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Clayton Achen (00:02):
I am super honored and feel privileged and thrilled to have one of, I would say, my mentors on Chuck Blakeman. Chuck, thank you so much for being with us. By way of a quick intro, Chuck’s got three bestselling business books, including why employees are always a bad idea. Making money is killing your business and rehumanizing the workforce by giving everybody their brains back. And these three business books for me have been really foundational in the last five years and how I’ve built out our accounting firm and our business advisory practice. And I know that you’re a serial entrepreneur, Chuck, and that’s all I’ll say for a minute and let you take over on who you are. And thank you so much for joining.
Chuck Blakeman (01:19):
It’s great to be with you. And yes, that’s my background. I’ve built 13 businesses, I think in 10 industries on four continents, and I’m just getting started. We got another 50 years left to plan to live till I’m 120 at least. So we’ve got a lot of time left to do fun stuff and my poor wife and all that, she’s had to put up with all this craziness, but at the same time, we all are benefiting from it. Life is an adventure and off we go. Let’s do it again.
Clayton Achen (01:47):
Yeah, right on. I think one of the main reasons why, I’ve read a lot of business books quite a lot, a lot of ’em suggested by people that you work with actually. And one of the reasons that your books sort of resonate with me as a whole is I would say your message for me really speaks to the human aspect of being an entrepreneur. And it’s sort of an antithesis to hustle culture, and I really appreciate that. I believe in a lot of the same things. Is that sort of, where does that come
Chuck Blakeman (02:23):
From? Yeah, it’s a great take on that and I don’t know where it comes from other than for some reason early on in my life, I became suspicious of the world around me. Not the world, but the messages that a lot of the world was giving me. I became suspicious early on that this wasn’t maybe the whole truth and in many cases wasn’t the truth. And so I’ve been accused of being a counterculturalist or just against stuff, but I’m really not. I’m really for doing the right things. And we find that a lot of things that we’re taught in business are just dumb. They have no foundation in productivity or in humanity or anything else. And one of them is the rugged individualist, the great American disease. I am a recovering John Wayne, rugged individualist. I had that disease in spades and it’s really a bad idea.
(03:20):
It was never a good idea, and it’s the worst idea today than it’s ever been. And one of the aspects of that that you just touched on is that we somehow think that being an entrepreneur or being a business owner, I see those as two different things, but that thing, that’s a thing. It’s a human doing rather than a human being. We talk in terms of productivity. When we talk about building a business, it’s exactly that. We talk about building the business. And my experience in building many businesses is that really what we need to do is build the human being behind that business because that’s the only way the business gets to be what it is. I am capped by my own potential, my own limitations, my own what the fancy people call limiting beliefs, all that fun stuff. And after 125 plus years of research on how to be more productive and how to be better human doings, even those that go in trying to measure that they come out with, if you’re kind to people and you treat them like adults, you make more money. That’s basically what the research has shown us
Clayton Achen (04:35):
For us. It’s not even close. It’s not like a, maybe it’s this or maybe it’s that. It’s not even close, right?
Chuck Blakeman (04:43):
No, no, it’s not even close. There’s all kinds of data points and data research on this that you can basically see a 100%, a 10 times gain in your business by investing your energies on making the environment better for the people than you will by trying to figure out how to make your assembly lines you grow faster.
Clayton Achen (05:10):
Okay, so I mean, that’s a long history and we could sit here for hours and go through your whole book because you’ve written at length about this, and I really appreciate the messages. We were all entrepreneurs before and we went through this industrial revolution and there were sort of, there’s a renaissance on the way here of just getting human with each other again and figuring out what we want out of business and how covid sort of reset that. I mean, for me, I was in the hustle culture. I was in sales and it was high pressure sales, and I grew an awesome sales team, and I got flown to Toronto and went on boats for awards and all the things, and then I took a huge pay cut and got into accounting. But that was another hustle culture. And by the end of my training there, I was working just crazy.
(05:55):
I think there was one project where I slept under the desk for a couple of days and I started my own business so that I didn’t have to do that anymore. But then I found myself in the exact same trap of my daughter was born. Government changed some regulations. I got a lot of phone calls to make, I’m going to miss my dinner table tonight. And something had to give. And I think that’s when we reached out to your firm Crankset group to say, Hey, I need a change here. And so that’s sort of my journey to you and Crankset group. Where does yours start? Where did you go? I’m going to jump off the bridge here and try being an entrepreneur because being an employee just isn’t good enough for me.
Chuck Blakeman (06:36):
Well, I was pretty close to unemployable right up front. I graduated at the bottom of my class in high school. They had me in the principal’s office deciding whether they’d let me out. That’s how bad it was. They didn’t know what a D H D and dyslexia were back then. They just thought I was stupid. And so I’m unemployable right from the get go. So I went to music school. I got a full scholarship to a classical music school of Cleveland Institute of Music, and ended up doing that and went into the Army because the Army’s the only people who could possibly, that’s the only job I could ever get. They have to take me. I did have a high school diploma and I went into the Army band, which was military welfare. We could talk about that at another time. But while I was in the Army band, I sort of, I’m not sure by mistake or just unintentionally, started some little business thing and thought, well, that’s interesting.
(07:33):
Maybe I do have something to offer the world around me. And started another one. And fast forward again, 13 businesses in 10 industries on four continents later. Apparently ADHD and dyslexia are good things to have. It turns out something 80 plus percent of entrepreneurs are ADHD, so there’s something good in there. So my journey actually to the idea of getting off this treadmill, most of the first five or six businesses were what you call the hustle culture. It was just work harder. My intention was if I work harder, I’ll make more money. So the intention was I want to work hard, make money, and my one hope was I hope it all works out. And the problem with that is I got exactly what I intended. I got hard work and I got some money and it didn’t work out.
(08:24):
I was just hoping it would work out. So after my fifth business, I watched my fifth business go from two of us to 109 people, and I was still working 50 hours a week plus. And I thought, how did I do this to myself? Seems like if we got all these other people, how is it that I ended up working as much or more than I did when we began? So in my sixth business, I said, I don’t know how I’m going to do this, and it sounds like a dumb idea, but I’m going to figure out how this business will serve me instead of me serving this business. I’m not going to be a hostage to this business. I’m going to own it. It’s not going to own me. And so I’m going to do this. I’m going to figure out how to make more money in less time.
(09:08):
And I had no clue how to do that at all. Clayton, when I said that, I just knew that that’s what I wanted. And this becomes an intention, and you get what you intend, not what you hope for. And I intended to figure out before I just hoped that way. Wouldn’t it be nice if every business we built with, the more we built, the more money we make with the less time in it? What doesn’t look that way? So I had to intend it, and that’s where my journey began was really in about 2005, 2006. I said, I got to do this differently this time. I don’t know how, but off we go.
Clayton Achen (09:42):
You were relatively late to the game. I didn’t realize that. I didn’t realize that. Yeah,
Chuck Blakeman (09:46):
I’m still learner. There’s a reason I built 13 businesses.
Clayton Achen (09:51):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting. I don’t know what your journey of discovery was to get to, because when did you release making money is killing your business? It
Chuck Blakeman (10:00):
Was actually about four years later. I wrote down my experience of having figured out for the first time how to make more money in less time. And that became making money skilling your business. That became that book. So it was really just a compendium or biography, if you would, of my own journey from being in that hustle culture to figuring out how to build a business that makes more money and less time. So I was working 60 hours a week making about the same money that four years later I was working 15, 14 hours a week, same thing, three years later. So that’s where that came in in 2010 is when that book was published and it became the number one business book of 2010.
Clayton Achen (10:44):
Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s still, I’d say still my number one business book. And I am so grateful that someone went through and actually thought through it and wrote the things down. We can all think through how to solve our problems, but actually writing them down and setting an intention to distribute that, I mean, that’s a hell of a thing. Well,
Chuck Blakeman (11:01):
I think that was why it is still a very popular book. It has a lot of legs because it’s not a book. I wrote it to life I lived and I just happened to write it down as I did it. And people like real life, I want to know what really happened. That’s something in some ivory tower I can make up any kind of anything to put out in a book that sounds good. But no, this is stuff we bled over. It works.
Clayton Achen (11:24):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and what a story, and I would say as one of the pieces to the entrepreneurs that I speak with and certainly the listeners of this episode and many others, is you don’t have to go through the same pain that you did. I certainly went through it for a while until I found some resources to guide. You can accelerate your growth path if you just read from the people who have come before you. These aren’t new ideas. None of the, as you even say in the book, these aren’t new ideas.
Chuck Blakeman (11:59):
It’s one of the four building blocks, we call it outside eyes. As a ed individualist, I had the pride of being able to print a business card and pretend that I knew what I was doing and let everybody know that. And yet I’d be telling ’em, they’d ask me how business is, and I’d say, well, business is great. And inside I’m saying, I’m dying inside and I’m not sleeping, and I’m sweating bullets, but I can’t tell anybody that. I have to let them know, think that I know what’s going on.
Clayton Achen (12:28):
Yeah, marriage is on the rocks, mortgage payments are coming due, all the things.
Chuck Blakeman (12:32):
So what if you had outside eyes on all this to accelerate your learning? What if you were humble enough to actually do that? It took me a while to get broken, to get outside eyes and have people who have no dog in the hunt have a very objective view of my business and say, Hey, why don’t you try this?
Clayton Achen (12:49):
Yeah. And you did that
Chuck Blakeman (12:51):
And I did that, and
Clayton Achen (12:52):
It worked. Yeah. Where’d you go for those people? What was your pre-3to5 club? Where did you land on the outside ice? Well, I
Chuck Blakeman (12:59):
Was fortunate enough to have some friends that I saw what I liked in their businesses, and I went to them and say, Hey, what are you doing? So I took a learner’s mindset from that and tried to be teachable on stuff that I otherwise would’ve said, Hey, I already have this figured out. And so that was a big chunk of it. And then the other chunk of it was me having this real clarity of vision that I was going to somehow build something that made more money and less time. None of the guys I talked to actually had done that. One of them had sort of done it without knowing it. So I had to learn that piece on my own. But there were so many things I could pick up from the way they viewed business that could help me get there so much faster if I just got involved in community.
Clayton Achen (13:46):
Yeah. So for those of you who are doing a bender on my podcast series here, I recorded, I was on yesterday. It won’t be released in this order of course, but I was on yesterday recording a podcast with a payment FinTech Calgary company, and they’re a FinTech company, and they do payments, and then they do good at it, and they’re great. And the fellow’s name is Nick Beek. And one of the things that he said, I asked him for, what would you tell people? And he said, ask somebody who’s been through it before, right? Ask somebody who’s been through it before. And so for those of you who are doing a bender on my podcast, I think Chuck is the third or fourth founder to say the exact same thing. So outside eyes, get some mentorship, get some help. And that’s helped everybody, all the most successful people that I’ve had on this podcast and successes, we can talk about how you measure success a bit later, but they’re all saying the same thing. There’s people who’ve been through this and they’re happy to share their experiences with you.
Chuck Blakeman (14:47):
And it’s a principle, it’s a life principle. I was probably an 18 to 20 handicap in golf for 35 years, and then I decided I wanted to be a scratch golfer, and I went and found a coach for the first time in my life. He laughed at my swing and I said, why do you laugh? And I says, well, you want to be a scratch golfer? And I said, yes. He said, not with that swing. You have to start over and you’re not going to be able to play golf. This is April. You will not be able to play golf this year. You’ll start playing golf sometime in October, maybe even year golf course if you really want to. And a little over two and a half, three years, I got down to a 1.9. I decided I didn’t want to go farther. But the point of that rant is the same thing happens in business. When you get outside eyes. You can be in a place for 30 plus years thinking you’re doing just fine. Somebody else takes a look at your business swing and says, if you want to get better, here’s something you might want to try.
Clayton Achen (15:46):
A lot of your entrepreneurial experience comes from some experiences that you have in Africa that you wrote about and how you went and saw it sounded like you had some very humbling experiences over there. And yeah, why don’t you talk about that for a minute. I love those stories.
Chuck Blakeman (16:05):
Yeah. It’s the only place I’ve ever lost money in a business. And this is something you’ve probably heard consistently from other people. I call it measured risk. Normally I take measured risks. This was an unmeasured risk or a big risk. It was measured, but it was still a bigger risk. My risks have always been, let me make shoes and sell some shoes, and if I can sell six or eight or 10 pairs, then let me throw some money at this and just make it bigger and make it run faster. We hadn’t sold anything, and let’s go over there and spend an awful lot of money on this idea of solving poverty through developing small businesses. This is a very noble idea. And many, many, many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars later, we ran into the president of a company who basically made us persona non grata and stopped the whole thing in its tracks. And in the process of that, I learned a lot of things, but I learned a lot about the universality of the principles of business and how people in Africa were hurting for the same things that we were needing here.
(17:16):
I was over there working with people who were so poor that when I decided not to use my handouts because they were worthless, they grabbed them because the backs were empty. ,-
(17:29):
And they had blank paper on the backs that they could put with their kids at school. So they weren’t in poverty. And I was talking to people in a building with blown out with no windows and no doors and the sand floor and little benches, and that was their church and a lot of other things. It functioned a lot of ways. So it was just a very poor environment. And on the plane back, I was thinking about the experience of what did I learn in that particular time in Africa? And I realized that everyone has a mindset of poverty. The mindset of poverty is universal. And what I mean by that is if I line to a hundred people from that slum, what we call slums in that part of Africa, we lined to a hundred people there, a hundred business owners up against a wall from that slum. Their net worth would be somewhere near nothing. If you lined up a hundred people from my hometown here in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, up business owners up against another wall, their net worth minus tens if not hundreds of millions.
Clayton Achen (18:47):
Minus
Chuck Blakeman (18:48):
Minus.
Clayton Achen (18:49):
Yeah. They’re all leveraged.
Chuck Blakeman (18:51):
Yeah. Huge. And I’m thinking, what’s going on here? Well, the mindset of poverty involved in this whole thing that we don’t really understand what it means to live at net zero and to get to net zero, what would it be like? These people are happy in Africa and
(19:09):
These a hundred people, imaginary people in high events, they’re miserable, they’re panicked, they’re leveraged to the hill. And if you ever, this is the mindset of poverty piece. If you ever manage to get to zero, so let’s say you’re covering your mortgage, you’re covering your payments, you’re paying for your kids, and now you have some extra, you get an extra $5,000 coming in every month, what do you do? You go buy a bigger house and put yourself in debt again, or you get the extra 50,000 the month. Well, you go buy yourself a helicopter. You get yourself. We somehow just can’t understand that there’s a place at which enough would be enough.
Clayton Achen (19:47):
Enough would be enough. Yeah. That’s not, and this is one of your counterculture things, Chuck, right? We’re not supposed to do that indefinite growth. Right? Right.
Chuck Blakeman (19:55):
Grow or die. Who made that rule? Well, I tell it wasn’t a small business owner. It’s an investor who made that rule. But it goes back to one of the other four building blocks, which is the idea, the need for us to all have lifetime goals or what we call a big why.
Clayton Achen (20:10):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I was going to ask you about big why, because these people in Africa who were happy, there’s a reason that they’re happy. And I think it relates to what you’re about to say, but that’s what I associate it with. When I look at our cultural, I think there’s just this enormous discontent happening over here. And the more you have, and I can’t remember if it was you or a study you referred to or someone else who said the happiness money equation sort of levels out when you’re able to fend off your right, that’s your net zero, right?
Chuck Blakeman (20:50):
It used to be 20 years ago, 75,000. Now it’s like 125 to $150,000. There is actually some measurable relationship between some money and getting to about a hundred to 125,000. After that, it falls off to nothing.
Clayton Achen (21:05):
On the happiness scale.
Chuck Blakeman (21:07):
If you can take two weeks vacation and maybe buy a hot tub after that, there is no amount of money that will make you any happier. This is verified, researched neuroscience data. You’re not going to get anything more out of it, but somehow we need it. And the reason why we need it is because we don’t have a big why or
Clayton Achen (21:26):
That is our big why. Right?
Chuck Blakeman (21:28):
Well, it’s a big why substitute? Because it is. Yeah. Because my definition of a big why is something you can never check off as complete. So I had a guy call me from California one day after reading my book, didn’t know him now as a friend, and he said, Hey, I’m making $1.2 million take home every year as a coach. I build a business to 40 million. I build another one to a hundred million. Now I’m helping other people do it, and I’m training for marathons and the triathlons, and he’s got all these crazy, someone would call big, hairy, audacious goals. And I said, what are you doing all this for? Why are you doing this? And he’d give me, well, because you want to grow to a hundred million, but why? Because I want to be able to run faster. Why? And it pretty quickly got to crickets. He had no reason why. And I said, would you mind if I’m obnoxious and tell you what I think why you’re doing this stuff? Why you’re growing businesses to 40 million, a hundred million, why you’re doing this manic crazy coaching? I think it’s because you don’t know why you’re alive.
Clayton Achen (22:37):
And he’s your friend still.
Chuck Blakeman (22:38):
And he’s still my friend because he has enough courage to build 40 to a hundred million business. He’s a courageous guy. But that’s basically, we fill a big Ys shaped vacuum in our lives with nonsense, and we trade in fulfillment for achievement. So achieving all these things. But see, when you achieve a 20 million or 40 million business, you can check it off is complete. When you run your triathlon at the hourly, whatever it was, you wanted 13 and a half, you can check that off three hour marathon. You can check that off. And it’s never satisfying because you’re chasing ghosts, you’re chasing myths. A goal realized is not no longer motivating. So we have to find another goal. What if you had a goal in life that you could never fulfill, and yet every day you could fulfill it and the next day it comes back again so you can finish it every day and the next day it’s never complete. What if you had something that you would just never be able to finish the rest of your life, like being a great mom or solving world hunger? It doesn’t have to be something giant.
Clayton Achen (23:52):
I want my kids to always want to come home. That’s one of mine.
Chuck Blakeman (23:55):
And what if you made that a thing? My mom died when she was 92, 93 years old, and she was still trying to be a good mom. You’re never done with those things. So what is it? What’s the transformational things you can do in the world around you that would motivate you to get out of bed the rest of your life and use your business to help you do that? So that’s where enough becomes enough. One guy decided that one of his big why was to just see the world and never finishing the world and play a lot of rugby
Clayton Achen (24:27):
Nice.
Chuck Blakeman (24:28):
So he developed a rugby tourism business,
(24:33):
And he put up this website and he’d collect people. And once he got 20 guys and their spouses, he’d put together a three week tour of South Africa, or they’d have a rugby game every three or four days once so they could heal in between and do tourism. And he sold his big house and moved into an apartment because he didn’t need a big house anymore. He was gone three weeks of every month, and he didn’t need all that. His big why reduced his need for money. Now I want to solve world hunger or poverty. I want to solve poverty so I have enough time and energy, but I’ll never have enough money I don’t think. And if I do, well, actually that’s not fair. I could get to it. We’re going to need about 750 million to solve poverty worldwide. But that’s a pretty big goal. So that’s going to take me more time and energy. So the point of that is we were taught that time, money, and energy were the goal. Let me be physically fit. Let me get a buttload of money in the bank and let me get some freedom. The reason most people don’t get at least two out of three and many times, three out of three of those is because they don’t have any reason to have those resources. They’re just resources. And it sounds motivating to tell someone, let’s make more money and less time I’m in. That sounds right.
Clayton Achen (25:57):
Yeah. Everybody would say yes to that I think,
Chuck Blakeman (25:59):
But most people will never get it because they don’t have a big why. They don’t have a reason to have those three resources. If you know that it’s going to take you this amount of time and this amount of money and this amount of energy to live out your big why, now you got a real motivation to grow your business to the point where it gives you that amount of time, money, and energy.
Clayton Achen (26:19):
So what about you? What’s your big why?
Chuck Blakeman (26:21):
So my big why is to live well by doing good and a big why generally. Well, you’ll find we will have characteristics like that where it’s kind of fuzzy, it’s value laden. It’s always value laden. It has value words, but it’s big enough, it has a big enough umbrella that you could just about do that with every breath. I could be a truck driver and I could live well by doing good. I could be a school teacher, I could be a dad. I could be walking down the street and help someone across the street and live well by doing good. So your big wives are generally not real measurable. They give birth to tons of measurable things. So I have X amount of business owners that I want to impact each year, and I want to do the same things with my kids
Clayton Achen (27:11):
And thanks. Yeah. I was going to ask you to tie it into Crankset Group and how does that big why for listeners out there that are trying to figure out why they exist in the world, how do you tie that to your Crankset Group adventure and the creation of Three to Five Club live Well by doing good? How do we tie those two things together and how have you married them?
Chuck Blakeman (27:30):
So for me, and many business owners, their big Y will be lived out very directly through their business. And that’s not the only way I want to make sure people understand. Big Y is much bigger than business. Sure. Business will be one way you live it out. So for us, it’s really convenient. I want to live well by doing good, and I want to impact the lives of business owners worldwide. And I think there ought to be a business, a three to five club in every town in the world big enough to have a Chamber of commerce because it’s that impactful. So we got a long way to go, and that’s one way that I live well by doing good, is seeing business owners figure out how to get their big why so that they have a real reason to have to make more money and less time. And I watch those testimonials come in on a regular basis, and that feeds me and keeps me going. That’s just one way in which I live out my big why.
Clayton Achen (28:24):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s super interesting. And so yeah, for all listeners on here, I guess this is a good plug for 3to5 Club. I got one going in Calgary here, and we are growing our membership. So anybody who’s local or anybody who wants to attend a session or two on me, feel free to jump in. We got some great business owners in that group, and I think the ones that are in there by and large would say that your material check in making money is killing your business, which is broadly what Three to Five Club is based on those principles and your journey figuring it out, that’s been very, very impactful for them. And they can’t live without it now. And certainly it has been for me. So yeah, that’s the three to five club plug.
Chuck Blakeman (29:08):
Well, I would say 3to5 Club again was not something I thought up in an ivory tower to sell on the internet, but it came out of my life. I need help. I realized that I’ve taken the long hard road by myself as a rugged individuals. What if I had other people, and this actually came from my golf game. I saw my golf game change so quickly by getting a coach. Why if I do that in business, what if I did that in life?
(29:37):
And so the 3to5 Club came out of that for me because I’d seen the data on how when we do things in community with other people, we learn them so much faster than even with just a single coach. Having a coach and community is the best, but the reality of it is we need a place, and I didn’t have it. The question I came up to with for myself is where do I go to say these three magic words? I don’t know. Where in the business culture do you get to do that? You can’t do it with your clients. They get frayed and leave.
Clayton Achen (30:10):
You get spooked. Yeah.
Chuck Blakeman (30:11):
Your employee, your stakeholders, employees, they put their resumes out. You can’t even do it with your wife or
Clayton Achen (30:16):
I’ve done it. I’ve done it with my employees and I’ve lost employees over that.
Chuck Blakeman (30:19):
Yeah, now they’re scared. It’s like, really? He doesn’t know what’s going on? My spouse says, I thought he knew what he was doing. Now she’s not sleeping either. Where do you go to say these three? Well, you need to go with other people who are saying the same things. I don’t have this all figured out. And that’s the magic of any kind of group, like 3to5 Club. It’s the community aspect of being able to go there and share your bottlenecks and say, Hey, I’m having this struggle right now. What do you guys know? Yeah.
Clayton Achen (30:47):
Yeah. Well, and I think one of the main things why I was drawn to it when you asked me to launch one up here in Canada, this isn’t a coaching group. I facilitate information that is largely generated by Chuck, which is largely stolen from other sources and personal experience. And then I layer in some of my personal experiences and we talk about it. And the thing that I’ve really enjoyed since facilitating these clubs is we’ve got business owners of all stripes here. So we’ve got some folks who are doing really well. We’ve got some folks who are really in their startup phase, and we watched a lawyer go from one person. Now he’s out making his third or fourth hire in a year. And without this group, he might still just be doing it on his own, doing $12 an hour work as a lawyer.
(31:40):
And so I guess the point here is everybody, it’s a universal set of issues here. This is a universal set of issues. We call ’em fundamentals. You call ’em fundamentals in business. They don’t teach this stuff in school. You can’t go to entrepreneur 1 0 1 at your university. And they go, yeah, here’s all the business fundamentals. They don’t teach you this stuff. You can only learn it by grinding it out or by getting some outside eyes like in 3to5 Club. And so that’s why I really appreciate it. Business is almost a great leveller. Everybody goes through it and there’s no special person. There are some unicorns out there for sure who are just naturally better at it, but there’s still fundamentals and everybody can learn the fundamentals and apply the fundamentals. And that’s a choice. That’s an intention.
Chuck Blakeman (32:28):
It’s an intention. Some people, to your point, there are some people gifted enough to figure this stuff out and really not even know what they’re doing. The greatest athletes make really bad coaches usually, because they didn’t have to figure this stuff out. It just came. The same thing’s true. There will always be some people out there who have this thing figured out without figuring it out. It’s one of the gifts I have is that it took me a long time to figure it out. So I had actually to think about it. And then we see the value of that in my golf game, and then we see the value of it in my business. And then this woman who was functionally homeless, living in the basement of her friends, having had to escape an abusive situation with her two children, she’s homeless and she joins the 3to5 Club penniless and homeless, and in two and a half years, she has five people in her business and she bought her own house. Then we have the guy who in California, who went from $1.2 million a year working 50 hours a week. Now he takes home probably six or 7 million a year, and he works eight hours a week. It doesn’t matter where you are in the game, when you get outside eyes and you get into these communities where we have learned through the sweat of our brow and the blood of our hearts to understand what the fundamentals of business are, watch out,
Clayton Achen (33:50):
And lots of people in professional services. In my job, I w, state,as now, I’m a part-time accountant. I say that in my LinkedIn status or whatever it’s called. I am not that big on social, but I’m a part-time accountant now. So I do it occasionally and we got lawyers in our group and you go, okay, what are the professions that you think the least likely to be able to build processes and build structures in their company where client service of this really complicated stuff, tax law, whatever. How do I get out of that? I need my brain. I went to school for a long time, yada, yada, yada, all the things. And it’s like, it’s possible even for us, even for us who are, I know a lot of folks who are retired forced into retirement at 65, not a lot of folks, but I’ve known a couple guys.
(34:46):
I’ll just say guys, because they’re guys who are 65 retired and either get to 73 and are still attending the office three or four days a week in retirement because they’re so identified with this position and they can’t imagine doing anything else. And that’s a double-edged sword either, wow, that’s great because you really love it or you, you’ve got nothing else in your life that you’re trying to live for other than doing tax returns. So I’m not sure which it is, and I’d like to ask them. But then on the flip side is you retire, you’re not welcome back and you die. Right? And that’s a common story in our profession.
Chuck Blakeman (35:20):
It’s a subtitle, one of my books, Death by Golf, because the research shows that people who retire at 50 are more likely to die at 60 than people who retire at 60 are to even die at 70. you
(35:36):
The sooner you think you’re done, the sooner you’re done. So we are not made this idea of retirement out of Van Bismarck invented it in 1881, I think. And it’s not a human condition. It’s a bad thing. We were taught that we were supposed to just have no stress and sip my ties and play golf all day. That’s a shortcut to death. And the research shows it. There’s just verifiable fact. You want to keep alive, figure out how to continue to have reasonable but ongoing stress in your life. You’re constantly having to figure out, well, how do I do that physical, mental, emotional, spiritual business? We have been in this house for 25 years and I make a hobby out of just blowing things up. We’ve taken what was essentially a track home and turned it into a designer home over the last 25 years. There’s nothing in here that looks like it did when we started. And we’re sitting on the second floor deck that I had just finished building a few months ago, and we looked at each other and said, this house is perfect. We got to move. We got to get out of here because there’s no stress left.
(36:53):
So we do that with our lives, and I watch my neighbors and I’m 69, and people, when they ask me, really, I got my first massage in my life last month. The guy says, you have the body of a 50 year old. I said, well, that’s good. I want to be 120 when I die. But I watched my neighbors who retired when they were 55, 57, and they’re walking by the house slower and more stooped every day because they’re done. And who said that? Otto Van Bismarck gave us that disease.
Clayton Achen (37:23):
And I think one of, just to level it out with listeners here, I don’t think you’re a proponent of work hard forever. I think it’s really just let’s find a way of existing where we’re happy all the time and keeping ourselves busy and a little bit of stress and all the things, and why shouldn’t I have that at 42? Just as much as you have it, it’s 70.
Chuck Blakeman (37:46):
Exactly. So two parts to this. The question in life shouldn’t be, how do I get all the time, money and energy I could ever get? Because you won’t get, you don’t know what to do with them. The question is, how can I live in a way today to be transformative in the world around me? The research shows the most fulfilled and joyful people on earth are solving other people’s problems, not their own. So how do I get to where I can do that today? And then why would I wait until I’m 65? What if I could find a way to get the time, the money and the energy when I’m 42? So I work, to your point, I work in the Crankset Group business half days, three weeks of the month, three days each of those. So it’s nine days a month, half days I have scheduled appointments, half days, nine days of the month out of the 22 work days, the rest of those days, all the Mondays and Fridays and the rest of those, and the last week of the month, I get to get up in the morning and say, how can I live a significant and transformative life today?
(38:58):
And sometimes it has to do with going and being with my kids. Sometimes I’m going to go read a book, sometimes I’m going to work a business owner. I get to choose. So
Clayton Achen (39:07):
Thanks for saying that because I don’t want people to get hung up on this thing that, Hey, I got to go be on a TED Talk to make a difference. You don’t have to.
Chuck Blakeman (39:15):
No, no. You get to decide. The only thing I never get to say that’s a good big why, all I can ask is, well, that gets you out of bed every morning.
Clayton Achen (39:26):
Yeah, yeah.
Chuck Blakeman (39:28):
That’s all I get to ask.
Clayton Achen (39:29):
Okay, me. I want to pivot a little bit here. And by the way, everybody will go, yeah. Well, that’s really nice that you’ve done that, Chuck, and that sounds really hard. My advice to you now, if you’re thinking that right now is go read, making money is killing your business and come to a three to five club as my guest. It’s a bit of a grind for three to five years, but I promise you that if you follow the fundamentals, it’s going to work out as long as you have a good business idea and you stick to the fundamentals. So transitioning here a bit, I want to talk to you, I wanted to pick your brain for a while on this, and I didn’t prime you beforehand for this, but I know you’ll be able to just freestyle it a bit. So there’s a thing in the labor market right now, and I know I’m kind of contextualizing Rehumanizing the workforce by giving people the brain back. Your latest book, sorry I forgot the title.
Chuck Blakeman (40:23):
Rehumanizing Workplace
Clayton Achen (40:26):
By giving everybody their brains back. And so we have an interesting effect in my view from Covid, which is, I think it’s a dirty word to even say the C word now, but I think what happened is who could work from home? Went and worked from home. They woke up. We just as a huge collective society, we woke up, but then there was this sort of weird or stranger, darker part where a lot of people were getting government money that maybe could have gone and got a job instead. And there’s different things at play here that I can’t exactly explain, but what I can explain is I was at a CPA forum in Banff last year, and one of the old practitioners came up to me and says, how are you finding people? I can’t find people. There’s nobody out there. I said, there’s tons of people out there, they just don’t want to work for you anymore. And he might say, we have an entitlement crisis on our hands here, folks. And then let me chime in on that and I’ll put in some more context in a minute. We
Chuck Blakeman (41:30):
Just entered the world of colonialism and patrimony and top-down hierarchy and all these other things where the people at the top of the spectrum feel entitled to certain things that the bottom should never get. And that’s what business has been built on for hundreds of years. Comes out of the military, comes out of mercantilism, comes out of serfdom, comes out of basically slavery. That’s the first place we see the concept of top-down hierarchy and management is slavery. And so we’ve got this notion that people are entitled, well, guess what? I love this conversation because I’ll talk about this pickle factory where we had people making $8 an hour and Peter Piper was packing 12 jars of pickle pickles every hour that were 12 cases every hour. That was the maximum. That’s all anybody could ever do for who knows, long, 70 years. And we came along, we incentivized them and turned their brains on. And within a month, people who had never packed more than 12 cases of pickles on an hour were now packing 18 to 24 cases per hour and making twice as much money as they had been in the past.
Clayton Achen (42:47):
And the owners of the business were getting rich
Chuck Blakeman (42:50):
And the owners of the business were getting rich. And then they were also ticked off. Those snobs. They’ve been sandbagging us for 70 years. It turns out they could do 24 cases an hour, which they never did. Those SUVs we’re going to put ’em right back at $8 an hour in demand. They do 24. So my response to that is, okay, so you own this pickle factory, I’m going to take the pickle factory away from you, and I’m going to require that you double your production and double your revenue next year. And I’m not going to give you a cent more to do it. How much motivation do you have to grow?
(43:34):
So all I want is for everybody to be a capitalist. That’s all I want. What if we invited everybody to the game where if you work harder and you produce more, you make more money. Every business owner I know gets excited about that, but they don’t want the people who work for them to have the same game. Hypocrite. You can’t do that. And then you wonder why people don’t want to work for you. Well, somebody down the street’s going to pay me an extra 20 bucks or somebody down the street’s going to in set size game. Yeah. Or
(44:06):
It’s just clearly a better place to work. So one of the interesting things that I saw, and then I’ll let you go coming up on time here, but just I could talk to you about this stuff for hours. I really could. But I am sure you’ve got a busy schedule because it is Tuesday and it’s your half day today. So I was at an ATV’s, a local bank here. It’s one of the only small credit unions in Canada that actually does well really well. And they’re in Alberta Bank, Alberta treasury branches, and they hosted a thing where they had some great speakers up and really, really great production. And this is a couple of weeks ago. And one of the speakers was the HR director for LinkedIn and took it from 400 to 4,000 people and he started putting up stats about the new way of work, the new way of work.
(44:55):
He had a chart up where he said the average employee stays at a company these days for 2.8 years. That’s the average right now. Then he put the car companies up and on the right side of the chart was their market caps, and on the left side of the chart was their retention and they’re not correlated whatsoever. And then the biggest market cap company, he had to put a question mark there for sort of comedic effect. I think everybody knows what it is right now, and their average employee retention right now is under a year and a half. And I think then the punchline at the end was that it’s Tesla. And the punchline of the whole thing was you don’t need to retain people forever to make money. And so now what and why is that happening? You go into a big discussion about people have options and they just want experiences and they want growth and this is how they’re getting it. You can do that now. So how are you going to design your organization to live with the reality of a potentially lower retention cycle than you’re used to? Right? It’s super interesting conversation,
(45:56):
And I think there’s two things at play there because I think if you create a culture that is better than anybody else in your industry, you are going to have the highest retention in your industry. So you will solve some of that.
Clayton Achen (46:11):
What does culture mean now? So we have to look at what people want, good pay, education, all the things. What do you think?
Chuck Blakeman (46:19):
Well, in retrospect, a piece of the pie. Profit sharing, but incentivize profit share. I want to know that I’m getting what I’m worth. So if I made 10 pairs of shoes and the guy beside me made two pairs of shoes, I should make five times as much. It’s not a bonus system. It’s a means involved product, results-based incentive. So if you treat people well, you will retain them much more. There’s a washing machine factory in Brazil. The average retention or the average turnover, I think the, what is it, 35% a year of the people in a factory that will turn over for 40 years. They’ve had one and a half to 2% turnover where there’s been 35 to 40% turnover four decades out of,
Clayton Achen (47:16):
So we’re talking one 1/20th of normal retention.
Chuck Blakeman (47:20):
Imagine if you’re already profitable, imagine what that would do for your profitability. So great if you’re able to do this on a year and a half retention, what if you had ’em for five? I guarantee your retention will go through the roof. The second piece of this is who’s actually shuffling in and out? Who are you retaining? I guarantee you are retaining the people who you least want because the research
Clayton Achen (47:44):
Shows he said the exact same thing on stage, by the way. So yeah,
Chuck Blakeman (47:49):
Okay. Yeah. 65% of the, somewhere between 50 and 65% of the people in the workplace today have their resumes out. And it’s the people who want to improve themselves. You’re going to retain with your lousy culture and your lousy the others and your lousy respect. You’re going to retain all the people you don’t want. So it’s exponential.
Clayton Achen (48:11):
Yeah. That’s really good insight. Chuck, I want to thank you so much for coming on here. I appreciate you very much. I appreciate you immensely and you, you’ve had a big impact on my life and frankly, the 20 people sitting here working with me as well. So I’m really, really honored to have you on, and I’m honored to have you as a close associate and to be able to wrap, riff some things with you sometimes. So
Chuck Blakeman (48:39):
Yeah. Well, I feel the same as the recovered rugged individualist. I recognize the need for you and other people in my life who can call BSS on me and help me grow, so I appreciate it.
Clayton Achen (48:50):
Right on. How do we find you and what would we come shopping to you for?
Speaker 3 (48:54):
Well, 3to5club.com or chuckblakeman.com. And then I personally help people with their businesses. I help them avoid all the mistakes I’ve made over the decades. So we do what we call business advisory, which is a combination of coaching and consulting. Sometimes I need to ask you questions, sometimes I need to tell you what I see. It’s a combination of those things we do. Both those
Clayton Achen (49:31):
Well, Chuck Blakeman, thank you so much and I appreciate your time.
Chuck Blakeman (49:36):
Thank you, sir. Have a great rest of your day.
Show notes:
Check out his book, “Making Money is Killing Your Business.”
Learn more about 3to5 Club, and if you’re in Canada, reach out to the facilitator Clayton Achen (host of this podcast), to attend a meeting. clayton@achenhenderson.ca
