From Chaos to Clarity: Pete Mohr's 5 P's of Business Success

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:00:41

Well, hello, everybody, and welcome to another great episode of Leap to Be Unstoppable podcast. I am your host, Jaclyn Strominger, and today I am so excited to welcome to the show. We have a great guest, Peter Mohr.

And let me tell you a little bit about Peter. He is a business coach and exit strategist and a Colby certified coach. And honestly, it's really cool stuff.

And he helps owners coach, cut through the chaos, align their teams and create turnkey businesses, businesses that thrive without them. And he gets, he really helps people specialize in that exit readiness and value building, which is so important.

So we're going to have a great conversation today about his businesses and leadership and learning a lot more about what he has to offer. So welcome, Pete, to the show.

Pete Mohr: 00:01:35

Oh, thanks so much for having me. I am excited to be here and I'm excited to be with the listeners. I mean, it's. That's why we're here, right, Jaclyn?

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:01:41

Right. That's why we're here. So, Pete, you know, you know, you're, you know, I was looking at your profile and what you do.

You obviously have your own brick and mortar business also online. You also have your coaching business and which is business executive. And then you also have, like, exit strategy, which is somewhat overlap, but.

Pete Mohr: 00:02:03

Yep.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:02:03

So first and foremost, you know, you're a business owner. How are you managing all of that and leading? You don't. I'm, I'm. Surely you're not doing this all on your own. So how do you lead your team.

Pete Mohr: 00:02:24

These days? I'm leading my team pretty much virtually.

You know, I do have face to face meetings, whether it's here on Zoom or whatever the case is, sometimes in store as well. Lots of different ways. But, you know, I've been in business a long time now, Jaclyn.

It's, it's kind of crazy, but I'm in my 31st year of being a business owner. I started young, I was 23, got my first business rolling and, you know, had, have built businesses along the way. Built them, sold them.

I've defranchised, I've franchised. I've, you know, helped people buy and sell the business you were just talking about.

We currently own two shoe stores and they're called Shoe Topia here in Canada. And how do I run those? Well, basically, I run them through a lens that I created several years ago and I wrote a little book on it.

And the idea behind that is that I'm going to give you the five P's that are in the book and I've added another P since I wrote the book. But. But this. This idea here is how I. How I run everything. And it's understand your promise.

Align your products, your process, and your people to it so that you can have the right amount of profit.

And the one other P that I didn't have that I keep getting asked about, so we've sort of added it after the book is promotion, so, you know, we need to promote it. Right? So just. And I'm not going to. I know the whole podcast isn't around this structure, but I'll dig a little bit deeper into those six P.S.

just so everybody, a framework of where I'm coming at in our conversation. So the promise is not your mission. It's not your sort of vision.

The promise is what you shout out at the top of the mountain to all of the people that will listen to you. It's what you do for your client. It's how you take them from their pain to their game.

And when we think about that, I'll use my shoe store as an example. Our promise is to help our clients look great and feel fantastic.

And if you think about a shoe store and you're walking in the shoe, what are you thinking about doing? Well, I got to look good for the event, or I got it, you know, whatever.

Or I got to feel good at work every day because I'm on my feet 12 hours a day. And you know what? All of these different things.

So what we want to do at Shootopia every time somebody enters the door is we want to help them look great and feel fantastic. So that's where it kind of starts. And how do we do that?

We build that by saying ooh, ah and aha, which is we have process getting back to one of the other P's that takes people from, you know, proper greeting and all this other stuff as we get in, but as we get them to actually try on the shoes and they. And then we're like, let's go to the mirror. And what does it. What do you think the questions are? Well, it's like, how do they look?

And you're like, ooh, I look pretty good. And we're thinking, okay, how do you feel? Ooh is one of our key words. We need to hear the ooh, right? So we know we got the look good.

The next one is how do they feel? And then they close their eyes and they're going, ah. Those feel fantastic. Look good. Feel fantastic.

We've given them the next three letters, which is aha.

So with ooh ah and aha, we've hit the emotions of look great and feel fantastic through the process, through the product, so that we can then promote these things, thinking about all of those expressions and all those different things with each individual product in order to drive the right amount of profit in the store. And so that's a shoe store.

And for anybody listening here, whatever your journey is, your customer journey is, we have to start framing this up in these ways. Is your promise still relevant? A lot of people have been in business 10, 20, 30 years.

You know, what you did 20 or 30 years ago may not be as relevant as it was. Have you updated? Have you looked at these things? Do people still care? I see that a lot with my coaching clients.

It's like, okay, well, this promise is 30 years old. People, you know, don't have a fax machine anymore or something like that. Right? Like, things change.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:06:29

Right? And it's. I like that too, because it's actually your. Your promise is going to evolve as you evolve.

And it's, you know, I know it's not your mission or your vision, but it's. But that promise is. Is in there. And those things are fluid. They're not.

It's not like you chisel it in stone, put it on a beautiful rock outside your door and forget about. Has to change and evolve with as. As time change, as your customer changes, as your business evolves. It's.

Pete Mohr: 00:07:05

It's the bedrock of every decision you make. So if you think about that flipping and, And I like to use the shoe store example, because everybody buys shoes.

Everybody's bought a pair of shoes, right? So the idea here now is that if I, if.

And I invert these when I have it in a graphical, the promise is actually at the bottom of the stack graph because it's the actual bedrock of everything. Everything is stacked on top of that. If you think of the foundation of your house, the promise is the foundation.

So next we have the product, or if you're in the service business, it's going to be service, right? So what's the product? Does it align with your promise? If it doesn't align, it has no part of being part of your product offering anymore.

And so many people will say, well, we've always done that. I've always fixed fax machines, for example, but nobody cares anymore. Like, nobody even has a fax.

So whether you've always done it, is it still relevant? No. So in. In the shoe store, maybe it's a line, maybe it's a brand, maybe it's a department.

We got rid of kids shoes in our shoe stores because it wasn't profitable enough for us. When we look at the overall amount of. Of space in the store for the square footage it was taking, it wasn't generating the profit.

We had to lose that area. And did it affect our promise? It did. We're not promising to. To fit those kids anymore. Right. And we're not going to promote that anymore.

And our process doesn't involve kids shoes anymore. So that all has to change because of the decision that we made around the fact that it's not profitable.

So all of these things, like, they interweave into every decision that you make. And having the clear understanding of what the promise is is where it all blends in. So the process needed to change.

In that case, when we actually decided to exit kids shoes, our promise did change. We're still helping people look great and feel fantastic. But there's other derivatives of promise that you might have, right.

Like in your marketing and the variety of different things. So we had to clean up that language, we had to clean up the website, we had to clean up a variety of different.

And then we had to let our customers know about it. Right. And so all of these things, even the people side of things, so the people's always the big one. Right.

So we have process and people and a lot of small business owners really have a hard time with getting the stuff out of their head and into process so that other people can take accountability. And accountability is a big part of leadership. And this is a leadership podcast, right? So, you know, if.

If we can't get the stuff out of our heads and into some sort of format that's going to allow others to do the tasks that we're asking them to do so that we don't have to worry about them and micromanage them, then we're not great leaders.

And we need to then align and assign the accountability to the right people with the right culture who understand the promise, who live the promise, so that they can be making the decision in alignment with the promise so that we can work this through, promote it properly, and drive the right amount of profit.

Because getting back to the exit plan things, the first thing that people will look at if you ever do want to sell your business down the road is, is this a profitable business?

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:10:16

Right, Right. So you've touched on quite a few things. And. And I'm going to kind of go back a couple things. So something that you said, and I.

And I want to bring this out. It's not ne. It's part of the people portion of it, in a sense. But something that you said.

There's a few things you said that struck me, but something that you said really I think is extra important. You said, you know, it's. When somebody walks in the door, it's even. It's down to as small as how are they greeted, for sure.

And that's a part of the people. The employee. You're as. And I hate the word employees. I've said that a thousand times. They're part of your tribe.

Pete Mohr: 00:10:56

They're your team. Same thing. Yeah.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:10:58

My team members. The word employee just seems.

Pete Mohr: 00:11:00

Yeah, I agree. We use team.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:11:03

Yeah.

Pete Mohr: 00:11:03

Yep.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:11:03

They're your team members. Right. How do you disseminate this messaging to your people so that they're providing and capturing the essence of what you're doing? And that prom.

And. And part of that promise. Right. They get the ooh, ah, aha.

Pete Mohr: 00:11:31

Yeah. It's not easy.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:11:35

That's why I'm asking. Because. And I'll share it. Because when you think about it, at the end of the day, every business.

There are so many businesses out there that I don't want to say they forget about the customer or that. That, you know, some. Some do it really well and some do it horrible. Right.

Pete Mohr: 00:11:55

Yeah.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:11:56

Or just. Or, you know, or some people do it great within a company and some people don't.

And those that don't obviously have a bigger impact on those that can have a bigger. Bigger impact on those that do. It's right. It's like the bad experience that you have. So how do we create no bad experiences or.

Pete Mohr: 00:12:14

Well, we have bad experiences at Utopia. You know, we do. And. And we do our very best to. And we have a process to clean those up as well, you know, but nothing's perfect.

I think ultimately it begins with a leadership culture of holding people accountable. And we need to have process in place.

Again, getting back to process, and before we hopped on, I mentioned that I'm a Colby coach, and Colby really is very helpful in understanding how people deal with communication, facts and figures systems. Are they okay with change? Are they not okay with change? All of these different things. Because people learn differently than the business owner.

So taking that back to process, if I was talking about how do we greet somebody at the door? We have onboarding training that really tells people in written language because some people like to read, some people like checklists.

Some people would prefer to watch a video or some people would prefer to listen to it because they're auditory.

So Almost all of the process that we have in place has many different ways of absorbing the information for the listener or for the reader or for the watcher. Because as leaders, we need to provide the information in a way that they can absorb it and most want to absorb it.

And if we're asking somebody to read a 30 page document, but they are an auditory or a visual learner, that's a real problem.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:13:47

Right.

Pete Mohr: 00:13:47

Yet we're expecting it because maybe we're, we like 30 page documents. Well, that's not good enough. And you're wondering why these people aren't doing, you're saying you never do what it says in the document.

Like go to the document.

And they're like, well, you know, they're thinking, they may not be saying to you, but they're thinking, I'm not going to read 30 pages on this stuff. Why don't you just do me a video? Technology today allows us to do this stuff so quickly.

We could do and one of the best things that we use, and I mean, I'm tool agnostic, but we do have tools that we use that make life easier currently and they'll change as we as this podcast ages.

But things like Loom, for example, L O O M a wonderful digital tool that you can just track your mouse and go around these different things and you can just point to the different areas and saying, go here, do this, go that.

And you're talking this out at the same time, it's transcribing it for somebody that wants to read it, pop it into something like Chat GPT and you say, can you do me a checklist on this as well? Well, that would have taken us even three years ago. Yeah, like a half day to do that.

And now you can literally knock it off almost as quickly as you can speak it.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:15:00

Right. By the way, I just have to share. Do you know that. Not that I'm a, not that I'm a seller of Zoom, but Zoom has that feature now too.

Pete Mohr: 00:15:06

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, there's like I said, tons of them.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:15:10

There's tons.

Pete Mohr: 00:15:11

They're just endless. Right. And you know, I'm not saying ChatGPT is the right one either. There's perplexity, there's.

I mean, there's just so many different, different things. Right.

The idea here is that there's no excuse to not have your process in many different formats these days because the tools are so easy to use, they're so user friendly and you can provide this to the people on your team in many different Formats so that you can get the stuff done.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:15:38

Right.

Pete Mohr: 00:15:38

And that's what we need as business owners, as leaders. We need the stuff to be done, hopefully without you being involved in every decision. Right.

And as we climb that sort of accountability chart and have other people working for us, we want to ensure. And like I said, do things happen at Utopia?

Sure, they happen at Utopia, but, you know, ultimately we're hoping that 98% of the time they don't, because we have good process in place. We have people that are accountable for understanding what needs to happen, not just me.

Why can I work only one or two days a week, give or take, on an average week within the two stores? Because I have good people in place, good accountability. We have good process, and people know what to do and how to do it.

And that's the culture of the kind of business that we run.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:16:20

And a key thing that you just said, too, I think that's also really important is it's that accountability piece and knowing that you've got the good people in place and what's underlying in there is trust. You trust the people that you have, so that. And you empower those people through the accountability to do the work.

Because at the end of the day, people want to be able to think for themselves. They don't like the micromanagement. They want to have that, like that feeling of. Of autonomy.

Pete Mohr: 00:16:56

If they're the right fit, if they're the right cultural fit, they will want to make decisions for. And with you, keyword this.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:17:04

The right cultural fit. So, right. In your process too, in. In bringing on people.

Pete Mohr: 00:17:09

Yeah.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:17:11

You know, if you're listening to leaders and you're taught and leaders are listening and you're thinking, like, how do you grow that team? How do you. What are the tools that you use to make sure you've got the right culture in people?

Pete Mohr: 00:17:23

Well, I mean, it starts really on how you send out that ad. You know, how are you sending out the ad? What's the language in the.

In the ad that you're putting out there for whatever position that you're hiring for? I mean, that's their first general, their first interaction.

If they've never been into your business before and they know nothing about your business, they're going to see this ad, and now they're going to go look at your website and they're going to. You got to think about the journey. Right.

And so, you know, just like a customer journey, we're thinking about the employee journey or the potential team member journey. As. As we're Attracting, just like we'd be attracting a client, we're going to now attract a team member.

And so having language that understands the kind of business that we run, the culture that we run, the fact that we're small town sort of stores and, and we like to offer service and we're okay with having a chat. And it's not just an in n out and a variety of different things around creating a family like atmosphere.

I help people do what they're called their heart models for their business. And so we have a heart model.

It's, you know, it's got the five Ps in it, of course, but indirectly it's got all these different things of we share our heart model with, you know, with them right off the bat so that they understand this is what you, this is what it's going to be like to work here. And usually they'll almost always either love that or that's where it ends. And that's okay.

Like, we're okay to let people go that aren't going to be right fit before we even have interview one. So we want to be very clear in our language around that sort of stuff.

When we do have the first interview, we have another set of very clear language and we want to go through a variety of different things.

And then we put them through the Colby test, which the, the Colby A assessment, which I'm a Colby coach, so obviously we use it within our own business as well.

It's one of the only assessments that can be used as part of the hiring process because it's got nothing to do with your preferences, which are sort of frowned upon as far as hiring procedures these days. But Colby is still perfectly good to use as part of the hiring procedure.

So we're going to look and see if their Colby A aligns with the Colby description that we're looking for for that particular position so that we can see if there's going to be some issues going into question two. We'll take a look at their Colby. We'll take a look at any of the areas, gaps essentially, that we want to dig into on, on our second assessment.

If they pass that second interview, then we ask them to come in for a working interview. We want them to work with us.

Sometimes that happens, like literally the minute after the second interview ends, it's like, hey, have you got a couple of hours? And you can just stay and work with us and see what it's like. You can see what we're like, we can see what you're like.

And Then I call that Discovery Day. So I've been doing Discovery Day. Years ago, I used to have a bathroom cleaning business. And everybody says, oh, I don't mind cleaning toilets.

I mean, I can tell you I've cleaned more toilets and urinals. Urinals than you would ever imagine in your entire life. My first 15 years of business. But you know, they're like, oh yeah, no problem.

I, I got it, I got it. And I'm like, we start at 5:30 in the morning. Yep, no problem, no problem. I, I, I like the idea of starting early and being done early.

Okay, so your working interview starts tomorrow morning at 5:30. And then they would show up at like quarter to six and wonder why I wasn't there. And I'm like, I told you we start at 5:30. Like we start at 5:30.

Yeah, but 5:30 is pretty early. Well, that's what time we start. Like you've, you failed on Discovery Day, so you're not the right fit.

You know, so how do we work out some of these things?

And then it's like, okay, well sometimes they would get there and they would say, oh, I didn't realize I was going to be on my hands and knees all the time. It's like, yeah, you're cleaning toilets and urinals. You're going to be on your knees almost all day long. Oh, well, that's not what I expected.

Okay, well then it's not the right fit. So that's why we call it Discovery Day. It happens really quick and we can make a decision.

They may choose not to stay with us or we may ask them not to stay with us after that Discovery Day.

And it, it, you know how much money is wasted after two weeks or four weeks or two months of hiring somebody and knowing they're really not the right fit all along when this could have been dealt with before you even put them on payroll.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:21:40

You know, it's a, the hiring issue and, and placement.

It is a, at least I know in the States it's like a $43 trillion issue where people actually, and, and I'm not even talking worldwide, I hear so I love that because, you know, we, we talk a lot and I, and I sometimes feel like I talk about this till I'm blue in the face is that not everybody is the right fit for your company. They might be great on paper, but you have to have, and you share this.

There are certain questions you have to have key questions to ask people to really understand their key values, as I call it, their Achievement code. Like what do they live by, how do they operate?

And if, if they're not aligned, they don't have to be exactly like you, but they have to be enough in alignment with how they operate and their beliefs and how they put out into the universe basically into the world that if it's not the right fit, they should not be on your team.

They, you know, and that's where it might be right to say, you know what, you're not right for our company, but I know another company that might be better for you.

Pete Mohr: 00:22:57

For sure. And we've done that in the past. For sure. We have. And I think, you know, that people portion is interesting. It's the fourth P of the P list there.

And so when I think about the alignment of people, it's so, so vital, right? You can have all the process, all the product, you can even have the promise aligned.

But if the people aren't there, you've got no business because the right people are. I break them down into three different categories.

One is your ideal client, which I'm sure everybody's done, at least I hope everybody's done their homework on. And then two is your ideal teammate, which we're talking about here, right? And what's the process involved in bringing on the ideal teammate?

Or maybe what's the process in training them and onboarding them? Or maybe what's the process in, in paying them and, you know, working through that? Or maybe what's the process in letting them go?

You know, all of these things we need to look at. But the third one, which a lot of people don't think about that much, are any of your suppliers, are your suppliers aligned with your promise?

And if they aren't, is there someone else who's a better supplier that's capable of taking that?

Because if they aren't aligned with your promise, just like a bad employee or just like a bad client, they can suck every living juice out of you and a lot of money out of you and take up all of your time so that you don't have time for your best clients, your best teammates and your best suppliers.

And so we need to be actively working on bringing on better suppliers every single day as whatever, whatever business you are there, you have outsourced suppliers. Maybe it's a marketing company, maybe it's a bookkeeping company, maybe it's a, a shoe company that you're buying shoes from.

Whatever the case is, everybody's dealing with outsourced suppliers, or are they aligned with your promise? Do they even know what Your promise is, have you ever even shared it with them?

If they're true partners with you, they should know what you're working towards and they should know when they're suggesting products that they have in their bag of tricks that, that it should align with your promise so that they can help you deliver your promise so that you can get paid, so you can pay them.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:25:07

Right. You know, keeping you just, you just said is shared, right? I mean it is like sharing that promise.

It's, it's something that needs to be done and done. So how often do you share that promise, like with your team and your clients and your suppliers?

Pete Mohr: 00:25:29

Yeah, well, I mean on my podcast and on all the things I do from a coaching side of things, I share my promise every day. From Shootopia, the Shootopia side of things. It's an interesting thing.

We have what I call a supplier scorecard that we've developed and I strongly suggest everybody do one for whoever are their suppliers. And it goes through our sort of our guiding principles. It goes and it and it, and it actually lays it out in a 12 step process.

Does this person align with what we're doing? Do they provide what we need? Are they on time? Are their people good? Is the price right? Like a bunch of different things.

And then we'll take that when we go to do our buys and we'll say, hey, listen, you're 73% and I don't do it with every supplier because, you know, quite honestly, the really good suppliers you already know. And it's like, I don't even need to show you this. We already have the best relationship ever. If you want to see it, I've got it.

But you know, it's more about the ones that are always telling you, why don't you give us more business? Why don't you give us more business? Like, what's going on here? You should be, you know, you should be. Everybody else gives us more business.

How come you don't? It's like, well, because you don't look after your returns, you never ship us the stuff on time.

You like, whatever they may be, you've got a scorecard, you can say, but this company does. And so if I'm looking at my budget of whatever, a million bucks worth of shoes to buy, am I going to allocate, how much am I allocating to you?

When you're 72 and somebody else who's got a very similar brand is a 94, I'm probably going to give them more.

And that's the Reality of how you start looking at this, because it's, you know, if you're scorecarding the people, you're scorecarding your best clients, right. Do they pay on time? Do they. Do they give you hassles or not? Do they love your product? Are they bought in all this stuff?

Or you're scorecarding your team? Right, right. Are they living up to the accountability? Are they doing what they said they're going to do?

You know, do they have the capacity, the capability, the confidence, all of these things, so that when it comes time to sit down with them and they're saying, hey, I want more money, you're saying, well, you know, here's all this is what we need to do in order to get the more money. Because it doesn't work if we don't have this happening.

You've agreed that part of the job of getting paid is that you're accountable for these three things and you're only doing two of them until the third one's up, then we can't give you more money. Or maybe we have to do even worse than that. Right, Right.

But, like, if we're not scorecarding things in our process, if we're not, you know, communicating to our partners, the people in our business, whether they're clients, their team or suppliers, then it's very hard to have a profitable business that's going to stand the test of time and hopefully one day be at a point where you can sell it for a tidy sum.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:28:18

Right. You know, it's. Yeah, it's. That is just. It's so important to have that and to create.

And you're creating such a great culture, you know, with what you're doing.

And by creating, you know, all around with, with your team, the people, your clients, your suppliers, I mean, then when people look at the business, they have a certain idea of what, like a, A certain belief and thought of the comp of the company.

Pete Mohr: 00:28:50

If you, if you were, you know, putting a marketing plan together, you should probably, you know, like, if you, if you wanted to do a spread in a local newspaper, just say. Not saying that everybody's doing newspaper these days, but just as an example, you'd probably send the newspaper, your brand guides.

And the brand guide says, this is how to use my logo. This is the color we want, this is the font we want, this is all that stuff. And it's like I'm.

I'm giving them everything they need to represent me in this guide. That's the process. We've already got this Process piece. Now I'm going to hand it over.

And if they don't represent that properly, then that's a problem. It's like, I've got a reason. It's like, I've got a reason not to pay that bill even, because it's like, hey, I gave you the brand guide.

What were you doing? What were you thinking when you made our logo purple when it's yellow? Like, what's going on here?

You know, so, but if we're not clear, getting back to clarity, getting back to communication as leaders, something like that, and we're not clear with our team and we're not clear with our clients, and we're not clear with our outdoor suppliers, how can we expect them to be accountable? Just because we know what to do doesn't mean that they know what to do.

If I didn't give them the brand catalog and they just came up with that, like, what could I say, right? Oh, well, you did the best you could, I guess. Thanks. But.

But if I'm laying it out how it's supposed to be and they're not doing it that way, now we've got something to talk about.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:30:16

Right? That's.

Yeah, that's so, you know, I love that because, you know, I love how your six p's actually really come, really help illuminate the entire, the, the biggest thing of all, which is that communication piece within leadership. Because in leadership, you, you know, as a leader, you have to be able to communicate all of those things to yourself.

You have to be able to communicate it to your team and you have to be able to communicate it to your clients and as you like, in your suppliers. So that is so important.

So, you know, not necessarily to switch gears, but, but I, but I want to actually it kind of goes into the whole idea of communication because it's, it's a really big topic and we, you, you, it's on something that you coach on and that is the exit ready business. Right. And that's. And so communication is a huge chunk of that.

Pete Mohr: 00:31:13

It is.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:31:14

Right. So, you know, so I'm curious, how do you feel that cultivating those Right.

Relationships, advisors and peers and customers, you know, play a role in preparing for that successful exit?

Pete Mohr: 00:31:32

Well, there's a couple of little things before that, I think.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:31:38

Yeah. Yeah, probably, yes.

Pete Mohr: 00:31:40

One is that, you know, I do a lot of work with people. Not, I mean, the business, that side of the business called the exit ready business.

But ultimately it's not because you're ready to sell your business. It's because you want your business to be exit ready. There's two different things.

Maybe you do want to sell it, maybe you are getting ready to sell, but your business should always be exit ready. And the reason why is, and I've seen this, and Jaclyn, you probably have too. There's what we call the five Ds, and the five Ds are death.

Death will cause you to exit your business and probably cause a lot of problems in your business if you aren't exit ready and your business isn't exit ready. So premature death has caused a lot of problems. Okay.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:32:27

Yeah.

Pete Mohr: 00:32:28

Two, Divorce.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:32:30

Yeah.

Pete Mohr: 00:32:31

With so many people getting divorced and, you know, the numbers are sort of whatever you want to call them. It depends on who's playing stats, but. But let's just say one in two people getting divorced. Divorce can cause dramatic problems within the business.

And you may have to sell your business in order to rectify the divorce. And if it's not exit ready, you are both, both you and your partner are going to lose on that deal. And that's not good. Right.

The next one is disagreement. And if you have a partnership, a partnership disagreement is like a divorce. It's the same sort of thing.

One day, one of you or both of you will exit the business. Is it prepared? Do you have the right documentation, the right legalese? Do you have, do you have your buyout clauses?

Do you have all of that stuff set up? Right. And then the next one is disability. What happens? And I just had a friend of mine, in fact, my.

One of my store manager's husbands just had a heart attack, and he's my age, 53, and had to have open heart surgery. Not even just the stent, like they tore him apart. And because of the, the valve issues that he had.

And he works a physical job and he's not going to be able to work for nine months. Right. Are you ready for being out of your business for nine months? Maybe it's cancer, maybe it's a car accident.

The proverbial hit by the bus syndrome, you know, on my way to band practice last night, I saw two car accidents. Two car flip overs within five mile radius. Very unusual on a super hot day.

That would be more like in the slippy days of winter when there's freezing rain. But I mean, stuff happens, right? And I'm not saying we want this to happen to you. I am saying you do need to be ready. And the last one is distress.

So we went through Covid.

We're going through tariffs, we're going through like all of these different things that are out of our control distress issues that can cause major havoc on your business. So 50% of the businesses out there exit because the person wants to. The other 50 exit because the person has to.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:34:48

Right? Because one, yeah, there's a D that happens. Okay, so I'm just going to share this with you.

Like this is like, it's like your, you know, it's your insurance plan.

Pete Mohr: 00:34:59

It totally is. Totally is.

And you know, the work that we do to build the value in your business, which is the value building, coaching side of things and whatever that is, we're always working to build the value in your business so that we can free you up and get you out of being the cog of every decision and set up the process, set up the people, set up all these things that we've been talking about today. Align the communication, the process and the accountability in the leadership wing of everything and have the 6Ps underneath that.

And then what we're doing really is setting this up so that if and when you are ready now, it becomes a choice. If and when you are ready to exit your business, you can.

And a lot of the times when people say I want to exit my business, it's because they're tired of doing whatever it is they don't want to do anymore. I don't want to do the sales anymore. Maybe I don't want to clean the toilets anymore, maybe I don't want to sell the shoes anymore.

Whatever the case is, you just don't want to do that anymore.

But if we align and assign the accountability, if we work all this stuff through, we get everything in an organized, functional way so that anybody who's looking at this business, including bankers, if you want to expand the business, because just like exiting a business, we need to do the same work in order to get the business ready for expansion. That's the value building side of things. Right? I'm going to open another location, I'm going to move to a new city. I'm going to whatever the case is.

We still need to build this structure, same thing, so that we're not there because we can't be in two cities at once. We can't open two doors at once. We can't be on two zoom calls at once.

There does need to be process and other people and other things involved so that we can grow this business, but that's also when it's most valuable. So then we building this up. And at the end of the day, I've literally had clients that say, listen this is a good, profitable business.

I am actually loving what I'm doing in my business now. I work what I want to work when I want to work within my business.

Other people are doing what I always hated doing, and I'm going to keep it for another five years because, like, why would I get rid of it? The reason I wanted out of it was because I wanted more time or I wanted whatever they wanted. It doesn't matter there.

It's all unique to the individual person. But if we can give them that back, then they can make the choice as to when they want to, as opposed to when they have to.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:37:12

Right? That is so important. You know, Pete, I could talk to you for hours about all of this.

You have a wealth of information and a wealth of knowledge and listeners. I think you need to connect with Pete and. And, you know, take his Colby test. Like, get this assessment. Not test, not assessment.

Have the assessment done. Get, you know, you know, jump in and what he's, you know, he wrote the book on the. The five P's and is adding the six. You really need to get that.

It's really important what you are offering and what you're sharing. So, Pete, tell us how people can connect with you.

Pete Mohr: 00:37:51

Best way is just go to my main site, which is pete-mooremohr so pete-mooremohr.com underneath that, you can get to the Colby coach and understand that or the ExitReady business and take the value builder assessment, which is going to help understand what you need to do in order to get exit ready.

And I think that's probably a really good spot to start for any business owners on the Colby side, always love chatting and overlaying Colby on executive teams and on your team and helping you understand right fit hiring, which we were talking about, and using Colby as part of the hiring process or part of the communication process, or if you just want to build the value in your business and you just need to have somebody to shoot the breeze about, you can always go to speaktopeat.com and I'm happy to chat with you for free for half an hour, and we can just kind of toss around a few ideas and see if we're a right fit.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:38:41

Oh, that is absolutely fantastic. So, listeners, I'm sure you've gotten a lot of value out of this. I know I have. So please do me a favor.

Connect with Pete, go to a site, and then do me the other favor and hit subscribe. And then the third favor is actually to take this episode and share it with your friends, your business colleagues, because this is so important.

I mean, like, the whole the entire exit strategy is so important. And having a plan, like I said, it's your insurance plan for your business.

And having all those P's aligned is going to help you have an amazing business culture to help you have growth in that business. So I'm Jaclyn Stranger, your host. Thank you all for listening. And again, Pete, thank you so much for being an amazing guest.

Pete Mohr: 00:39:23

Thanks for having me, Jaclyn. Make it a great day.

Jaclyn Strominger: 00:39:25

Thanks.