Videocast 3: Identify And Assess
Thank you for visiting and welcome to the very first Accelerated Breakthrough videocast!
Paul Perez Discusses The Topic of Being Able To Identify The Problem(s) and Assessing It
Paul Perez: Okay. So the next logical phase, being able to grapple with an issue or a problem, is, you know, first we talked about awareness, right. First of all, knowing there is a problem. The second thing is being able to identify it. Being able to put your finger on, on what the key issue or issues are that you have to start setting goals around to wrap your mind around and change those daily or periodic behaviors.
And I like to call that the identification slash assessment. And assessments are a very powerful way to get to the nuggets that you really have to get to, to be able to say, hey, this is what’s wrong with the machine, right You take your car into the shop and what do they do. They hook up a test, right. Run tests, right. You’d go in and see the doctor.
Paul Perez: The first thing they do is they take your vital signs, they want to see what your vital signs are. And then if, if you’re getting a physical or there’s something else under the hood, the sand gets in the lab, right. So those are all basically assessments and there were some very fantastic assessments you really want to win. When you get an assessment for your organization, do you want to find one that has validity and has reliability?
That means it’s got some statistical rigor or statistical significance to it, right ? A nd then when you’re looking at your business, it’s important to be able to have someone who knows what that assessment needs and can help interpret the results. There’s an old adage in, in our industry that people lie about numbers, but numbers don’t lie about people. I think that’s also a big deal in the accounting world.
Paul Perez: The numbers tell the story. And so what we’ve been able to do as a certified value builder with regard to helping small businesses identify, those key areas is we launch it free 13 minute assessment that basically asks a whole panoply of questions. And really it takes about 13 minutes to do it and it narrows down what are the eight key drivers that over a course of a decade and assessing 40,000 businesses, small businesses around the United States and even around the world, what are the eight key drivers that if you pay attention to increasing the scores of these drivers, you will have a more valuable business. And those are any areas like, uh, supply chain, uh, areas like, uh, one of, one of the things we talk about is the owner’s trap. Are you as the owner to involved in every aspect of your business?
Paul Perez: Right. Um, Michael Gerber and his landmark book, The E-m myth Revisited said that most entrepreneurs are just brilliant technicians having a brief entrepreneurial seizure. Yeah. And uh, you know, these brilliant technicians, they can do something, they’ve permeated a widget or a big crack the code for something and then they go start a business for themselves. And maybe at first the market reception is really good .
But then you’d hit a point where the business becomes a machine and organism of itself. And the more you bring other people onto that team, then you’ve changed. The dynamic will be working with organisms. And, and we call that complexity, right I mean, if you think about it, every organization, no matter how big or small, whether it’s a marriage or, or a bowling league or a soccer team or a business, um, every organism organization is comprised with organisms.
Paul Perez: And those are people. So if you understand the rules of how organisms work. You understand how big the care and feeding and then, and then the appropriate, deployment of resources, people, resources to an organization, that’s a really big deal. So the assessment helps break down things like that. And then there are other assessments that we use to gauge the leadership as well. Leadership in the space, a leadership competencies are three sixties that we use when we take a deeper dive.
We also have assessments to gauge, you know, what is your oriented organizational strategy, right? And then how well are you deploying that organizational strategy, assessments so they’d get down to company values, mission, vision, values are a part of that whole strategic planning package. A lot of organizations say they have values, but when you walk from one person to the next and you ask them, you know, hey, what’s the, what are the values of the organization.
Paul Perez: They don’t know because they say something like, I think it’s on the website. And then really what it amounts to is nothing more than what can. The values drive our behaviors, values drive what we know to be the mission. And so very important to get to that. So there’s a suite of how powerful assessments that we use to get to those right numbers to get those right things, not just identified, but assessed. So that the next step is we can create a plan of action with milestones. We’ll talk about that in the next video.