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What happens if you take a day off to play golf? Does your phone ring off the hook? Do people wait and say, you know what, I was I didn't make this decision because I couldn't reach you? Okay? Do your employees know what to do in all cases that come up? And are you coming back into chaos? When you walk in the day after you've had that great day of golf and you walk in on a Monday, are you like, holy sh, this place is a nightmare? I can't stand to walk into my office on a Monday because I'm waiting for a pile of crap. No, if you own a company, the team has it covered because there's clear roles, responsibilities, job descriptions, there's someone left in charge, and you have systems in place to keep things running.

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You're listening to the Ground Transportation Podcast with Ken Lucci of Driving Transactions and James Blaine of PAX Training. Learn how you can build a thriving transportation business with real profits, repeat clients, and enterprise value. And now for your hosts, Ken and James.

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Well, good afternoon, Ground Transportation Podcast Audience. My name is Ken Lucci from Driving Transactions. And um I'm usually joined by the lovely and talented James Blaine from PAX Training. But sadly, James is out traveling. This is going to be a solo episode. Stay where you are. Don't tune into Joe Rogan. Stay where you are. You're going to get a lot out of this. This is going to be an episode, the first of a few, that we call Going from Grind to Great. I started business consulting in 2018. Before that, I was an entrepreneur, had my own businesses, uh boutique hospitality company. Before that, I had my limousine company for five years, ambassador limousine in Florida. Before that, I had my medical alarm company in Florida from 2000 to 2005 when I sold it. And then before that, I had a security company way back in the day when I had much more hair and I was much, much younger. And I can tell you that I lived the grind every single day, seven days a week, pretty much always been on call. So I'm happy to say my last two companies, I went from being the grinder seven days a week to really focusing on the growth of the business, and that's why I was able to sell the company by having people on my team that did things that in many cases I wasn't good at, or in many cases, I had other things that were strategically more important. So today we're going to start with the top 10 signs that you have a job and not a company. Why is this important? Entrepreneurs call us every week. They call us and say, Can I want to, I want you to sell my company. And when we do a review and a performance analysis on the business, we find that really you don't have a company. You have a job because the entire business revolves around you and cannot function without you, or it will suffer if something happens to you. So we're going to spend some time today talking about the top 10 reasons. We're going to focus on your job, you, and how you should evolve as a leader. So let's go through it. The first sign that you know that you have a job and you don't have an independent functioning company is that everything stops when you're gone. Everything goes through you. Sales will slow down, operations become chaotic, employees stop and wait to talk to you to make decisions, and customers call your cell phone directly. Now, I I will share with you when I owned Ambassador Limousine, I had that happen to me. My cell phone had about 1800 contacts in it. And I got to a point where it was interfering when I first started the business, it was interfering with me driving. So the first thing I did was I got a call center and I trained the call center how to respond. At first it was, hey, Ken's not available, he'll get back to you. But then I said, this is ridiculous. And I trained them on how to take, at the very least, information on the wedding, information on the event, information on what they were doing, and I trained them to do vanilla ice cream bookings. So everything stops when you're gone. Your job should be to build systems that generate revenue and process transactions without you. Number one, build a sales engine. We'll get into it. The operations engine, that means that once the reservation is in, you got to make sure it can be processed. Finance engine, bill and collect and pay. Now we are very, very fortunate in our industry to have some great offshore call centers and onshore call centers that can take the typical reservation. And I understand if you're the owner, you're going to be doing the dispatching. Great. But as we go through this, we're going to talk about how you're going to eventually get rid of doing a critical process. So the goal here, and I mean this, is to make yourself the least important person in your company, in your business. We're going to talk about your duties later. But if you're not buying into that, this podcast is not going to be good for you. This episode. Number two, you're not really building a business. You're literally stuck in a lifestyle job, and it's a seven-day week grind. Okay? So we're going to talk a lot about building systems, and then we're going to talk about the evolution of what you do. So the second reason you know that you've got a job and not a business is you're the chief salesperson. This is the first process to write detailed, written processes around. If you're the one that generates most of the new business, you're the one that actually has to take the reservations, even if they're marginally complex. I I work with an operator long ago who uh got into motor coaches. He'd been into motor coaches for for two years. And his people, I I watched them. I watched them answer a phone and say, you know, uh Mr. So-and-so is going to have to get back to you. He's the one that does all the pricing. Really? I mean, your job should be to write down every bit of a sales process, every type of service that you sell, and your people should be able to do the vanilla ice cream stuff, the vanilla airport reservations, the transfers, the five-hour motor coach charters, et cetera, et cetera. Now, obviously, there's complex stuff, right? But you have to have a process around that. We have a situation with a customer we did a calculator for, an over-the-road calculator. I don't expect you to give your line people the ability to do a five-day over-the-road unless they've been properly trained and vetted, and all of the options and such have been dealt with. We created a calculator for this person and a process. And the process is the reservation has gathered all the data, they fill out the calculator, they fill out everything that the client needs, they will get back to the client, they tell the client, we'll get back to you within 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and then they go sit with the supervisor, and that supervisor checks the calculator. So if you're the chief salesperson and you haven't documented every possible way to sell every service that you sell, and you haven't documented how you want the reservations handled, that's what a good place to start. How do you answer the phone? What do you want said? How do you address the prospective client? Do you ask the question, how did you hear about us? Have you traveled with us before? No. How did you hear about us? Document that. How to process and document every sale? What do you want with special instructions? How do you verify satisfaction? How do you say thank you? How do you sell more stuff to that person? And how do you ask for referrals? So the sales process is where I would start. Next way you know you have a job and not a company, is every important decision comes to you. If your employees, if you have one or two employees, even if you have an outside call center, if every employee needs your approval to price, to refund, to do purchasing, scheduling, et cetera, you become the bottleneck. Okay? I was on a call with a company owner this week, a Zoom call, to talk about the value of his business. He's been in business for 30-something years. He literally interrupted the call with five phone calls. We had to restart constantly because he was just losing track of what we were talking about. I said to him, this business is totally dependent upon you. It's going to negatively affect the value. So how do you get rid of being the bottleneck for everything? STP, create systems, train people on those systems, and make sure you have processes and people who know them. So your processes. But STP creates systems for everything. How do you open the business? What's the first thing that you do? You open up limo anywhere, you see if there are any messages, you check your email, etc. What's the opening process for the office? What's the closing process? How do you hand off to your call center? STP, systems training processes and the people who know them. Next way that you know that you're running a job, you have a job, a lifestyle job, and not a company, all of the knowledge of the business lives in your head. If you are often the one that only I know that, only I can do that, I'm the one that does that the best. Okay, couple of things. Number one, I want you to remember this phrase does what I'm doing right now add the most value? So we have a client, oh, many years ago, and we valued his business. He wanted to sell, and he confessed to me that he does the books every single month, and it takes him about two days a week. He closes the jobs and he does the billing, he does the payables, he puts it into QuickBooks. And I'm like, wait a minute. You don't close jobs every day? No, I don't let my people do that. So I do that on Tuesdays. That's why your affiliates are pissed off at you because they're waiting for receipts, right? When you do pharmaut work, they need those jobs closed. Anyway, write it down and transfer your knowledge. Walk with a notebook and start with how do I open in the morning? How do I answer the phone? How do I address the client? How do I enter this into my reservation system? Where do I put special instructions? So take every single process, starting with the open, starting with the sale process, the reservation, answering the phone, and then take it through all of the major processes of the company. Create those checklists. James would love the fact that I'm saying create checklists. Create an outline before you create an SOP standard operating procedure, just create an outline of what you expect for the outcome. As a leader, your first, last, and always job is to be teaching. And you may say to me, Ken, I'm only a one-car operator. Well, if you're a one-car operator and you ever want to stop driving, you better write down what you expect for the client experience. If you ever want to stop answering the phone, which by the way, should be one of the first things that you do, makes a ton of money. He doesn't answer the phone, never has. He has a great call center. He's trained them on every possible way the call could go. And the worst case scenario is listen, after you go through all this stuff, text me the question with the client on the phone. He doesn't have to intervene anymore. His entire call center, reservations of dispatches on autopilot. But as a leader, your first last and always job is to be teaching, whether it's an employee or a call center. And your business can only grow as far as you can continue to learn and you can teach. You can transfer your knowledge. Otherwise, it's not scalable. So you can't have all of the knowledge locked in your head, no documentation, right? You're constantly training other people verbally. No, absolutely not. And it's risky if you leave. We'll talk about that a little bit. Next way you know that you actually have a lifestyle job is that all of the revenue coming into the company depends on your personal energy. Well, what do I mean by that? It means that if the revenue only rises and comes through the door the longer hours that you work, right? So if you decide to go away for a week and you do leave it with a call center, the revenue just does not maintain. That is not a company. That's a job. So let's start with creating the ability for your company to have 24-hour selling opportunities. What do I mean by that? First of all, you should absolutely have the ability to your phone is answered live 24 hours a day. Honest to God, if I'm getting messages, I'm going down the road to another service provider. Okay? So your phone has to be answered 24 hours a day. You have to have onboarding information. If you want to be the one to sell the job, after hours, just get onboarding information. I believe that you should set up your call center or set up the people that answer your phones 24 hours a day to be able to sell the vanilla ice cream, what I call the standard airport services transfers and charters. And if at the very least answer all the questions they would have on the more complex and always set a uh let them know what's going to happen next. Listen, Mr. Lucci, the owner will get this first thing in the morning. This is a little bit more complicated. Is it okay if I have them call you in the morning? Excellent. Thank you. What's a good number? Then after you've set up the protocols for how your phone's going to be answered, your website should be on duty 24 hours a day. What do I mean by that? 24-hour forms that people can fill out for even the more complex things. They should be able to order airport services. They should be at least be able to plug in your regional zip codes to and from and get prices to and from. You should always have changing offers on your website. I look at websites of companies that want me to sell their businesses that have not been updated since 2018. That's ridiculous. You should have 24-hour chat available. Now, there are apps that you can have and put on your phone that will allow you to offer chat and it comes up on your phone as a text message. You can set hours. You should have a calendar if somebody wants to set up a wedding consultation. You should have your schedule for anything that group and meeting manifest or group and meeting discussions, et cetera. But you've got to use your website as a sales. It should be able to book the simple stuff. You should be able to collect information from anybody and everybody who's interested in doing business with you. Same with social media. They have a 24-hour messaging functions now. When you do ads on social media, it doesn't mean that you have to be taking live calls at 11 o'clock or midnight. But I hate to tell you, that's when people are doom scrolling, right? So you have to be able to have on social media, if you're doing ads or you're putting out offers, you absolutely have to have messaging. In certain cases, I've looked on social media and I've looked at services for my house. And anytime I stop at that ad, I automatically get a message. I haven't done anything, but I love the fact that it looks like someone is attending to my lead, the best ones are sending me a text message saying, you know, let me know when you when you'd like to have a discussion about that, I can call you in the morning. And the best ones are always following up. Next way you know that you have a job instead of a company, is the employees solve problems by asking you. So if your team keeps coming to you with even the most mundane problems, okay, you are the bottleneck. You need to empower your team to solve problems. And again, not hand them off to you. If you're using a call center, and there's no reason why even a one or two car operator can't afford a call center, they should not just be taking messages. You should be giving them if-then scripts, okay? If-then scripting. And if they are dealing with existing clients, they should be able to take the reservation. So let's back up a step. Before someone comes to me, if you're a larger company and the employees keep coming to you, first of all, documentation is our salvation. Focus on the acronym of the STP. Systems training and processes and people that know them. How do you open the business, the office? How do you close the business? How do you hand off the dispatch screen? How do you take a reservation? How do you process the payment? How do you assign drivers, track rides? How do you dispatch? Dispatch can be different than tracking. How do you close jobs and bill trips? What are the exceptions? How do you assure quality and how do you thank your customers? And the easiest way to do this to start this is to start keeping a notebook and tracking what you yourself do. There's just absolutely no question that that's the best way. If you have employees, when I owned a company with we, I think we had 85 drivers, 85 chauffeurs, CDL drivers, and 10 people in dispatch and reservations, I would say to them, before you come to me with a problem, figure out what the best three solutions are. Okay? And then don't bring them to me. Make the decision. I empowered people to give people money back if they weren't happy. I empowered people to give total credit or give the next trip comp. And more so than that, anytime we encountered a problem, we pulled back, we looked at what the resolution was, but more importantly, and all my clients listen up to this. How do you make that a teachable moment so it never happens again? That's where the training part comes in. If you're having the same repeat problems, it's not the people, it's the lack of the process and the lack of training. Next way you know that you have built yourself a lovely job is if you're the hub, you have a job. Everything revolves around you. If a new CEO could not operate that company using the systems that you've documented, then you literally have created a job that is personality driven. Okay? If everybody has to ask for Ken to get done, we have a problem. If you are the hub, you have a job. Gets back to what I said about your people. You have to establish problem-solving parameters and say, listen, if you get somebody who's complaining about the car wasn't clean or these things, the first question I would ask the client is first of all, apologize, absolutely apologize. How can we solve this for you? We want you satisfied. And give empower them to solve the problem. And if even if they solve the problem in a way that you don't agree with, support them from making the decision and say, you know what, we're going to set a policy around this. Next time, let's do this. But hey, thanks for solving the problem. So you cannot be the hub. And I always tell people three solutions, come to me last. Talk amongst yourselves. What are the three best possible solutions? Come to me last. They thought that the owner of Risk Carlton was crazy when he came up with a system to guarantee client satisfaction and to wow the client. He gave every employee back in the day the ability to spend $500 to solve any problem or as a way of wowing the guest. You could spend $500 to wow the guest. Now that's gone up to $2,000. Okay. So what does that mean? If you're at the Risk Carlton, I can tell you they they absolutely love to solve problems with foods, snacks, and little chocolates, et cetera. They're also great on thank you notes. They're also great on anticipating. But the bottom line is the owner of the Risk Carlton back in the day gave specific parameters about this is how you solve problems. This is what you can spend to solve a problem. I'm never ever going to give you a hard time about it. And then this is what you can spend to wow the client. But very, very, very important. If you have a problem that repeats, it's not the person, it's not the problem, it's the fact that you haven't trained and you haven't figured out a way to engineer the problems out of your company. You've not designed the system to prevent the problem. Well, what do I mean, we'll give you an example. The chauffeur went to the wrong location at the airport because it didn't read special instructions. Okay. If that's the case, if you have that happen, you better set up a protocol about having the chauffeur sign off that they've read the special instructions. If they miss it, if you find that they've taken somebody to the wrong location, I can tell you where this happens constantly. It's because the chauffeur, when they got in the car, the chauffeur did not confirm the location. This is a perfect place for a checklist. You have to tell them what you expect and inspect what you expect them to do. Again, you can't be the hub. Next way that you know that you have a job instead of a company is you can't predict accurate results. At the end of the day, you must be the one to set strategy, and you are the governance of your company. What's governance? Think about the governor of a state. Do you think that they plow the snow or do you think that they make sure the trains run on time because they're the engineer? No. They set the vision, they set the mission, and they track all the important metrics. And they also assure satisfaction. They assure the things are running on time. So what do I mean by that? You have to start with a budget. You have to start with the forecast. You have to look at every vehicle that you have and create a revenue generation schedule, revenue generation forecast for every one of those vehicles. And you have to constantly look back at those metrics and KPIs. Most important thing to me, it's very simple. It's sales, what's our sales goals? Retention and reuse repeats, how many clients are using us on a repeat basis? Is the company profitable? What's your NOI say? And are your assets productive? When you look around, when you look at your fleet, if you don't know what your targets should be on each one of those vehicles, that's problem number one. They're not there as your own personal toys. They are there to produce revenue for you. So you must be the strategy, you must be the governance, you must be the one to make sure the company is profitable, not your CPA, and it's not done at the end of the year. It's a constant, every single month, looking at your financial metrics. So let's go down the list. What's your revenue goal? Well, let's start with what did you do last August? What did your company do for revenue last August? The target should be a 10% increase in how you're going to do that. What did last revenues look like from a production perspective? Sedans and SUVs, airport service charters, et cetera. Set goals and objectives in the beginning of the month and issue them to your team. Gross profit margin on all of your rides is maintained and managed by looking at all of your costs every single month. You should know how much it costs you to turn the key and do the work. The only way you can do that is by looking at a monthly PL. We always like to track your overhead. We like to track how much it costs you to take and manage a reservation, and obviously, what's your NOI? What's my profitability target per month? The problem I have with people who say, well, that's my CPA's job. No, actually it's not. What your CPA does, what an accountant does as a trade, is basically they write down the numbers and they record what you've already done. Think about what I just said. They record what you've already done. They don't know the granularity of your business. You're the one that needs to do that. And that's governance. That's governance. And you must be the strategy. You have to set the vision and the mission, what you expect on every client experience, on every part of your business, on every interaction with your customer and your employee. Track every metric and ensure satisfaction. By the way, satisfaction of your internal client and your external client. How are you making sure that your customers are happy with every experience? Obviously, the review tool in most reservation system. I myself like the owner sending an email just saying, I saw that you took a ride with us this week. Not to bother you, but give me an idea. How did we do? Is there any other suggestions you may have? Send it to the EA as well. This is Ken. I'm the president of Ambassador Limousine. Just wanted to make sure we provided transportation for your boss in Philadelphia. How did we do any feedback, positive, negative, or neutral? Let us know how we can improve. By the way, how can we make your job easier? That's your job as a leader. Okay. So I want to talk about how you know that you have a job definitively. How do you know you have a job and not a company? So let's just make it break it down to three things. Number one, what happens if you take a day off to play golf? Okay, I'm not a golfer. What happens if you're a good friend of mine that takes a day off and he goes fishing? He's smart enough to go way out there to make sure his cell phone doesn't work. But let's just go back to you've just taken a day off. Does your phone ring off the hook? Do people wait and say, you know what, I was I didn't make this decision because I couldn't reach you? Okay? Do your employees know what to do in all cases that come up? Now I'm not talking about a massive accident where obviously they're going to bother you, but I am talking about, you know, we had a late trip. What are we supposed to do there? We had a driver call in sick. What are we supposed to do here? What's the protocol? Customers notice. Does service slip? Are you getting messages from clients on your phone that you didn't answer? Does satisfaction drop? Do you experience, I mean, do do things just fall off the rails? Do the wheels fall off the bus? And are you coming back into chaos? When you walk in the day after you've had that great day of golf and you walk in on a Monday, are you like, holy sh, this place is a nightmare, right? I can't stand to walk into my office on a Monday because I'm waiting for a pile of crap. No, if you own a company, the team has it covered because there's clear roles, responsibilities, job descriptions. There's someone left in charge, and you have systems in place to keep things running. I used to always joke when I left for the day. First of all, I'm going to tell you a story about absolutely being the least important person in my companies. Okay. First and foremost, I owned a company called ResponseLink. We sold medical alarms around the country nationally. We had 126 distributor offices. We had five operating manuals. Why? How did that happen? Because I ran the first operation, the founding branch, if you will, and I wrote down how do you sell these things? Who do you see? Who in healthcare do you see? Who do you present to? How do you take an intake, not the reservation for transportation, for a system? How do you schedule an installation of a system? Right? All of those processes, I had a sales manual, an operations manual, a billing manual, and an administrative manual. Okay? And that didn't happen overnight. I built the system so that I could train 126 distributors. I did the same thing in Ambassador Limousine. I wrote the standard operating procedure manual from day one because I started answering the phone myself and started dispatching. And I knew I didn't like it. I knew I wasn't good at it. I knew from cleaning the cars, I knew what I wanted. I trained every detailer. So if you have a company, all that stuff is documented. The decisions get made. Now, are they buying a car? Of course not. On your day off, they're not going to buy a car. But if the toilet paper is empty, they are ordering it. Your employees are confident. Your employees know what to do. I used to always laugh when I was leaving ambassador for the day, usually to go to a charity event, I would stick my head in reservations and I would say, Shelly, you're in charge. Or I would say to whoever the lead dispatcher is, keep the train, keep the train running on time. And so if you've got a custom a company, things are happening without you, you can take a day off. Let's take it the next step further. When you go on vacation for a week with your family and you try to practice some work-life balance, are they always calling you? Does your phone absolutely is it always ringing? Do the problems get worse? Do they sit there and fester? Hey, this happened last Monday when you get back in. And does the revenue keep flowing? Are all of the clients that call in, even for the most complicated events, are they being taken care of? Are proposals going out? And most importantly, are you coming back into a pile of chaos? That shouldn't happen. You should be able to take a week off and basically say, with all the systems in place, here's what I want you to bother me on. Any accident of any kind, I need to know about it to make sure that the written accident protocols have been followed. I want to know about it. If we have a problem with our top one, two, or three, yes, I want to know about those. If we're five or ten minutes late or Jim calls in sick, you better have a process to take care of that. We used to wake up every single chauffeur client, and they had that system that would call the chauffeur, wake them up. If that chauffeur didn't wake up, it was not my problem. You know whose problem was? It was my chief chauffeur's problem. He was a guy named Jim Herb, and he's still driving for the company. Jim Herb knew, because Jim was an early morning guy anyway. Jim Herb knew if a chauffeur failed to get up or failed to answer, he would call them and then he would go down his list and he would try to get somebody to cover. We always had a backup. So if you can't take a week off, you have a massive problem. You should be able to keep the business growing and going. All of the day-to-day decisions should be made. And by the way, you should come back refreshed. And the problem with owning a business and not taking the vacation is it's one of the number one reasons for burnout in businesses is no work-life balance, no ability to unplug. Okay, let's get to the worst one. What happens if you have to go into the hospital? Well, first of all, if you if you have to go into the ER, and I saw this on Facebook recently, where a small operator missed an affiliate trip because they had to go to the ER. Okay, I I I'm empathetic that the person had to go into the ER, but there should have been a protocol. If something like that happened, the first thing is someone, whether it's a part-time driver, somebody needs to understand the protocol to keep the wheels on the bus. Even if that is calling a friendly competitor and saying, Ken was rushed to the hospital, please can you cover our trips? Or have three or four friendly competitors. But the person was lamenting how he didn't show up for the trip. He because he was in the emergency room and the affiliate was pissed. And the affiliate probably won't use him again. Not because he missed the trip, but because he had no protocols to make sure that that wouldn't happen. Let me give you some other scenarios. When I owned my limousine company, my father died. My father died right after we bought Julie's limousine. So Ambassador limousine I founded in 06. We bought Julie's limousine in 09. My father never got to see the building or the business that we bought. He died. And I had to leave. And I remember getting the call at 7 o'clock in the morning. And I remember calling Shelly, who you hear me talk about all the time, and then I called a guy named Brent Soward. Brent came in and I said, Brent, I don't know when I'm going to be back. I said, You're going to have to FedEx me the paychecks to sign, right? Because I didn't set that up. But I said, here's my work phone, and I'll pay you whatever you need. And I gotta tell you, the only reason why it happened is the man's a good Christian. He took care of my business as if it was his own. And I honestly don't know if I ever thanked him properly. But Jim Herb, my chief chauffeur at that time, he stepped up. They all stepped up because we had a culture and they knew I had to go grieve and take care of certain things. So any hospital stay, we don't control that. You need to have contingency plans on everything. We cannot foresee what's going to happen to us, but when you look around the industry, and we've had clients that have had to sell their businesses because, you know, they got a cancer diagnosis, they had to sell their businesses, the wife had to sell the business because the husband died. At the very least, you have a responsibility to your clients, you have a responsibility to your employees, and you have a responsibility to your family to have every contingency that anything possible that you can predict, lay it out on paper what's supposed to happen. Some simple stuff. What happens when a customer calls and complains? What happens when somebody disputes a bill? What happens when someone calls in sick? Because this is stuff that happens every day of the week. What happens when you get a flat tire? So I have a client that hired a chauffeur, put him through classroom training, got him on the road, and apparently he had a flat tire at the airport. He called the call center, got no direction. It was later at night. He rode back to the office 25 miles on a rim and he wrecked the front end of the car. At the end of the day, that should have been in an SOP manual. At the end of the day, if he couldn't reach the call center, the chauffeur should have had the protocol to call such and such a tow company. That tow company should have automatically had the company's credit card. Okay. Should the owner have been woken up? Maybe. But at the end of the day, I don't want to run a business where I have to be woken up if there's a flat tire. I want to be woken up if there's any kind of an accident, because I want to be the judge and ask the questions. Not the judge, but I want to measure how severe it was. But it doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a written accident protocol. But this first episode is if you started a business for freedom, both financial freedom, and so that your boss isn't telling you what to do. You're the keeper of your kingdom and you are the one that controls your destiny. Unless you want to become a slave to your job, you absolutely need to create all of these systems. You need to make yourself the least important person in the business. That's the ultimate goal. Create the sales engine. How do you want the phones answered? How do they sell specific services? How do you want the calls scripted? What do you expect? Same thing with the operations engine. How do you assign chauffeurs? How do you track trips? How do you assure the vehicles are on time? The finance engine. How do you bill? How do you collect? How do you pay? What do you approve? Etc. Your goal should be to be the least important person in the day-to-day. Your job has to be governance and strategy. Governance makes sure that everything happens on time and efficiently. Strategy is what do you want your business to look like next year and the year after that? And you also have to manage the financials. You have to manage the language of business, which is your financials. We will get into that on another episode. There is nothing wrong, I don't want anybody to think there's anything wrong with having a lifestyle job. I have a lifestyle job. My business partner does the financial analysis and I do the business analysis. We have retained clients. But at the end of the day, if I die, he'll keep working with the retained clients. At the end of the day, though, unless I bring on someone else that can do what I do and someone that can do more of what he does, we can't scale. And this business will suffer and die if I suffer and die. Now I'm pretty confident many of our retained clients love my business partner more than me. I think they would keep him on. But I'm not looking to pass this business on to my kids. I'm not looking to sell it. My message to operators is your business is not special to anybody but you. If you ever want to sell it, or if you ever want to be able to take an extended vacation or keep it running when you are, God forbid in the hospital, you have to do all of the things I'm talking about. Systematize everything. Everything is a system, everything is a process. Everybody needs to know what happens if you're not around or if you're not available. And it starts, if you're a one or two car operator, it starts with writing down the protocols of how clients will experience the trips when you can't be the driver. Don't get me wrong. I think I probably did my last ride with Ambassador Limousine the week before I sold the company. It was a VIP. And we set up protocols so that we had other chauffeurs that would be assigned to that client because they knew the particulars. They knew the gate code. We introduced them to the clients. We told them Ken is no longer going to be driving, et cetera, et cetera. We did that along the way because I started driving everybody. Everybody called my cell number. But by the time the business got mature, whenever my cell phone rang, I would text Shelly and say, Shelly, call Diane at the Yankees. She's trying to reach me. I'm driving. Tell her I'm driving. That became muscle memory to Diane. Diane eventually just called Shelly at the office and she called the VIP line. We set up a VIP line. So I no longer took those phone calls. I never had got a CDL, so I can tell you I never drove a bus, but I set up the protocols. I hired the CDL trainer. I had the CDL processes and procedures. So systematize everything, make everything a duplicatable process, inspect what you expect, and train every employee on the finest details. I'm going to leave you with what saying from Walt Disney. Guys, we're in the service business. Service excellence is all about details. Walt Disney, who some people compare me to, believe it or not, Walt Disney had a saying, and his saying was if we lose the details, we lose everything. If we lose the details, we lose the experience. And you're going to hear me keep repeating that. But at the end of the day, you're the one that has to impart all this wisdom, everything that's in your head, write it down so that you can build a company that can survive you. This is the first episode that we're going to title Going from Grind to Great. We hope you enjoyed it. The next grind to great episode is going to be about financial metrics and KPIs. Again, my name is Ken Lucci from Driving Transactions. This has been another exciting episode of the Ground Transportation Podcast. James Blaine from PAX Training, wherever you are, just know that I've missed you terribly. And John, thank you for doing a great job producing. And everybody, have a great day.

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Thank you for listening to the Ground Transportation Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information about PAX Training and to contact James, go to PAXTraining.com. And for more information about driving transactions and to contact Ken, go to driving transactions.com. We'll see you next time on the Ground Transportation Podcast.