Becky:
Hey, everybody. It's Becky from R.J. Hedges & Associates. And today, I've got another one of our partnership series. And this time we're going to be focusing in on improving your own person, improving your business, and helping to get some extra information that might help you increasing your profits, increasing your purpose, and giving yourself a plan for doing all these things. Now, my guest today is a gentleman from down in Florida. His name is Jeff Earlywine, and he actually has a company that its name is Purpose Plan Profit. So, Jeff, thanks for joining us today and sharing with us a bunch of great information for our listeners.
Jeff Earlywine:
Well, Becky, thank you for having me. I look forward to it.
Becky:
Good deal. So, Jeff, when I was looking at your website, I saw a lot of really, really great information that I think our clients and our listeners are going to be able to get great benefit from. And one of the things when we were talking that really struck me as such a profound and simple statement is, let's stop guessing and start executing. So, can you give us a little background on who you are and a little bit about your business and hone in on this stop guessing and start executing?
Jeff Earlywine:
I'm Jeff Earlywine. I've been a business coach for a long time, 30 years, I guess, maybe a little longer worked with. I ended up the other day, makes me feel really old, probably over 400 different organizations in the 30 years. A lot of them in the nonprofit world, but a lot in the pharmacy world. Probably about 150 pharmacy owners I've worked with now. And when I was sitting around, probably watching some sporting event several months ago on TV and I started thinking about business. I know that's probably rare to a lot of people, how they would associate a sporting event to business. And I started thinking about the game Battleship.
Jeff Earlywine:
And Becky, what I've discovered is many business owners, they play the game of business, just like they play the game of Battleship. So, in the game of Battleship, you might say before, and you just know you're going to hit your opponent's carrier or battleship or whatever, and all of a sudden, that person says miss. And you're like, what? I mean, I took an educated guess, I really thought it out, but it was still a guess. And that's what I find many times with business owners, is they will sit around, they'll think, "Okay, well, I'm going to do some marketing. I think this will work, I'll guess at it," and then it doesn't work. And they're like, "Well, marketing never works." Or, "I'm going to hire this employee and I don't know for sure if he or she's going to be good, but I'm going to guess at it," and then they don't work out.
Jeff Earlywine:
So, we need to stop guessing and start executing on the right decisions. And to do that, we have a process here at Purpose Plan Profits, it's purposeplanprofit.com, is you can go right on the homepage. And there's actually a two step process. The first one is, let's identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business. Instead of guessing at what they are, let's really identify them. So, you can go to step one and execute, click on it, execute. You'll see Business Battleship right there, you click on the tell me more little tab there, and then it'll take you to some information that'll help you understand about not guessing, start executing, really strengthening your strengths and eliminating your weaknesses in your business.
Jeff Earlywine:
Whether it's a pharmacy, whether it's a medical practice, whether it's the corner restaurant, it doesn't matter, all businesses have strengths and they have weaknesses. Now, you may go, "Well, I don't know if I'm really ready to dive in that much. And I don't know if I have strengths and weaknesses for sure." Well, we have a very short seven question quiz that you can take that'll tell you, "Hey, you've got some areas to work on, and if you were to work on it, we'll be glad to work on them with you, but you can schedule a free session with me. I'll walk you through the process. If it's something you feel like that will help you, great. If it's not, then we'll just be friends and you can go about running your business as you have been before."
Becky:
Awesome. That sounds like a really great tool that people can easily do in a very short amount of time and then get a really good gauge of where they need to be. And then I love that you're able to do that free session with them to go over those results. We have a lot of people from very diverse backgrounds that listen to our podcasts and that our business owners. A lot of them have multiple businesses. Maybe they have a pharmacy, maybe they've got a couple other things, they've got a car wash or restaurant. They have maybe some type of other service related industry.
Becky:
What are some of the problems that you're seeing in the business world as a whole, that it really doesn't matter what type of business you're coming from, that you can really get a lot of great benefit from partnering with a business coach to help you improve your overall business?
Jeff Earlywine:
Purposeplanprofit.com really is two words short, you need to add people and processes in there. And really, that's P5 BOS, business operating system. So, if you have a business, whether it's like general motors, whether it's like the corner restaurant, whether it's like a car wash, it doesn't really matter, you've got a purpose, which is your vision, your goals. You've got a plan, that's usually marketing. You've got profit issues or things you got to deal with, financial things, financial statements, banking issues, KPIs. Then you've got people, you've got to train them, well, we first got to hire them, hire the right ones, train them, motivate them, all that. And then the processes really is the glue that holds it all together. Whether it's something that is as simple as just an opening checklist or a closing checklist or a process to hire people, a process to buy product, whatever it is, you have those processes so that you really do have a business that is held together, something solid, it's duplicatable, do all that.
Jeff Earlywine:
Every business has it. Doesn't matter what they are. And so, what I find is when I'm working with business owners, as many as I've worked with over the years, most of them, they don't really have all five really locked and loaded. They don't have all five syncing very well. Or if you want to look at it as a puzzle, they all don't fit together very well. In our world today, Becky, what I see is a business owner, let's just say that he's an electrician and he works for somebody that is an electrician type company. And he's like, "You know what? I can go out and do this on my own. I've got a vision, I've got goals," and he goes out and does it. And he can ride that vision, those goals for a little while and all of a sudden he realizes, "Man, I'm running out of work.
Jeff Earlywine:
I mean, I hired some people. I really don't know why I hired them, other than just to get the job done, but we need to market, but I don't really know how. And quite frankly, I'm not sure I really like to market. I like to be an electrician. And then my accountant gives me these white pieces of paper, all this black print on it every month, but I don't know what those numbers mean. And yeah, I need to hire people, but I need to train the one that I've got. And I really don't want to be a slave to my J-O-B, my job, because I had a job before, before I started my company. I really wanted to be a boss and an entrepreneur. And so, I want to put processes in place."
Jeff Earlywine:
And so, what I find is, just to make it very practical is there's business owners all across the country these days that I work with, it seems to be a one side of the coin or the other. One is they're doing great. I mean, their business is doing great, income's coming in. They hardly even have time to work on their business. Flip the coin over, a lot of business owners really are struggling these days. Where in the pharmacy world, could be callbacks and reimbursements. It could be just getting new patients to come in. It could be the COVID pandemic, whatever it is, but they're really, really struggling with either just running the business.
Jeff Earlywine:
So, you've got that dichotomy of things are great, things are not too great. But the thing is, this P5 BOS, all 5 Ps, purpose, plan, profit, people, and processes, you get all those working in your business, it's going to tie it together. It's going to make it stronger. Bank account's going to increase. Profit on the bottom line of that white piece paper with all that black print on it, called a P&L or profit and loss statement, it's going to grow. Your staff is going to hang around a lot longer and you're going to enjoy running a business. A whole lot less stress because you've got processes in place.
Jeff Earlywine:
So, I would encourage everybody that's listened to us today, think about your business and think about, "Okay, things are going good, but I want to keep them going really well." Well, let's probably need to have a conversation. If things aren't going really well, let's find out what the strengths are and what the weaknesses are and what the reasons are, and let's eliminate and execute those weaknesses, get those out of there and multiply and strengthen those strengths.
Becky:
And that sounds like some really great advice for a lot of our listeners today. I'm going to pivot just a little bit, because I think it would be nice to give them a slice of what they might be able to experience when working with you as a business coach and your team. So, I've got two areas that I think you might be able to give us like a real quick snapshot. So, one pain point that a lot of people have is terminating an employee. Got somebody, maybe I like them, maybe I don't, maybe they do a great job and just the economy is turned and I have to let them go. Maybe they've done something that's driving my decision to let them go. How can you help these business owners when we're dealing with that terminating employee scenario?
Jeff Earlywine:
First of all, documentation is king. It's really, really critical. Now, different states have different, those laws that when it comes to hiring and firing, and some states are right to work states, and some are not. Some states, if you fire them, they can get unemployment. Some, they have to work at it. So, it just depends. But I can tell you from a general coaching perspective, no matter where you're at, you want to have a job description for that employee. You want to do annual reviews. And well, if they're hired recently, you want to do probably a 30 day review and maybe a 60 day review after that and then an annual review. So, you have a job description, you have an employee handbook that sounds so boring. But by having that handbook, it really gives you the roadway to run on that says, "Okay, we don't allow cell phones in our business," and the person read the handbook and signed off on it. "We require you to wear certain clothing," and they signed off on it.
Jeff Earlywine:
So, if you document every time that the person, the employee does something that breaks that law or that rule in the handbook or in their job description, then you write it down. Now, what I usually say is three strikes you're out. Now, I know some businesses, they do it a lot longer, but you want to hire slow and you want to fire fast, which we usually get this all mixed up, Becky. We hire somebody because their heart's beating and we need a cashier, and then we take forever to fire them because we just don't want to hurt somebody.
Jeff Earlywine:
Well, I'm not trying to be insensitive and cold hearted here, but you want to hire slow and fire fast. And I usually have that three strike you're out. So, the first time you do something that's just clearly wrong, it goes against our policy or values or whatever it is, then you get a verbal written. It's written, but it's a verbal warning. And then you explain to them what's going to happen next. The next one is a written warning. If I was coaching the person, I've got a worksheet you could fill out on this. So, you have a written warning that tells them, "Okay, you did this," they signed it, you discussed it, whatever. And then the third time, you could very well let them go.
Jeff Earlywine:
So, you've documented your steps. You've documented the process. You've documented everything along the way, but just keep in mind that different states have different laws. So, you might want to talk to an attorney or some type an employment, a type attorney that will be able to give you a little bit better direction in your area. But they're all going to come back to, do you have an employee handbook? Does the person have a job description? Did you document everything that they did? Now, if it's blatant, they smack a customer, they punch a customer in the face, well, you're probably going to not do the three strikes you're out. They burned all of them right there. Yeah, they're done.
Jeff Earlywine:
And if the person is caught stealing, yeah, you're probably going to fire them. I mean, it's clear. They're on video, it's clear they were stealing, you're probably going to go ahead and let them go. But you want to have all the background and all the support you can have because you don't want to find yourself in a lawsuit. And you might win, but you end up losing because you got time, you got money, aggravation, stress, all this stuff that you don't want to deal with. Have all your tees crossed, your eyes dotted, believe me, it pays big dividends.
Jeff Earlywine:
And I'll be honest with you, Becky, a lot of small business owners, this is where they do drop the ball. They don't really document things very well. And I would encourage you just take a few extra minutes, take the time and document things.
Becky:
Great advice. I definitely agree with everything you just said. In fact, from a compliance side, we have a great piece that I'll tag into this as well, so then that way they can go step by step from a compliance standpoint, what they need to do when terminating an employee, especially for our pharmacy folks that are listening, in regards to HIPAA and PHI. But yeah, that's definitely really great information to be sharing. And anyone who's listening to this that has one of our compliance programs/ a lot of our clients have access to our HR program, which is where you're going to find just what Jeff mentioned, your employee handbook, your job descriptions, hiring protocols, release protocols, signature pages, and getting all that documentation in place. So, that's awesome information, Jeff.
Becky:
My second scenario for you is we have a lot of business owner that, like you mentioned with your example with the electrician, which cracked me up because I have a friend who happens to be an electrician and that was almost the exact story for him. And he's in the same boat where he's like, "I love doing my job, I just hate dealing with these numbers. I hate dealing with some of these other things that I didn't realize I was going to have to deal with when I was a business owner." And one of his pain points is numbers. He's like, "If I wanted to deal with numbers, I would've become an accountant."
Becky:
I know you have some services for people who need help monitoring numbers. Can you give us a little bit of idea what that might be and how you could help some of our business owners checking things and what they should be looking for if they are monitoring their own numbers?
Jeff Earlywine:
Well, what you're looking for if you're monitoring, could vary from an electrician to a pharmacy, to a restaurant, but let's just talk pharmacy right now. Money is made, at least these days, maybe not so much 10, 20 years ago in the pharmacy world, back in my day, when I managed several pharmacies. But the thing is, if you're going to make money in pharmacy, it's nickels and noses. Now, if you're selling cars, it may be big checks and noses, but in the pharmacy world, it's nickels and noses. So, typically, you're not going to make a whole big bunch on a prescription, you make it on volume, just like the grocery store with the can of green beans.
Jeff Earlywine:
So, they want to sell as many cans of green beans as they can. So, in the pharmacy world, you want to get as many patients in, you want to fill as many prescriptions that you make money on, but you've got to be able to monitor the numbers. And what I do in my work, it depends on the level of our engagement that I have with a client, but many of my clients, what I'll do is I'll create what I call a dashboard. And it shows the client in almost real time, where are your numbers and what do they look like? So, if you knew that you only want to fill a certain percentage of prescriptions below cost, you'd like to do none, but you know that's not realistic.
Jeff Earlywine:
So, if you're doing six, 7%, that's where your baseline is, that's what you want. Your gross profit, if you want it to not be below 25%, every day, you need to be looking at these numbers. Now, if you're an electrician, it's maybe how many jobs did you do today. How many hours did the employee work on that job? How much equipment did the employee have on the band and how much do they have when they come back? So, you look at these, what we call KPIs in my world, key performance indicators. Now, let me give you an example of why I believe in this so strong, not only have I seen it work in hundreds of businesses. But when I was in collage, I had a professor that said to the class, "If you read your electric meter every day, you'll save money on your electric bill."
Jeff Earlywine:
Well, I was young and cocky, and I thought, "Well, I'm going to prove him wrong." And so, I didn't know what I was looking at, but I was writing down those numbers on my electric meter every day. And what I found was it changed the behavior of me and my roommate. We didn't run the dishwasher. We didn't dry our clothes in the dryer. We didn't leave lights on. We didn't run the air conditioner very much. If I remember right, our electric bill that month, and I haven't had an electric bill anywhere near this since, was around $20, 20 bucks, because I was looking at the numbers.
Jeff Earlywine:
It works the same in business. So, if you're watching the numbers every day, your script count, if we're talking about pharmacies, your script counts, naturally going to go up because you're focused on it and you've got your whole team focused on it. The number of scripts, I call them IOUs, shorts nos, Os, whatever you want to call, why do we have that? And so, you start working on those numbers and get those into shape. Your gross profit, I don't want it to be below 25% or 35% or whatever that number is. I don't want it to be below $20 a script. We start working up, why are we doing that? Because we're looking at those numbers every day, or at least every other day. And it's just like me, back in my college days, looking at that electric meter on the side of my apartment or my townhouse, actually, that would make me change my behavior.
Becky:
That is really, really good advice. I can't believe you had a $20 electric bill. That's unheard of.
Jeff Earlywine:
Well, it was not that fun of a month, quite frankly. I'll be honest with you, we were so bold and so excited about this, that we would even turn the breaker off. So, everything in the whole apartment that we had would go dead while we're in class all day. And then we come home, we flip that breaker on. Well, what I didn't know is, and this is probably too much information, but you can actually break a breaker. So, if you flip it on and off enough, you can break one of those things and we didn't know that. So, we kind of had to fix that. But we did learn a lot about saving money on our electric bill.
Jeff Earlywine:
And I don't know, I haven't talked to my roommate in, well, probably since we've not been roommates, but it really changed our behavior. And that's the key to it that I find in business is you're looking at the numbers. You start looking at those KPIs every day, or at least every a couple of days, it's going to change the behavior, not just you, the owner, but the staff that you've got as you start revealing that information to them.
Becky:
And I think it's really important that they're the right numbers, because I would be willing to bet that a lot of our business owners listening to this, they have certain numbers that they look at every day, whether it's the balance in the primary account that they're paying their bills out of, or their funds that are coming in. But those might not actually be the right numbers. So, working with a business coach that can help identify those KPIs, like you mentioned, now, instead of spending five minutes a day, looking at numbers that don't only matter, but drive us crazy. We can be focused on spending five minutes on the numbers that do matter and the ways that we can impact those specific numbers. So, it's a much better use of our time. So, I think that's great information for our folks that are listening today.
Becky:
Jeff, you shared some really great information about who you are and a little bit about your business Battleship and I really do like that, stop guessing, start executing. And I think a lot of people out there, they know they need a little bit of help, but they're not quite sure what they need. And I think working with a business coach is a really great way to do that. Where you can really take a snapshot, figure it out, focus on one area and improve that part of your business a little bit at a time.
Becky:
Can you tell us a little bit about what it might actually look like if we've got someone who's listening going, "This guy sounds like a really nice guy. This sounds like a really good way that I can help improve my business?" What does it look like when somebody becomes a client of Purpose Plan Profit?
Jeff Earlywine:
What I would recommend they do is probably one of two things, go to purposeplanprofit.com. When you pull that webpage up, the homepage, look in the top-right corner, there's a big red box that says click here to schedule a free 30 minute coaching session. Let's jump on the phone. You don't have to put a credit card in, all you do is to schedule it and come to that meeting with a challenge that you're facing right now. We'll talk about it. It lets you kick the tires to be able to see how that I, as a professional coach, that's been doing this a long time can really step in and give you some ideas on being able to help you accomplish or overcome, I should say, that challenge.
Jeff Earlywine:
Now, we obviously in 30 minutes we can't fix the world, but we can talk about a lot of the stuff. Now, the other thing that you might want to do, if that doesn't float your boat, is check out step number one, identify strengths and weaknesses with the Business Battleship. Click on that, maybe take that quiz, it'll help confirm a little bit more. After you've read enough information about that and you're like, "Yeah, I'll schedule a meeting," then let's jump on the phone. Let's go through the evaluation. It's a complete evaluation. Just because it's free, doesn't mean I'm only going to give you part of the good stuff. No, you get it all.
Jeff Earlywine:
We're going to talk about all five areas. I'll send you a report card when we're done. It'll show you the percentages and where you're weak and where you're strong. You get all that completely no charge and you don't have to worry about credit cards and all that mess. You just schedule it and we jump on the phone. My goal, Becky, is to be able to help people. Now, if somebody's listening right now and they're like, Man, "I've heard of people having a coach." I mean, sports people have coaches, actors have coaches, other professionals have coaches, and they're thinking that would be a big help.
Jeff Earlywine:
Well, if you go to the website, step two is you're like, "All right, what kind of help do I need?" Well, maybe you need a coach. You're pretty good at what you do, but you just need someone to coach you along. It's kind of like the first coach or first couple of coaches of Michael Jordan. They may not have really helped him be better, maybe they challenged him some to get him better, but really they guided him along. And that's what a coach does. Now, a coach will kick in the seat of the pants, but also reach down into that pit and pick you up and keep you going. So, that's a coach part.
Jeff Earlywine:
Now, the other one is real time performance management. That's where a client will actually, whether it's a pharmacy or an electrician or restaurant owner or a car wash, they're like, "Look, I like running my business. I like being a pharmacy owner. I went to pharmacy school and I studied hard, but I don't want to do all this business stuff. I don't want to deal with the financial and the operations". Well, what I have is clients that will buy a block of my time to be able to hire me as a virtual CFO and a COO, to help them work with them and their staff on a certain amount of hours a month and be able to help them do it.
Jeff Earlywine:
So, I'm not just coaching people along at that point, I'm in the boat rowing with them. I'm in the boat working with them to get things done and to help them to do what they're good at and I get to do what I'm good at. So, you've got two options there, coaching you along, or actually jumping in there, rolling up my sleeves and working with you on all that stuff. Either way, I'm going to be in the boat rowing with you, it's just, one, I'm giving direction a little bit more than the other one.
Becky:
And I think it's great giving people such a wide breadth of different options that they can go with. Some of the things that you have on your website, it's very self-service, that free 30 minute coaching is amazing. And then some of these extra things that you can do for them, depending on the scale of how much assistance they need or how much help they need in those areas is really great, Jeff. So, I want to say thank you so much for sharing all this information with us today, giving us an inside look at who you are and what your company does and how they can help a lot of the folks that are listening today. So, I really, really appreciate it. So, thanks so much for joining us today.
Jeff Earlywine:
Well, Becky, thank you for having me and I really appreciate your time and your interest in what we're doing here at purposeplanprofit.com. And I look forward to helping any of the listeners in any way that I can.
Becky:
Sounds good. Thanks, Jeff. And for all of you who are listening, we will most certainly have all of this available in transcribed version as well. So, if you want to share this information while you're listening into an audio, you want a playback or you want a print out, we have that available on our website as well. So, thanks for tuning in. We appreciate all you listeners. And please feel free to share this information with a friend, with a business colleague that might be able to get some benefit out of this as well.
