or they send us a message on Slack, or whatever. We're expected to deal  with it right then. The other is that when we're in the middle of our workday and we've got a million  things to do, and now we're expected to deal with a problem, our instinct is to just slap a bandage on it,  and just quickly deal with it and get it out the door. When you slap a bandaid on it, you're not actually  dealing with the root cause of it. 

Mike Brcic: This thing, it's just a simple Google sheet. It can actually just be a box in your office with a slot in it  where you can drop stuff. These are issues that are not mission critical. They're not going to break the  business, and they don't need to be dealt with right now, but they should get dealt with at some point.  Goes into a list for my company, because we were fully remote. It was a Google sheet, and people would  put, "This thing is happening." They'd put a little bit more detail about what it is. 

Mike Brcic: Then we had a time, we had an hour set aside each week, for the core team to meet up. We would look  at these issues, and we would dive into them, and we would get at the root cause. We would ask why.  Then we would ask why again. We would ask why again, "Why is this happening?" Until we're getting at  the real meat of, "What is actually happening that's creating this problem?" If you don't actually set  aside the time to do that, you're probably not going to get to that level of depth. 

Mike Brcic: Then when we actually discover the root cause, we come up with a plan. "This is how we're going to  solve it." Then we hold somebody accountable and say, "Okay. You're in charge of making sure this gets  done. You don't have to do the work, you can delegate it, but you're accountable." Then at our next  meeting, they're going to report on that.

Mike Brcic: That is hugely impactful, because if you can set aside half an hour to deal with a particular issue, get at  the root cause, and then come up with a plan ... That might've come up 10 times over the last two  weeks, and each time it costs you time, and stress, and energy, whatever. 

Mike Brcic: Over time, by the time I sold that company, we had over 100 issues in the "solved" section of our issues  list. These were things that just kept coming up time and time again, and stressing us out and stressing  my staff out, whatever. Then there was quite a number of weeks where there was just nothing, nothing  coming up, because the company was just running so smoothly. 

Mike Brcic: If people take away nothing from that, that's just one small thing you can implement today that's going  to be ... You can download that. You can create your own version. You can put a box if you're still  meeting physically somewhere. 

Jason Pereira: I've been doing that while you've been talking. 

Mike Brcic: Nice. 

Jason Pereira: You get one more download. 

Jason Pereira: It's interesting. While you were talking about that, it brought up my thinking around some of the  conversations I've had with either coworkers or people in general about this sort of stuff. I find that  people almost fall into two camps when it comes to the putting out fires. There is the perfectionist  camp, and then there's the denial camp. I shouldn't say denial. More so the, just, "It only takes me five  minutes so I'm going to keep doing it," camp, or whatever it is. 

Jason Pereira: I think what you're defining more so is the ... These things keep on coming up and no one puts a process  in place, that's a failure. If it keeps on coming up, then either something's broken in the process, or if it's  not broken in the process and it's just exceptions are going to happen, then you have to basically build  that playbook for how to deal with it. 

Jason Pereira: I find the other side of the coin, and I've seen this with people I know, is the perfectionist issue. It's, "We  did this thing for a thousand clients. A thousand emails went out, and we had one complaint to us." It's  like, "Oh, my God, we need to do something. This person complained." I remember specifically having  conversations with people about this. It's like, "Okay. We have complaints about this process. That's  fine. How many complaints have you garnered?" "This person and this person." "Okay. How many people did we actually deal with in this instance?" That number usually has at least three digits in it. It's  like, "Okay. It's called acceptable failure rate." 

Jason Pereira: You're never going to make everybody a hundred percent happy. Even in total quality management,  which is the process for manufacturing, you talk about Six Sigma manufacturing. Six Sigma  manufacturing is all about trying to get the defect rate down to something like 30 per thousand, or  something like that, or a smaller number than that. The point is that, even in the most highly  automated, large-scale companies, when it comes to manufacturing, they accept that there's a failure  rate. 

Jason Pereira: I think we as entrepreneurs, especially perfectionist-mentality entrepreneurs, don't give ourselves  enough, basically, freedom or leeway as to say, "Okay. That's fine." I think, if anything, in a perfect  world, what we're talking about in terms of putting out fires is, those should be the only ones you ever  have to put out. It's the, "We've taken care of all the routine stuff, and now we had this one thing we  haven't done before, and we had a failure rate of one. It's not going to happen again, so let's just put out  that fire, not build a system for it or reinvent the entire wheel." That's my long, diatribe way of saying to  people, "Don't be perfectionists. Accept that failure will happen and just adapt." 

Mike Brcic: Exactly. That came through in our process because people would post something in the issues list, and  then when that came up during our meeting, I would ask them, "How many people has this affected?"  We would try to do a little bit of triage and be like, "What do we need to actually deal with, and what is  a one-off thing?" 

Mike Brcic: I always wanted to prioritize, "What are the things that are recurring frequently that are affecting a lot  of people?" That's where we put our time and energy. One person in my company might feel really  passionately because this affected one or two people, but if it's affecting nobody else, sorry, we're not  going to deal with your issue right now. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah. It's basically like Zeno's paradox. If you get half the distance to the wall every time, you're never  going to get to the wall. You're going to get the perfect company without issue, but frankly, you want to  take the bigger step that gets you closer as opposed to the tiny step that gets you not half the distance. 

Jason Pereira: Anyway, Mike, where can people find you, again? 

Mike Brcic: Yeah. I have a personal website, but I'm not very active on it. Mostly it's through my company, and it's  Wayfinders. Again, it's way-finders.com. I do a lot of writing on the blog there. There's a bunch of ... I  write about all this stuff on the blog, so you can get a lot of ... You want to go down this rabbit hole of  optimizing your company, and aligning it, and all that kind of stuff, you can find that on the blog.

Jason Pereira: Excellent. Thank you so much for your time. 

Mike Brcic: Thank you. Have a great day. 

Jason Pereira: That was my conversation with Mike Brcic about automating your practice. I hope you enjoyed that. I  sincerely hope that you were taking that to heart, because I'm sure every entrepreneur listening to this  podcast can relate to a lot of the issues we talked about. 

Jason Pereira: Yes, there is a better way. Just, whereas I default to technology often, it doesn't have to be. It always  starts with just figuring out what's wrong and writing it down. Whether you automate that or not, that's  a different process, but just having it written down, and reducing cognitive burden, and creating  processes are just force multipliers within your business. 

Jason Pereira: As always, if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get  podcasts. Until next time, take care. 

Producer: This podcast was brought to you by Woodgate Financial, an award-winning financial planning firm  catering to high-net-worth individuals, business owners, and their families. To learn more, go to  woodgate.com. 

Producer: You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify, or find more  episodes at jasonpereira.ca. You can even ask Siri, Alexa, or Google Home to subscribe for you.

FPCBOJason PereiraBusiness Owner, Process Management