The snow is not the problem. The shaking is. Why thirty minutes of silence a day is how founders find the vision that was already sitting there.
Most founders only check cash when panic hits. Here's the weekly cash review I give home service owners: same day, same time, 13 weeks ahead.
March 2021, a Texas ranch, and six people from my leadership team. You cannot reheat a room. The conference is not the trip. The van is the trip.
The snow is not the problem. The shaking is. Why thirty minutes of silence a day is how founders find the vision that was already sitting there.
Most founders only check cash when panic hits. Here's the weekly cash review I give home service owners: same day, same time, 13 weeks ahead.
March 2021, a Texas ranch, and six people from my leadership team. You cannot reheat a room. The conference is not the trip. The van is the trip.
You can delegate the P&L, the hiring, the whole calendar. The care comes back every time, and it moves up to you. The founder's real job.
The ten disciplines from Gino Wickman and Rob Dube, handed to a friend on a back porch in July. Where I argue with the order, and the one discipline a man can hide inside.
You never know what's going to happen at the intersection of one point in time and a few people willing to tell the truth.
I walked into a leadership meeting with a client's team about a year into working with them. Twelve people around the table. Everyone had a status update. Everyone gave their status update. An hour later, we had a shared understanding of what had already happened and nothing had been decided. That is not a meeting. That is a group status email that required everyone to show up in person. WHAT A REAL LEADERSHIP MEETING DOES There is a version of the weekly leadership meeting that most teams never experience. One where the issues that have been bouncing around in people's heads all week get named out loud, get owned by the right person, and get resolved before they become next week's bigger problem. That version requires three things that most teams skip. First , the issues have to be named honestly, not diplomatically. Diplomatic issue identification produces incomplete lists. What you are actually worried about has to be said in the room, not saved for the parking lot conversation after. Second , they have to be solved at the right level. Most of the time the founder is not the right person. A mature team asks who is actually closest to this problem, and puts the solve there. Third , the priorities have to stay honest. Most leadership teams do not need more ambition. They need fewer things on the list, held with more discipline. When every item is labeled important, people quietly stop believing anything actually is. WHAT CHANGED WHEN THEY CHANGED THE MEETING We rebuilt the format with that client. Same people, same time slot, different structure. A short pulse on the numbers, a review of what moved and what stalled on the real priorities, then time to identify and solve the actual issues, not report on them. Three things happened in the first month. The founder stopped carrying half the company's unresolved issues home over the weekend. The team started solving things without waiting to be told. And the leadership conversations shifted from status reporting to real decision-making. The meeting did not fix the business. It created the conditions for the team to fix the business themselves. THE QUESTION TO BRING TO YOUR NEXT MEETING Before your next leadership meeting, write down the three things you are most worried about in the business right now. Not the agenda items. The real things. Then ask: do these get named and solved in our weekly meeting, or do they stay in my head until they become a crisis? If the answer is your head, the meeting needs to change. A business that still depends on the founder's nervous system to hold its unresolved issues has not yet built a real leadership team. It has built a group that reports to a person. What is sitting in your head right now that belongs in a room with your team? Prepared by Benny Fisher | Visionary Navigator | bennyfisher.com
Do the exercise. Not in your head. On paper, this week. Pick the age. Write the five. Write the obituary your kid reads. Then extend it, and write what you would do with the extra time.
I've sat across from a lot of business owners who are working toward an exit.
Three rooms that taught me how to do this, two men who are gone, and a backyard that fills up on Thursday. There's a gift sitting in my house right now that I can't tell you about yet. It's for Thursday. Every Pond member who walks into that backyard is getting one. There will be plenty of other people there too, friends, families, folks who are just curious about what we're building, and I'm glad about every one of them. But this piece is for the members. I've been working on it quietly for a while and I keep walking past it and stopping. I'll tell all of you what it is next week, after everybody has gone home. Right now I just want to sit with how this feels for a minute. I didn't make it myself. I commissioned my friend Brad Dalton. Brad makes gifts out of clay, under the name Clay and Spirit. Gift-maker is a real job and one of the better ones I know of. Watching him build this thing was its own gift. He made it with joy. I mean actual joy, the kind you can see in a man's hands while he works. There's video. You'll get the video. The barbecue is sold out. We never sold a ticket. We just ran out of room. Members are coming. Friends are coming. People who are still deciding what they think about what we're building are coming. Spouses, kids, the whole thing. Somebody is going to be in the pool by noon and somebody else is going to be at the fire pit at eleven at night, and I already know exactly who both of those people are. I'm sitting here on a Saturday going over the list and I don't have great words for what I feel. So let me back into it. HOW I LEARNED TO DO THIS I believe we were built for each other. Not in a greeting card way. I believe God made every one of us a masterpiece and then made us so that we can't quite see our own work without somebody else standing in the room. I think that's on purpose. I've felt called to be the guy who gets people in the same room since long before I had a company to hang it on. It might be the only real purpose I've ever had. But the way I do it, I did not come up with any of that. I got taught. By three rooms and by a couple of men who are not here anymore. The first was VeeFriends. I had a Hangout Hawk, so a group of us would get on Zoom together, and then we'd end up in the same room in person now and then. I also had a Gift Goat, which meant Gary would randomly surprise you and drop something at your door. No occasion. No reason. Just a box on the porch. I remember thinking, man, this is really cool. This is the way it's done. Then I joined Steve Sims and the Distillery. Day one, before I had done a single thing to earn it, a thoughtful gift showed up with a handwritten letter. Day one. I knew right then that Steve was different. Then I went to a Speakeasy, and it was not a hotel conference room with a projector and bad coffee. It was just cool. Cool in a way I had never seen anybody pull off. Then I met John Ruhlin. This guy gave gifts for a living. Wrote the book on it, Giftology. John made you feel like you were his best friend inside of five minutes, and the wild part is that he made a few hundred people feel exactly that way and every one of them was telling the truth. John died in August of 2024. It's two years this week. Steve died last July. Neither one of them will be in my backyard on Thursday. Both of them will be. THE PART I HAD TO BE TAUGHT TWICE The other room that got me here is the 10 Disciplines with Gino Wickman and Rob Dubé. Couple years in now. That's where I stopped treating peace like a reward you collect after the business finally behaves, and started treating it like something you build on purpose, at the same time as everything else. Here is what I came out of all of it believing. Every driven entrepreneur is called to relationship. Called to connection. Called to generosity. Called to impact. Called to peace. Not one of those instead of the others. All of it, at once, on purpose. That's what The Pond came out of. Not a business plan. A pile of rooms that other people built for me, and the feeling that I owed somebody the same thing. WHAT I HAVE TO WATCH ON THURSDAY Old Benny runs this barbecue from the kitchen. Old Benny is checking the ice, counting chairs, watching the driveway, making sure the food trucks are on time, and he gets to the end of the night having hosted a great party he was never actually at. I know that guy. I still am that guy some days. So the thing I'm telling myself all week is simple. Be still. Stay in the moment. Let it be what it is. The gift is done. The people are coming. There is nothing left to manage. Whether I actually pull that off is a different post. ONE MORE THING We hit capacity this year, which still does not feel real to me. If you wanted to be there and could not get in, tell me. I'll put you on the list for next year, and next year we'll figure out how to make more room. Here is what I keep landing on. Experiences rock. Not a feed, not a nice email, not a well-designed announcement. A thing that actually happens to people, in a place, with other people in it. That is what Gary and Steve and John gave me, and it is the only thing I know how to hand back. But the thing I actually want to leave you with is this, and I want you to sit with it a second longer than is comfortable. Somebody built a room for you. Gary built one. Steve built one. John built one. Gino and Rob built one. Somebody, somewhere, made space for you before you had done anything to deserve it, and it changed the direction you were pointed. Have you built one for anybody yet? Not a group chat. Not a follower count. A room. With a door you hold open and a table you set on purpose. Who is sitting outside of yours right now, waiting on you to notice?