Along the way, the governor of Illinois named March 16th after my company, so I have a day named in the state of Illinois for all the jobs we created and the companies we’ve helped to keep going. It’s meaningful when you take a company that is about to go out of business and then, they’re profitable, they’re successful, life is good again. And it’s a meaningful thing I feel that I’m doing and in some way making a small difference, putting the biggest dent in the universe that I can.
INTERVIEWER: Sure. Okay, so I want to go back to a couple of things. You said, “I’m not a consultant.” What title do you go by?
JOHN MAUTNER: Business coach. It’s really what I am. I’m coaching companies by training and providing a set of tools they can use, which would dramatically improve the performance of their businesses. So, in a way, I’m really teaching them to fish. A consultant will give you a fish, and when you’re hungry, you’ll call him or her and say, “Give me another fish;” or the consultant might write a report and say, “Here’s all the problems, you go fix it. Goodbye, I’m done.” Imagine a business owner taking a walk through the forest and he steps in this moggy area. The next thing he knows, he steps in the quicksand and he starts doing all the wrong things. He starts moving around, starts panicking, and the next thing you know, he gets stuck deeper and deeper in the quicksand. It’s very difficult to get out by yourself, and there’s nobody around to help. Suddenly, we appear and we jump in the quicksand with the owner. Rather than him looking at us going, “Great, now we’re all stuck together. Congratulations.” I go, “No, no, no. We’ve been here before. We’re going to work together to get you out of the quicksand, because if you don’t do anything, you’re pretty much going to die. It’s just a matter of time before you get sucked under.”
INTERVIEWER: But I wonder, if these companies are in that kind of trouble, how can they afford your services?
JOHN MAUTNER: Because they pay a little every month to make it go. The things we do have a rapid improvement on the profitability of the company, so it can help pay for us and a whole bunch more which they get to keep. The other thing I’ve been doing is, I’m guaranteeing the companies that if you work with me and it doesn’t work out, I’m going to give your money back. Nobody else is doing that. So, when I say I’m not a consultant, I’m not the expert in their business. Sometimes I feel like I say to the business owner, “I cannot help you at all.” And they look at me and go, “What are we doing here?” I say, “Let me give you an analogy. People in America spend billions of dollars—that’s billions with a B, on, let’s say, home exercise equipment like treadmills and elliptical machines and whatever. They buy it, they set it up, they put it in the bedroom, they get all excited and after a couple of weeks, they’re using it. And then after a month, it just becomes a glorified towel rack. The problem is that the elliptical machine will work if you get on it and use it. So who can help you? You’ve got to help yourself. I will give you the tools, I will give you the motivation. I’ll teach you what to do, but you need to do the work and make it happen. You need to commit the time and energy, and put your best efforts into it to really turn this thing around and get it going again. So I don’t consult. I teach them a process. I coach them, I motivate them, I hold them accountable and let them know that they’re going to have to do the work. And I’m tapping into the expertise that is inside that company, because I believe the answers are all within the company.
INTERVIEWER: Absolutely. So, you said that within an hour or two, you can come up with a hundred different things that may be preventing the company from moving forward. Can you share two or three of those typical findings that you find in most companies?
JOHN MAUTNER: Yeah. It’s really interesting because I have a new book coming out, which is based on those findings. What I did was, I looked at the last hundred companies I worked with who each put a team together to find a hundred things to improve, and they all did. That’s 10,000 things that we discovered. But here’s the interesting thing. Among almost all of the companies, the top ten biggest things that they could implement right now that can make a big difference were almost identical across the board.
INTERVIEWER: Wow. No matter what type of business?
JOHN MAUTNER: Yeah. It was really interesting. These are construction companies, retail, manufacturing, distribution companies, family-owned businesses, and restaurants. I mean, almost every industry vertical had the same exact problems that were really killing them. Some of them were lack of quality control, the lack of a good, consistent process for quality all the way through, from how the paperwork is filled out to how stuff goes from department to department, to how you check what’s going on to make sure you didn’t ship the blue one instead of the yellow one, and prevent the customer from getting upset. Things like rework and scrap and waste were all pretty rampant in all these companies, so quality was definitely one that came up all the time. Communication was a constant that I’ve constantly heard. It was like a broken record. I just dated myself, but anyway. Communication from top down, side to side, between departments, from the office, from the field or the shop. People not knowing what their roles and responsibilities are, the lack of delegation from the top or chain of command. Communication problems makes things fall through the cracks, and it was incredibly expensive for companies to deal with this stuff all the time. Lack of standard procedures was another one. Everybody sort of doing everything the way they wanted to do it versus having a consistent, documented process that everybody follows. I kind of equate it to McDonald’s or Burger King, any fast food restaurant, let’s say the Big Mac. If they didn’t have a process of how to make the Big Mac every day, and let’s say, I like more cheese and you like more pickles, and we just do it the way we want to versus the McDonald’s way, what’s going to happen to that product and customer experience? The cost is going to go up, the quality is going to go down, the experience isn’t there and worst of all, customers might not come back. Those are some of the top ten things that are just killing their companies.
