Facing The Giant

Hello. My name is Gary Shotton, and I’m going to talk about some of the challenges that we have in business, and how we overcome those challenges, and I’m going to call it just “facing the giant.” I’m going to list these key points, and then we’re going to kind of go over them and some examples, then I’ll try to review them at the end as well. One of them, when you’re facing an obstacle, that’s just way bigger than you think it should be, be sure to get all the facts. Number two: watch what comes out of your mouth. Don’t speak negative and defeat. Number three: don’t fall into emotions. I’m not an emotional person anyway, but you can’t afford to go into emotions whether it’s crying or pouting or your facial expressions, and then remove any kind of discord or confusion that’s even around you in any way. This is not a time for you to help someone else, you need you need all of your efforts focused on getting through this challenge, so I’m going to give some examples here and I think it’ll help you, and I just trust that it will. We all face giants. What do I mean? Something, a payroll that’s just impossible to make, or a failure with an investment or a job that went just totally, totally bad, or maybe something that just even isn’t inside your control. The economy dives and it goes down, economies go up and down. That’s why I’m very careful to only leverage out as much as I can. I’m a risk taker, but at the same time I’m calculating out you know months in advance trying to estimate how much of a risk can I take. And so, the economy drops we got to be in a position to recover. So I’m going to use some examples here and one is to do with the fact that I own a moving and storage company for 17 years, and man 17 years. Wasn’t the kind of business I would recommend my family to own. My kids didn’t want me to keep it and pass it on to them as a family legacy. It wasn’t that kind of thing at all. It was a case of me using this and it using me to teach me business to understand the grind and grunt and the difficulties that come with almost every business. It was moving furniture, it was hot. Our Oklahoma temperature today is maybe a hundred degrees, but that’s a heat index of a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit, but maybe in the winter it could be zero degrees. And we’re outside, maybe snow on the ground and we’re still out there working and in wide ranges of whether, it’s a wide range of challenges that come with it. So one of those challenges that seem to repeat itself so many times was the ability to have enough money for payroll, and wow I would consistently week after week, we paid every other week at that time so it could rise up to a pretty high Payroll. Some I was averaging right around fifty thousand dollars for payroll on every other week at that time, and wow the pressure was on insurmountable sometimes it just seemed almost impossible, nearly impossible, might have a thousand, two thousand dollars in my checking account. I’d already exhausted anything I could do to borrow more money. My folks weren’t, my dad wasn’t alive for a big part of this, so I wasn’t going to ask my mom I mean, what would I do if I ask mom this week, would I ask her next week? I didn’t go there. I knew I had a giant and I’m the only one that could come through that. And these are the kinds of things that I had to just get the facts. I say okay who owes me? When can I get paid? What do I got to do to get paid? I would get on the phone personally and make sure payments were coming. I would explain in a polite way say listen we moved you, you knew you were supposed to pay me. I need your money. Could you bring it by to me today? If not, I could come get it from you tomorrow. I mean details. I was focused on the facts. Who owed me, how much money I had to have when my deadlines were, but the pressure was on I would make sure that nothing came out of my mouth that was oh, I could just feel so sorry for myself and say. “Oh, why has this happened to me?” I could start crying, and the next one show emotion and have bad words coming, not cuss words, but words of defeat. Well this’ll never happen. We’ll never make it. There’s no way we can get a… not me, that would never come out of my mouth. I’d always either keep my mouth shut, or I’d say you know, I don’t see how it’s going to happen, but somehow this is all going to work out. This is a test. I’m going to get through this test. We’re going to see a miraculous recovery. Something’s I wouldn’t be ridiculous on this, I wouldn’t get, you know, just name it and claim it without some kind of validity to it. But, I would watch what came out of my mouth, and then if there was anybody around me that had discord, maybe a worker or something in the office, I’d say listen. We just can’t have that now I’ve got to have every positive energy I can working in my behalf so that we can get through this temporary setback or this issue. It was an experience. I’m glad I did it/ I’m glad I’m not facing that same… now we have a much higher profit margin and what I’m doing now, but it was a good experience to learn how this could work when we’re facing a giant. Then hey, we’re in a machine shop business. I buy a machine shop in the year 2006, I leverage a lot. I’m taking a big risk. I’m at that time 55 years old. A lot of people at age 55 are thinking about retirement. They’re not thinking about taking on a huge debt, taking on huge responsibility, well the first two or three years from 2006, 2007, even 2008, wow this is going pretty good. I’m making good money. I’m putting a little bit back, but not too much. Oh, but then came 2009. Everybody in the business world in the world in that year knew it was a bad year typically. It dived and I once again had to say hey, this is a giant. I’m going to run towards the giant, I’m not going to cower back away from the giant. I’m going to be proactive not defensive, and so we made an immediate decision. I didn’t want to but I laid off 41 workers, 41 out of 65. I went from 65 to 24 in about three weeks. I’ve got to take drastic action because that’s the facts. I don’t have work for these people. I’m fooling myself to keep them longer than I should. We have to cut our workforce and I did it. I watched what came out of my mouth. I told, many many times this came from my mouth. I’d say “You know, we’re going to come through this a better company, a stronger company, a more efficient company, we’re going to actually be better off because we came through it than if it hadn’t happened. We’re going to look back and laugh and see how this helped build us into a better company.” That’s what I said, I didn’t say “Woe is me, we’re going broke.” None of that, I had very little emotion. It’s kind of easy for me because I’m not an overly emotional person. I cry a little bit, but not very often. I’m happy you can see that in my face a lot, but to get wide swings of deep depression, and grumpy, and yeah, you know there’s there’s that feeling, but I didn’t let it go into a real negative mode, and then I certainly removed in getting rid of 41 people guess what? I kept the best people I had. We came into a meeting room with our core people, we had our best machinists, and our limited cut down, restricted number of workers in the office, and I said fo”Folks, we’re going to make it through this together. I have no option but for this to work now I’m willing to do anything It takes to make it through. Are you willing to do that?” and everybody of those six or seven people all said “I’m willing to do it with you Gary. I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll deliver parts, I’ll run machines I’ll sweep the floor, I will cut out every expense possibly can, and make the difference up with hard work. And I paid them by the hour all but one other person, but still they cut pay in the form of over time. I mean we bore the burden. I didn’t take a paycheck for nine months. I had other revenue, other income streams, So I put no money for nine months to see that we’re getting through this, and so we work together, we pull together, you’ve got to pull together if you’re facing a giant. You can’t have strife division a contention in your presence, because it’ll pull you down. I hope this is helpful. I hope you don’t have to face these huge, difficult situations where there’s almost no way to turn around, but you know what those are the situations that cause you to grow the most. You don’t like it, but it’s really part of your growth process. I didn’t like it, but I’m sure glad I went through it. I hope you have a good time experiencing your business career, we hope you enjoy these videos. We hope that you would share them with someone, and give us feedback, please. Let us know how to make things better, that’s our philosophy, and we just will see you again, and in these with other videos, and other speakers Inspiring better business. Thank you. Up next