Planning vs. Improvising
I figured I'd start this post with a life & business update for those interested. If you aren't, no offense taken, feel free to skip down to the "Planning vs. Improvising" Section.
Let's start with personal...Ashley, Rory, and I (along with our 4 dogs and a bun in the oven) made the move from Columbus, OH to Tampa, FL. We arrived Friday, April 15 and even though we're only a week in, we're starting to get settled. We're liking the neighborhood so far, the weather has been fantastic (we're heading to the pool in a bit), and pregnant Ashley is very happy to not be sleeping on an air mattress and sitting on the floor which was reality for a couple of days until our furniture arrived.
Now let's move onto business which ties into the title of this article. I left my nearly 16 year career with Ingersoll Rand/Trane at the beginning of March to partner with a family office called WhitneyWilder. I'm now the President of Southeastern Home Services (website should be live in a few days) where we'll be acquiring and operating a number of home services businesses. The initial focus will be in the greater Tampa area and we'll be targeting residential HVAC, plumbing, and electrical businesses...aka "essential home services." In addition to service we'll also do residential new construction (RNC) and benefit from WhitneyWilder's vast relationships with the homebuilding community. The preference will be to partner with business owners who want to stay involved in the business, but have grown it to or beyond their ability to run it effectively and are looking for a partner to help them take it to the next level. It also allows the owners to take some chips off the table and capitalize financially on years or even decades of hard work.
We're scheduled to close on our first acquisition April 27 and the second May 5, with the goal of 4 of them by end of 2022. I can share more details on these when appropriate but needless to say, it's just about game time. For the WhitneyWilder team, this is a long time coming having been focused on this industry and building a pipeline of acquisition targets along with strategic relationships for over 2 years. For me it's been 2 months of full-time focus but several before that in discussions and preparation. Which brings me to the title of this article...
Planning vs. Improvising
Since starting full-time, most of my time has been going towards planning. Planning for how we're going to operate these businesses and where we'll tie them together vs. keep things separate, planning the initial communication & first 100 days, planning how we're going to grow, planning how we're going to structure the team, planning our financial targets, etc. etc....the list could go on. I've gotten involved in some of the blocking and tackling related to "getting the deals done," but it's largely been planning.
This has felt awkward at times, because I'm an operator and executor. I've spent the last 10 or so years of my career managing people and leading teams/businesses. The last couple months have been plenty busy, but haven't felt as tangible as I'm used to. I know from experience with IR/Trane moving from one job and state to another that there's no substitute for immersing yourself in the business, the people, and the processes to determine what really matters. No amount of planning can give you those answers and you just need to dive into the deep end and start treading water. We'll call this improvising.
Like most everything, I don't think it's an either/or. Both planning and improvising make sense, you just have to be mindful of striking the right balance. Given more time and words, I could probably go into more nuance about exactly where planning makes sense vs. improvising, but that's for a different article. Simply put it probably doesn't make sense to plan to the level of detail of what exact customer I'm going to meet with on May 24. But it very well might make sense to determine that past due accounts receivable are a focus in company XYZ, and to lay some groundwork for how we're going to attack that and clean it up.
A plan gives you something to aspire and strive for. When you inevitably go off course and improvise, you can look back on the plan and see if it still makes sense, and if so then adjust back to it. If not you can course correct along the way and make tweaks/adjustments to the plan. Not having any plan is foolish, but so is going to an extreme level of detail when you're going into a new venture with many variables and lots of uncertainty. This same concept can probably be applied to many areas outside of business, such as having kids, traveling, or just living life in general
The next several weeks are going to be hectic, but I'm going to try my best to stick with the cadence of sending these out every 2 weeks. I may be a day or week late from time-to-time, but if nothing else I think it will be therapeutic to write out some of what I'm encountering and wrestling through.
That said, here are some of my favorite things I've come across the last few weeks:
· Podcast Episode - Tom Birchard on Think Like an Owner – Ok, so a shameless plug for the first time I’ve done something like this. Alex and his team are amazing because I know I didn’t sound near this good unedited
· Article - Choose Your Status Game Wisely by Nick Maggiulli – I’ve always been a fan of Scott Adams’ talent stack concept and it was interesting to see it weaved into an article about status games. I think Nick makes a great point that it’s part of our human nature to seek status, so trying to avoid that entirely might be a lost cause for many of us mere mortals. Instead diversify so it isn’t all coming from one particular areas (work, money, appearance, relationship, social media, etc.)
· Very Short Video - Scottie Scheffler Quote Heading Into Final Day of Masters – I couldn’t find this clip or quote anywhere so linking to a Tweet I made after recording on my phone. Scheffler went on to win the tournament and his maturity at only 25 years old is quite impressive
· Article - Katy Bar the Door by Josh Brown – I never knew where the phrase “Katy bar the door” came from so that history lesson was interesting. But for any stock market nerds out there this is worth the read and we’ll see how the market holds up after behemoths Apple and Microsoft report earnings this week
· Quote #1 – We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. E.O. Wilson
· Quote #2 – Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner. Lao Tzu