1:15: [On the mentorship of Tom Schumacher] – “[Schumacher] inspired me to be a problem-solver and a speaker, and he showed great faith in my abilities and always pushed me to be my own person.”
1:59: “I’ve never really been an employee. I’m what I call a serial entrepreneur.”
2:20: [On what it means to be your own person] – “Not being easily influenced by either peer pressure, social pressure, or any other types of pressure that may exist either in the workplace or in society.”
2:44: The 3 primary aspects of any business.
3.27: [On finding and keeping clients] – “I’ve started with a handful of people that I’ve come in contact with, and they saw what I was doing, they saw my work ethic and my reputation, and some of them gave me a chance. That’s really all it took, was getting my foot in the door.”
4:07 [Characteristics of an ideal client] – “I think one of the primary characteristics, more than anything, is openness. What I mean by openness is openness to change.”
4:36 [On client transparency] – “I’ve gone into situations where I talked to some of the key managers, and although they recognize they have a problem, they don’t recognize that they need to change. And they’re not willing to look in the mirror.”
6:30 [On asking the difficult questions] – “I may attend a meeting, and I may interrupt the meeting and say something to the leader, or maybe even the CEO or exec, and challenge them in front of the team. Saying ‘hey, why are you asking that question?’ or ‘hey, it may be a good idea for you to listen to some of the other input.’ Or perhaps, ‘We haven’t heard from Jim, let’s hear what Jim thinks.”
7:14 “I really challenge people to get outside of their own heads, to push them to think and behave differently.”
7:54 [On building trust with clients] – “Before I begin any of the real work, I will spend a lot of one on one time with the decision maker. I will get to know them as people. I will ask them a lot of questions. I will get them to what I call the comfort point. And also, I will ask their permission. I will let them know that I will ask hard questions, and get their permission to do so.”
8:55 Rogers’ Inspiration for writing Decide to Profit: The 9 Steps in a Better Bottom Line
10:40 The nine steps in a better bottom line.
12:00 [On the importance of understanding the goal] – “A lot of people get mired in the day to day tasks and activities. And they kind of grind through their day. They have a tendency not to stay focused on the bigger picture.”
12:30 [The fundamental driving force behind the company] – “My whole purpose in writing both the book, and identifying the goal – as one of the steps, is to keep people focused on the bigger picture. And in any company, and any organization…the fundamental driving force behind the company is making money. So there’s an overarching financial goal.”
12:55 “And my idea was, have everybody within the organization tie every decision that they are making to the larger goals of the organization. Number 1 has to always be: making money.”
13:30 [On the importance of quality] – “The quality of your product, that also has to be a goal. You can’t make money and sacrifice quality, because that’s not sustainable.”
13:40 [Deciding the profit] – “Every organization can have 1, 2, or 3 goals that they are primarily focused on. And if you make sure that everyone knows what those goals are, and tie their day to day decisions to them, that’s how you can decide the profit.”
14:04 The importance of keeping day to day decision in line with organizational goals
15:10 The Lego study
16:09 [Sacred cows] – “In some of the companies that I’ve worked with, I see them hold on to business decisions, or I see them hold on to product. I even see them hold on to no-productive people. And all of this is counterintuitive, and it’s not in alignment with the overall goals of the organization.”
16:32 [On unified goals] – “[The lego study] shows how one single unified goal enabled a company to completely turn around.”
17:31 [On teams holding themselves accountable] – “Have you ever been in a meeting where there’s a lot of discussion and a lot of ideas, and everyone leaves the meeting and 90% of the ideas and discussion has been forgotten? That’s what I experience in a lot of the companies I work with. There’s a lot of ideas, a lot of good discussion, a lot of innovative discussion, yet nobody ever captured the discussion, nobody ever circled back – there was no feedback loop, and there was no accountability.”
18:23 [On accountability] – “What makes people accountable can be something as simple as an action list. And I don’t mean minutes, I don’t mean a detailed list of who said what verbatim. I mean, a ‘we talked about this, we decided to do this, this person owns it, and this is when they’re going to get it done.’”
19:45 [On employee contribution] – “In the book I have a tool for employees to do a very straightforward return on investment analysis. One of the disconnects that I was increasingly becoming aware of is that managers would often miss ideas because they couldn’t see how that idea would benefit the organization.”
20:16 [On helping employees choose ideas that are tied to financial goals] “The benefit of the 9th step is that it provides employees a tool and a methodology to demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively how to give an investment to the organization and show how their idea will either improve the financial goals or other goals.”
21:38 The importance of checklists and forms for employees.
23:00 [On brainstorming] – “The people that make the decisions tend to shoot down the ideas of those that don’t make the decisions. Allowing people to free think, allowing for ideas to be equally valuable no matter who they’re coming from, is very, very important. All of the rules that I put down for brainstorming are a result of all of those rules being broken during brainstorming meeting I’ve been to.”
24:21 Rogers describes the timeline and process of writing Decide to Profit: 9 Steps to a Better Bottom Line
25:03 “The book isn’t written for specialists. The book is not meant to be a dissertation on continuous improvement or operational streamlining or productivity. It’s meant to be a comprehensive overview of all of it, and it’s meant to be understandable, and it’s meant to be utilized by both managers and employees.”
26:06 Discoveries Rogers made during the writing process.
26:50 [On staying humble] – “I found that I fall prey to a lot of the same things that executives fall prey to, which is, believing my own press, believing my ideas are the best, believing that only my opinions count. I’ve found that really listening to the people around me makes a big difference.”
27:00 Rogers discusses some of the milestones in her career, and the significant clients she’s worked with
28:42 The two primary factors of inefficiency, and the importance of time management.
30:12 Roger’s preferred tools for productivity during travel.
Books by Mitch Joel
