Ep 037 – Progress Over Perfection: Building Winning Processes with Vince Torchia

Vince Torchia #2 ​[00:00:00] The Roots of Success podcast is for the landscape professional who's looking to up their game. We've got a brain trust of experts to help you nurture the roots of a successful business and grow to the next level. This is The Roots of Success. Tommy Cole: Welcome to another episode of Roots of Success podcast. I'm your host, Tommy Cole, and we've got a great episode. Vince Torchia, vice president of the Grow Group. How are you, Vince? Vince Torchia: I'm good, Tommy. Always great to be with you. Thanks for making time for me. Tommy Cole: if you don't know Vince, vice president of the Grow Group also runs all the peer groups and the famous GROW! Conference in February every year. Leads that team and Vince, how are you? What's going on? Like traveling and then doing peer groups. What's the latest with you? Vince Torchia: no, it's, it's a busy fall. It's a good fall. Not going to complain about being busy ever with our groups. We're up to 19 groups now. So we've got group meetings happening. As people are approaching fall, Tommy, it's like, okay, [00:01:00] what am I going to do to make the rest of this year as good as I can, but I've also got one eye on 2025. We're at that weird time of year where you're doing two things at once as an owner and a leader. Thinking about how do I, how do I maximize the last quarter of the year? But like I said, I got to start planning for 2025. I got to figure out my team, my purchases, what my goals are. So again, people have had a great 2024 and they're really focusing now on, on ending in a high note. Tommy Cole: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean the best is yet to come. It's, this is the strength of the season. The weather's starting to turn all across the country, which is awesome. It's a little cooler, tons of enhancements, tons of opportunity. I feel like this, this fall is going to last Quite a while into the end of the year. It's where to make up some ground. If you had a slow start to 2024 season, but rock and roll. Webinar On Systems and Processes Tommy Cole: Let's jump right into it, Vince. You've got something really awesome brewing, tomorrow Friday the 13th getting a little spooky around here, but you've got something really cool planned up your sleeve. What, what's going on tomorrow? Vince Torchia: Yeah. So I'm really excited, Tommy. [00:02:00] I'm hosting a webinar really focused around systems and process called all systems go. And I'm gonna be joined by Chase Coates. Who's a current ACE member of ours. And Chase and I are just going to walk through really the power of process within companies. I think as we've learned, there's two things, every company needs it's people in process, right? And we spent a lot of time talking about people. The process really becomes that secret sauce. And again, if you peel back any organization, whether they're in the green industry or not, power of process shows through you think about UPS or Amazon, all those packages getting delivered, they don't just wake up in the morning and think, Hey, how am I going to get these done? Right. They're following a system. They're following a process. You think about the McDonald's that will run. With an 18 year old line cook, right? It's because he stays in a box or she stays in a box and they follow the process and they get their work done. So Chase and I are going to walk through a really cool framework on that. Chase is a great operator. he really understands the operations of the business. He's got a great perspective. He's grown his company very quickly, leveraging process, [00:03:00] leveraging technology, leveraging his team. He's got a ton of insight and a ton to share. And Tommy, one thing that always comes to mind. The improtance ofan effective morning rollout Vince Torchia: When I think about landscaping, I think about process is the morning rollout, right? As we talk about, when we get to go on site with companies, when we're visiting them for peer groups, when we're on field trips and we see companies roll out in the morning, you can tell a lot about a company just by how that morning rollout goes. Are we doing a stretch and flex? Do we have a huddle? Do we have a sense of direction for the day? Is it a little bit of a morning circus? There's a lot that goes on in the first 15 minutes of every Morning at a landscaping company that really sets your day up for success. And I know you agree with me, but that's all built on process, right? So a great morning rollout tomorrow morning, Friday, the 13th, when Jason and I do our, our webinar together, if your team rolled out great tomorrow morning, that means you did a lot of stuff right a month ago. Right. We understood our schedule. We understood our capacity. We knew if somebody was on vacation, we had our [00:04:00] plant materials ordered. We had our rain days built in. We knew what our most schedule was. We knew what our enhancement schedule was to your point. We didn't just wake up Friday morning and think, hey, I wonder what we're going to do today. So again, Chase and I are going to cover a whole boatload of stuff, but if you're out there thinking now. Okay, Vince. Okay, Tommy. I think I hear about process all the time. Like, where do I start? Start with your morning rollout, work your way backwards, right? Have a conversation with your team about what an ideal morning rollout would look like, and you'll be amazed when you realize, man, that really started four weeks ago when I sold that job. And, and that led me to a good morning rollout this morning. Tommy Cole: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with you, Vince. I'm a huge fan in the morning, right? I feel like it sets the tone for the day. And if you've got a sort of a negative tone, sort of dead beat or it's, it's unorganized, that's continuation of the day. Every time we go on sites events, we always see some, you can probably tell within the first 15, 20 minutes how the day will go with that team. Not only that, how things will be [00:05:00] executed with that team. Right. It's from people, the equipment, the jobs, the maintenance routes, all that. If it's kind of a mess, first thing, it's going to be a mess for the rest of the day. What I learned back when I was a kid in college, I, some of you guys know this story, but I worked at Sam's Club during college. And they had this thing called morning huddle. And I thought this was the biggest joke of my life. I'm like, it was on eight 30, the store opens at nine and we get around in a big huddle and a circle in the front of the store. And we're like doing jumping jacks and celebrating like work anniversaries and kumbaya. I'm like. I'm in college. This makes no sense. I'm like hung over, I'm sleepy. But now like here we are with the morning roll up and it makes total sense. It kind of starts the day. So a hundred percent agree with you. Vince Torchia: And Tommy, if you think about it, Sam's Clubs is a massive company. Yeah. There's probably 50 Sam's Clubs in Dallas Metro. I'm being funny, but there's a ton of them, right? Somebody in [00:06:00] corporate did the math on that and said, well, on average, a Sam's Club has 30 hourly employees. On average right now in Dallas, Texas, they're making 17. 80 an hour. Multiply that by 30 times 50, we got a couple of commas in terms of indirect wasted time every morning, but they go, no, that's not how you look at it. That's an investment in our team and it's investment and the next eight hours of the day. So people will always run that math and they'll always go. I come to Grunder. I go to these companies. You guys do a morning huddle every morning. You got a hundred guys clocked in for 15 minutes just to give high fives. And Marty talks about the mission statement. Yeah, that's exactly what we do. Right. Because there's eight more hours in that day that need to be productive and you need to be the same page about. So again, that all starts back with system. It all starts back with process. And I will tell you, right. We talked about morning huddles. I'll continue on it. I'll tell you the surefire way to have a terrible morning huddle. It's not have anybody on it to get out there and go, Hey, Tommy, what do you want to talk about? Or, Hey, Vince, what do you want to [00:07:00] talk about? Like, no, somebody has got to come in every morning with a plan for that to be successful. And that still goes back to process, but you're exactly right. I mean, Sam's club saw the value in it. Our company see the value in it. That's a process, right? It's a form of one that morning huddle. Tommy Cole: Yeah, 100 percent agree. You know, it's one of those things that, owning a certain process. I think you hit, you kind of hit a little nerve there, right? The importance of ownership of processes Tommy Cole: Talk about what that means, because we hear a lot of conversations and talk, peer group meetings, just sort of water cooler talk about, well, what do I do? I'm building systems and processes. I'm building systems and processes. It's like this. New, catchy phrase now, but what really is that, what, what, what does that mean? And, and if I'm taking what you're saying, Vince, it's like, it's a bunch of the little things that add up to an entire system. So let's just talk about one process of the morning rollout is X, but you have like 50 processes that equal the entire system. Is that how you envision [00:08:00] it? Vince Torchia: Oh, I know. That's absolutely right, Tommy. And to your point about ownership, I stole this from Jim Cali, right? Our, our fellow ACE facilitator, ACE leader at McFarlin Stanford. But when people talk about systems and processes, Jim has the best comeback I've ever heard for this. Right. And I use it all the time. Now I always give Jim credit for it. But do companies ever miss payroll, Tommy? Do they ever just not run payroll? Right? No. Like if payroll happens every week or every other week, right? Depending on your company, it always happens. I can tell you that every company listening to this has a system or process for payroll. It might just be that Vince handles it. That might be the process, right? I'm not saying it's perfect, right? But everybody has a system or process for payroll. And I will tell you why it always works. Cause you can draw back to what you just said. Somebody owns payroll. If it's a payroll week, you are not walking in the office being like, Tommy, are you doing payroll this week? Or am I doing payroll this week? Or, or who's doing payroll this week? No, no, no, no. Everybody knows [00:09:00] who's going payroll. And again, I can hear the arguments. Yeah, Vince, but payroll, you're messing with people's checks. It's got to be right. That's how we got to treat everything else. But I will tell you, the reason it's so successful is because of ownership. Tell me when people start to talk about systems or process, and they go, yeah, well, we were doing really well with it, and then it fell off. Yeah, we used to do morning huddles and then Tommy went on vacation and now we don't do them anymore or yeah, we used to meet when jobs went over or under budget. We used to meet about a sales or production handoff. Inevitably, if you really dig into it and you go through the five whys of lean, why did it fail? Why did that not happen? Why did you end up there? Right? And you really dig into it. It's because somebody let the system break. The system was built. It was there. We had the agendas. We knew we wanted to cover. We had a way to do it. We had the checklist. We spent the time making the document. Right. But inevitably, somebody just kind of let it go by the wayside. Now, maybe it wasn't a priority for them or other things came up, but to your point, it all goes back to [00:10:00] ownership. If we can build the best system process in the world, if we don't have somebody that owns the completion of that. To your point, if we don't have somebody that is going to go check on the 50. Sub process things that have to happen for it to be successful. You're going to be on a sit and spin, right? You're going to be doing a whole lot of work, doing a whole lot of energy, but you're never going to get anywhere because you don't have ownership. So if you're listening here and you're thinking about, okay, I started on the process of systems in my company. I'm stuck or I'm failing. My first question would be who owns it, who owns it. And then we can dig into details from there. Tommy Cole: Yeah, so Vince, so that's the first part is ownership. So what's gonna happen, right, is I assign owners to all these processes that we need to build. The next phase of that, I know where you're going, right, is this whole accountability piece, right? Well, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, you know, I assigned my office manager. She does this, my account manager he does that, but like they don't do it, and I don't understand, like I [00:11:00] told them to do it, But it just never gets done. What happened? Benefits of Open Communication Vince Torchia: Yeah. We had a lost in translation. We had a misalignment of priorities. We had a misalignment of ownership. And Tommy, I'll tell you nine times out of 10, that is through no bad actors. That is through no malintent that is through nobody trying to screw anything up, people just have a workload and they prioritize every day and sometimes they don't prioritize the right things. And so I will tell you that what I'm seeing in companies, and I can use Grunder as an easy example. Is that we were sort of a closed off company previously. We didn't always share information. We didn't always know exactly who was doing what, not because we were afraid of sharing information. We just didn't, we just didn't do it. It wasn't a part of our culture, right? It wasn't a part of our systems and processes. Then all of a sudden, when you open that up and you make systems or processes or checklists visible to other people, it like stares you right in the face when something didn't get done. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa. We [00:12:00] have a process for billing work. How have we not billed Mr. Cole yet? Oh, well, we didn't have time approved. Oh, we didn't have time approved. No, and you can see it right there on our dashboard. We have 14 more jobs that have time approved and the Coles were one of them. Well, the Coles were done two weeks ago. So, whoa, whoa, whoa, where, where are we off here? Right. But until it becomes visual and people can start to see it, they see these big red marks or big holes in things. Now we can begin to figure out why it broke along the way. But if, if, if I'm the only one with the checklist, chances are, that's probably never going to get fully implemented. That's gotta be a public thing that other people can see and work with. Tommy Cole: Yeah, so it's almost making an awareness to everyone on your team, right? So if I hold all the little checklists to myself, right? We're now one single ownership person. But we can never scale or we can never complete those processes along the way. So when you open it up visually, so it's no different than like budgeted versus actual hours. And you know, a lot about that, [00:13:00] right. at Grunder. So people also say, well, don't post it visually, right? Because then it's going to expose others or it's going to show the weaknesses or the strengths of others. But what you're saying is no, no, timeout, timeout that strengthens you. The team, right? So we're, if we're all in a row boat and we're rowing, but yet the left side can, can own a few things and the right side of the boat doesn't do anything. What happens? We just, we just keep going in circles. So you're saying visible, own it, and that's big on accountability. Vince Torchia: Oh, and tell me we're in the season of we're in a great season of sports here, right? College football, the NFL are firing up. Playoff baseball is coming. Can you imagine? The New York Mets playing, starting going into the playoffs and going, you know what? Our pitching hasn't been that good. So let's not post any of our pitching metrics for right now. Cause I don't want our pitchers to worry about our pitching [00:14:00] metrics right now. Hey, Joe Burrow started off the season with a loss. Let's not, let's not have anything about our record this week at practice because I don't want Joe to be upset that we started off with a loss and he played pretty well and he did this and that. So it's really not his fault. It's like, we're not, we're not blaming. We just have to get this out there. And then people can be like, wait a minute. Every construction job we've done over a hundred thousand dollars, we have lost money on. Why? Right, but if we, if we're the only ones who know that as a leadership team, we're never going to build a process for that. Right. Why is all of our commercial work so profitable compared to our residential work? Like, what are we missing here? Right. As a team, but that exposure, that awareness, right? A much better word that you used awareness. That will allow people to ask questions and that's what we want, right? We want our team to be asking questions and we want to have a culture that supports that. Right. If you have a culture where. Questions get, you know, kind of put back on people or you get [00:15:00] defensive. Yeah, that would be difficult to overcome. But if your culture is about empowerment, if your culture is about, Hey, we want to win this together, we shouldn't be concerned about, right. Having our team be aware of performance on things. But again, to your point, that that's all a version of a system or process because we want people to understand where the process breaks, Tommy Cole: 100 percent agree with you. You know, at the end of the day, I always look at it as, They're professional football players, right? They're professional baseball players. We're professional landscapers, right? So why can't we have all the metrics and the data that shows Every fumble, every touchdown, every strikeout, so we can analyze the data to make the entire team better. And if you, if you think about that, Oh man, the sky's the limit as far as learning and growing as a team. Vince Torchia: And Tommy, you're exactly right. That allows us then to focus more on systems and process, right? Because it's going to show glaring holes where our systems and [00:16:00] processes are maybe working well, and maybe where they're not working and where we have ownership, maybe where we have a lack of ownership. Where we've got 2 quarterbacks, right? And we don't have ownership of a process because Tommy and Vince are doing it together. Like, it doesn't work, right? But you're exactly right. We want that. As part of systems and processes. And don't overthink it. If you're out there thinking, okay, this sounds good, but man, what's my mechanism for starting this? Stoplights. We use stoplights for everything. There's a red, a yellow, and a green, right? If things are going well, they're green, right? We're moving along. Traffic's unimpeded. We're moving well. Yellow. Hey, we either got to stop or go here. What's going on, right? We're caught in the middle and red is just, hey, let's stop. Let's figure out what's going on. Let's resolve this problem. And let's get back to it, right? Whether that's budgeted hours, whether that's time missed for time approvals in the mornings, whether that's activities that salespeople are doing, whether that's misses on sales to production handoffs, if there's 15 things that have to happen between sales and production, and we have 12 of them that are [00:17:00] green and two of them that are yellow. And one of them that are red, Hey, we're doing pretty good. Let's keep the greens green. Let's try to convert some of these yellows and let's have a, let's have a way to get this red out of this process. But until we know that. Right? It's hard to know where to start and hard to know, right, what we can correct on. Conquering the "What if?" Tommy Cole: Yeah. Vince, I'm going to play the other side of the card as, as the general business owner to go. Yeah, but yeah, but Tommy and Vince, that sounds all groovy, but like, what if this happens? Yeah. But what, what, what if it's not, what if we enroll it and then it just doesn't, it doesn't work or it's, it's, it sounds funny or my team doesn't have much buy in and, I don't know, I don't know, Tommy, like, what, what do you say to that? Vince Torchia: I say, I understand. As a recovering overthinker myself, I get it. Tommy, I could win an award for overthinking. I could win an award for rationalizing why something won't happen the way I think it's gonna happen. Right? I'm amazing at it. And you gotta divorce yourself from that. And you gotta say, [00:18:00] okay. Why am I doing that? Why am I catastrophizing the system or process that we haven't even gotten into yet? Right? Why am I doing that? And then you've got to say, you know what? This goes back to the beginning of time. There is a time when overthinking is going to get you into so much more trouble than you could have ever realized because you're never going to do anything. Why would we do lawn care? We could spill chemicals into yards and hurt people and dogs. And what if it gets into the runway and then our company gets sued, right? Like you can, you can go down that path with anything. Why would I want to have a 15 step process? Cause then I got to train people to the 15 step process. And isn't it better that they just go sell and my sales people aren't worried about a sales process. Like you can do it with everything, but I will tell you that we have seen it time and time again. Right. That people who prioritize progress over perfection win every single time, because we're never going to be perfect. I hate to tell everybody this, but tomorrow on Chase and I's webinar, there is no perfect process. There is no perfect system. We're not going to talk about perfection because that's, that's a place we're [00:19:00] never going to get to, but you can talk about progress, right? So, okay. I'll go with you on that. That stuff might happen. That's true. But let's just work towards what we can control, which is putting a process in place, making it a little better each time we use it. And you will start to get quick wins from that. It's, it's an amazing feeling when someone puts a system or process in place that works. Cause you get that kind of rush of like, Oh my God, I did this thing. I got a quick win from it. My sales team was more informed. Our client had a better experience. Our morning huddle was awesome. We got out of here in eight minutes. How did that happen? Like, and it makes you want to do more. So if you're thinking that, which again, I completely relate to, I completely understand, just trust us, do not let perfection be the enemy of progress. Do a couple of these, get them out and running. Tell me, I tell people, you're going to, you're going to bump your elbow. You're going to scrape your knee. You're going to get a bloody nose. It's going to happen. You're going to goof some stuff up. That's okay, but that's how you get better. So do not let perfection be the enemy of progress [00:20:00] here. Tommy Cole: Love it. Three words, progress over perfection. And here's what I recommend, Vince, put that quote on your front of your computer screen. Or your bathroom mirror every day and go, it's about the progress. That's what makes organizations and teams successful. And if you want a comparison to something really easy. It's the bicycle, right? When you get on the bicycle, do you overthink the bicycle as a kid and go, What if I fall? What if I break? What if I hit this? What if I, well, I'm just not going to ride it. I'm out. Right? No. You get on it, you fall. You fall, you fall, you complain, you cry, you get frustrated, and you just keep going and going. It's kind of like my golf game, right? You just keep going. Keep playing, you know, just, but it's progress over perfection. If you keep, if you keep the mindset there, that's a big start of it, right? Just get going. It's just that famous Nike quote, just do it. [00:21:00] And stop analyzing where that's perfect or not. And then, but the discipline to keep going along the way to make it better. Vince Torchia: and you're exactly right. We're trying to get the snowball running downhill and pick up speed along the way. Right? At first, we got to push it. We got to rock it. We got to get it going. But you are right. Once we get it going, God, we have momentum and momentum is so powerful for teams. It really is. And systems and processes support momentum. They support this thing that we're after, which is that feeling like things are easy, like a knife through butter, like all those things we think about, right? But things are easy when we've got systems and process in place. And you're, you're exactly right. Couldn't, couldn't say it any better. Tommy Cole: So great. Now I'm like, I'm ready to go. Friday 13th is tomorrow. The big showdown, like, like I'm, I'm getting jazzed up. Like, let's, let's go. Let's get after it. I mean, the, the weather's cooler. It's fall. It's nothing but enhancement season, install season, getting ready for the winter, Vince, where do we go to sign up? What's going on? How do I [00:22:00] log in? Give us all the details. Vince Torchia: Yeah, so join chase and I again tomorrow, Friday, the 13th of September, just go to McFarlinStanford. com/webinar Chase and I will be on there, we're ready to rock and roll plenty of time for Q and A while. We're on there as well. We'll answer your questions along the way. We'll take you through a framework for how to build out systems and processes. We'll talk about my experience. Dovetail that with Chase's experience. Chase is a great leader. Awesome. Super super ACE member that we have really lucky that he's joining us and it'll be a great experience. So, McFarlinStanford.com/webinar and Tommy, Chase, and I look forward to seeing everybody tomorrow. Tommy Cole: It's awesome. I'm really excited to it. It's so happy for Chase. He's a great, great guy. Great friend. I got to visit that place a couple of years ago. It was blown away and it just, he's, it keeps getting better and better and better. We just, when you think he's reached it, he keeps keep going further. So great, great case study with Chase, and I'm looking forward to it. Vince Torchia: Yep. Tommy, thanks for having me as always. Looking forward to seeing everybody tomorrow for our webinar with Chase. McFarlinStanford.com/webinar. [00:23:00] And yeah, looking forward to it. Tommy Cole: Absolutely. See you then. John: Ready to take the next step? 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