The #1 habit that keeps me in control of my companies

I have a lot of irons in the fire, whatever that phrase is supposed to mean. Two companies in the UK, one in Italy, and four here in America, one of them out in St. Louis. That is a lot of responsibility in a lot of different areas, and the amount of communication rolling into me every day is absolutely insane.

I work very hard to stay on top of it. I have personal assistants who help me. But underneath all the help there is one habit, the most important one I have, and it is almost embarrassingly simple.

Every day I answer all my emails. I handle all my texts. I clean the deck on a daily basis, and I do not let myself get backlogged.

Clear the decks

Am I perfect at it? No. There are days it slips. But I promise you this: never a weekend goes by without me having cleared the decks. I answer everything. Whatever piled up during the week gets handled before the new week starts.

I will give you a live example. I walked back into the office today after being away, and I was a little overwhelmed. So the first thing I did was sit down with my assistants and make a list of every single thing that had my attention stuck on it. That is the move. You do not push the pile around. You get it all out in front of you, on a list, and then you start clearing it.

You are the one pushing the lines

Think about what a company really is. It is people out there trying to do work with you. You are trying to get this person to finish a job, that person to finish a job, this project carried forward, that order out the door. Every single thing you want to see happen in your company has to get pushed forward, and you are the one in charge of pushing.

The way you push is on the communication lines. When I answer everything, I know where every line stands. I know what step comes next and who is supposed to take it, and I can shove it forward before it dies. That is a key to your success right there.

And here is why I call it my most important habit. It is what allows me to take on more. When I make sure the things I started actually get done, I am free to go on to something bigger and better. A backlog does not just slow you down. It caps you.

How do you get your confront up?

People ask me, how do I get my confront up? How do I get comfortable facing the hard stuff? Here is the honest answer: by facing it. I know, it sounds like a dog chasing its tail. So let me tell you a story instead.

The very first person I ever had to fire. I was about twenty-five years old, just a puppy, running a supply company I had built up to four employees. I had a man working in my warehouse, maybe fifty years old, short military buzzcut, gray hair. He had so many of my father's mannerisms it was not even funny. And he completely could not do the job. I knew I had to let him go.

I was so scared that I scheduled it for a day my assistant would be in the office with me. Then I got stuck on the freeway out in Los Angeles. No cell phones in those days. I had to pull over, get on a pay phone, call my assistant, and tell her, you have to let him go. She was not thrilled with me, but she did it. It was the right thing to do, and I had been a wimp about it, and I knew it.

Stay on the firing line

Some people are just mean and nasty, and letting those people go is easy. You usually do not have much trouble with that. The hard ones are the nice people. Genuinely nice people, trying their hardest, who simply cannot get the job done. You have to let them go too, and to this day there is nothing I hate more.

So I make a point of it. Across all the companies I am involved in, I stay active on the firing line. When somebody has to be confronted, I pull them into my office and we have the conversation. I try to make it as easy on the person as I possibly can, but I do it myself, personally, because if I hand that job off forever I lose the edge.

People come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and I do not mean on the outside. Keeping my confront up is how I make sure that when it is time to do the right thing, I actually go do it. Clear the decks every day, and stay on the line for the hard conversations. Those two habits are what keep me in control of everything else.