Evolving from Operator to Owner with Pete Mohr

Hey everybody, I am excited to present our guest today, pete Moore. Pete is well-versed in the world of entrepreneurship, having once been a radio host and now he's a certified business-made simple coach. He's certainly no stranger to podcasting, having guests starred in over 150 of them, which is a testament to his ability to engage. Aside from his coaching activities, pete's also the successful owner of ShoeTopia, a range of footwear stores based in Ontario. He's a firm believer in practicing what he preaches, so he implements his own strategies and frameworks in his own stores. Interestingly, his past experience as a business broker honed his ability to assist entrepreneurs in creating self-sustaining, efficient businesses. He's passionate about enabling business owners to have fulfilling lives outside their work, a perspective that resonates in his coaching approach. Pete leverages a repertoire of over 25 different tools, backed by his nearly three-decade-long journey. His philosophy is you own your business. It shouldn't own you. This forms the backbone of his coaching practice. His mission is to guide us in transitioning from just being operators to fully-fledged owners of our businesses, empowering us to live the lives that we truly want and deserve. Here comes a transformative conversation with Pete in 5, 4, 3, 2. Pete, well, it is really good to have you here.

Thanks so much for having me, matt. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to our conversation today.

Me too, me too, this is going to be a lot of fun. So where are you located?

I am about an hour outside of Toronto in a beautiful small town in Ontario called Elora.

I am in Erie, pennsylvania, so pretty close to you yeah exactly the other side of the lake.

Why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself? I own a few different businesses, but this one around coaching entrepreneurs. I've been in business a long time, matt, and since 1994, so coming up on 30 years. I find a lot of the business owners that I talk to they're overworked, they're overwhelmed, they're mired down in the frustrations of dealing with the day-to-day intricacies of their business. They're in the weeds all the time. A lot of the people that I work with have been at it for a while and they're starting to grow a little bit tired of that. And it kind of came from a long time ago. I used to be a business broker helping people buy and sell businesses, and one of the reasons people actually put their businesses up for sales because they're frustrated by it. So most of the stuff that I work with entrepreneurs and business owners around is, I call it, turning their frustrations into freedoms, because typically and I'm talking to you, the listener, here, but typically you got into business for a reason and that reason wasn't to work 50, 60, 70 hours a week and have all your money tied up in your business and not enjoy any of the freedoms. You had these concepts in your head about what being a business owner would be and often we have to go back and sort of revisit those, because we've been sort of like I said, head down and going at it for three years, five years, 10 years, whatever the case is, and not even having a chance to maybe take a good vacation or maybe enjoy some of the other things in life that you're now kind of looking back and saying, hmm, I kind of like to do that again. And so what I do is I help people through that and we set up some process and we talk about different things in aligning and assigning accountability. And I'll use one of the examples of a call I had today. This guy's been in business for 30 years. He's had two other businesses. He closed one of his businesses a couple of years ago. He's got another one. He's now in his late 60s and is kind of saying, okay, I'm ready to move out. And the reality of it is is that most of the process in his business is in his head and it's very hard to sell that. It's very hard to from a business broker perspective. I'm not a business broker anymore, but when I was it's very hard to sell a job. It's very easy to sell a business. So when I look at it I say you know a lot of my frameworks around and I've just created this little ebook called the 10 laws of moving from operator of your business to owner of your business. And when you start moving from operator doing all of that stuff and moving into the owner's seat, then it becomes more sellable and also you can have more freedom because you're not making all the decisions. You know you're aligning and assigning those accountability, because decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of the organization every day. They shouldn't always have to go through the owner.

Okay, well, I definitely do want to get into that, because it sounds fascinating moving from operator to owner. But first, like before we get into that, what are some common problems that you're dealing with as a coach? Like, do you have like three big ones that you're on a call and you know the person's going to say one of these?

Yeah, I do, and it's really always around the alignments essentially of their products to the promise, of their process to their promise, or of the people to their promise, and so almost every time it talks about one of those and the big one lately is the people, the person. You know where I can't find people who are, you know, behind what we do or they're losing people because of a variety of different reasons and a lot of time it has to do with the communication of the business owner or the leader or the CEO or whatever the case is, around what it is they do and why they want to, why that person may want to be involved with that. And you know it seems simple but it's not. You know this is one of the issues of having alignment within your team, because when your teams align with what you do, they tend not to leave.

You said every single one of those problems was in relation to their promise. So what do you mean by a business's promise?

Yeah, so I've got this thing called the 5P framework and I've already told you four of them. So it's first of all kicking off with the promise aligning the products, the process and the people to it so you can have the right amount of profit, which is the way to freedom, right. And the promise, really it's a little different. People talk about vision and mission. I look at sort of the vision perspective, of sort of your 25-year framework. Everybody needs that. What's the grand vision of my life? Because my business should support my life, right. And then you have your grand vision of the business and the mission is more sort of the marching orders. We will do this by then and, like in my case, I'll coach a thousand entrepreneurs by 2026, because I believe that everybody want, every business owner, should turn their frustrations into freedoms, and so that's sort of a mission, like I have put numbers around it with the data around it. It's marching orders, right. Promise is a little bit different. So vision and mission are more internally focused. The promise is what you shout out to the public and from that perspective, you know what do I do at Shuteopia? I help you get your time back, I help give you more freedom through your business. You know you can come up with all these little one-liners that are around. Your promise and from that perspective, you know my ultimately my promise is I'll help you turn your frustrations of your business into the freedoms within your business. And. But you can think about all these different little things. What that means because it means something different to you, matt, than it does to me, and it's something different to the listener than it does to us and that's the interesting thing about being a business owner is you need to start structuring your business with the full clarity of what it is you want out of your life in order to have your business prop that up. And until you have that, if you're just mired down in the weeds with it, you're just going to keep working, right, right.

It's easy to keep working. We're used to it. It is. It is my promise to my clients or my customers. Is that something that is more copywriting than it is actually what you do? I mean?

or it should be what you do. It should be taking your customer from a transformation from the pain that they have to a better future, because everybody buys a better future, matt. You know, ultimately people will not sign a check unless they see a better future. Okay, that's right. Yes, they don't. So we own some shoe stores. Our promise is in a Chewtopia here in Canada is called Look Great and Feel Fantastic. What do we want our customers to do? Want them to look great and feel fantastic, and when they do, they're happy to pay their bill, and you can also overlay all sorts of different things. Remember, I was talking about freeing yourself up from the frustrations and giving you more freedom within your business. Well, with Chewtopia, if you think of it, I've even narrowed it down to nine letters. Those nine letters of Looking Great and Feel Fantastic are these Ooh, ah and ah-ha. So if you think about it, try the shoes on, and everybody can relate to this. That's why I like this one. You know it's like okay, I'm trying the shoes on, I'm looking in the mirror and I'm going, ooh, I look pretty good, look great, that's one of my promises, right? Feel Fantastic is the other one. Close your eyes with the shoes on, take a deep breath. Those feel fantastic, look great and feel fantastic. So if I get them in front of the mirror and I say, how do they look? And they say they look great, I look great. And I say, because usually the ones that look great don't feel fantastic. The ones that feel fantastic don't look so great. At least that's people's perception of it. So if I can deliver that outcome, then basically they're going. I love ShoeTopia man. This is my favorite shoe store.

Okay, well, that's. Do you find when you're coaching, that you're helping people actually decide what their business is going to be? Sometimes, like this sounds good, how are we going to enhance it? Say, well, we have the best customer service in the world. Well, let's figure out a way to throw that in there. Yes, exactly, and then people will actually start changing what they do based on the promise that they've decided with you.

Okay, so I mean, we go back and we'll revisit. And usually it starts off by what do you want out of your life? Right, it usually starts that way because they don't know anymore. It's been so long since they had a life because they've been working 60, 70 hours a week and they're working, you know, not going to Little, league, baseball and all this other stuff, and they're not enjoying a meal at with their partner or any of this other stuff, or even going away on a vacation. So it usually kind of starts with that. And then we come back into the business and we're like well, why isn't your business supporting that? And what tweaks do we need to do in order to accommodate that? Because ultimately, you know, if your business isn't supporting your life, you're not going to enjoy your life and you're not going to enjoy your business. And my philosophy is love it or leave it. And I have a whole program around love it or leave it. And from that perspective it's like, hey, if you don't love what you're doing, then you should be leaving it, and that's within your business or outside of it. And you know, the more you can work in your love it zone, the better life is. So you start aligning and assigning the accountability to the stuff that you don't like to other people, in order to get your promise met and your customers needs met, so that you can have a more profitable business and enjoy more freedoms.

Okay. So what are the steps then? If I wanted to move from operator of my business to the owner.

Well, I'll tell you some prime examples. One of the steps is that you need to get it out of your head. If everything and here's a great one If everybody comes to you for the answer, that's a problem, okay, okay. If you're always. If you say to yourself as a business owner or a business leader, if you say to yourself often and often, my clients, at the beginning at least, will be saying oh yeah, I say that all the time, which is this line why don't they just get it done Like? They should know this. If you say that, then there's work to be done because they don't either know it because you haven't outlined it in a step-by-step format, which is process documentation, and there's all sorts of ways of round that, or you haven't actually given them the authority to make the call, which is the aligning and assigning of that process. And until you start aligning into, well, first of all, so many people don't even have the process yet. You need to get the process out of your head onto a piece of paper, onto a video, onto an audio, onto any way that some other person can actually tackle this accountability for you, and then we need to literally assign that accountability to that person so that they feel it's like I can make this decision now. That's the only way to freedom, or else you're going to be stopped at a glass ceiling. That is your thousand decisions that you make every day in that business and nobody else can make them without you.

How do I find the people? How do I find the people that are going to do it and somebody I trust giving accountability to?

Yeah, that's part of your process. How do you hire? How do you hire, how do you onboard, how do you? You know all of that stuff. That's part of your process. So you know we have different sheets and different things that we go through and hiring and I coach too, and all that sort of stuff and it's always around culture, it's around capability, it's around all of the different things about you know, does is this person a right fit? I'm also a Colby certified coach and Colby is an awesome source of information. It's a, it's an assessment tool that helps you understand how you make decisions and how other people on your team make decisions, and then you align and assign that into your team and into your hiring practice so that you're actually hiring people with a base knowledge of what you need before you even hire them.

You brought up an assessment tool, but you have an assessment tool also, right, yeah, I do, I do. And you know about the results of that. If I go on there, what am I going to learn?

Yeah, I mentioned that I'm with Colby as a certified coach with Colby, but I'm also a certified business-made simple coach and that's through Donald Miller's book Business Made Simple and the other ones he's known by Storybrand and how to Grow Business and that sort of stuff. So I work with Donald Miller and his team there and from that perspective it's called my Business Assessment and you can go on there. It takes about 15, 20 minutes to take it. But what it really does is it sort of all goes around an airplane and you have the cockpit, the leadership portion of your business, you know, and you have your wings, your marketing and your sales and your fuselage, your overhead and you know all of this sort of stuff. It basically lays it all out in a nice little flight plan so it tells you what areas of your airplane you're having. Yet you're really doing well with the stuff. That's like I'm killing it, which is great. It greenlights that. But it also redlights some of the areas that you maybe need a bit of work on and you know whether you use a coach like me or whether you use anybody else. That's fine. But the idea is it gives you this sort of plan to say, hmm, maybe I need to do a little bit of work on my leadership this year, or maybe I need to do a little bit of work on my marketing this year or my products this year, because I'm not super happy with this. I'm good here and I hear and hear, but it gives you this plan to say, hmm, here's where I need to dig down into nice little sort of 20 page PDF document that is outlined and good, good start for you to make some succession steps and move the ball for your business.

Okay, and everyone can find that on your website.

Yeah, and if you go to simplifyingentrepreneurshipcom, top right hand corner, just click it, take the assessment, and you will find that assessment there, no problem, and it's free, it's no problem. It takes you about 15 minutes or so and you'll get a PDF sent to you and then I'll follow up with you with a little video regarding the outcome of that particular assessment.

I did want to ask you about something that I read about in your profile, your bio, that I read on you, and that was your CPA.

Yeah, I like to put things out. I've already sort of told you a few of my frameworks, but you know the CPA is the one that I'm playing with these days, the five P's I've told you about, and CPA really is a leadership one. So it overlays that cockpit type thing that we talked about in your in your airplane, and the CPA is not your chartered professional accountancy, as I do think everybody needs to know their numbers if they're in business Like you can't, you can't deny yet. You need to know your numbers. But it's really around communication, process management and accountability, and I've touched on all three of those already because these, basically, are the pieces that you need to take and understand and be always getting coaching on around running your business properly. You need to be the ultimate communicator in your business. You need to align and assign those processes, create them and then align and assign them and align the accountability so that you can free yourself up, because it's only when you can free yourself up that you can move up the totem pole and everybody else can move up the totem pole underneath you and that's the way to growth. Other than that, you're one person show for as long as you're making all the decisions, you know, and there's frameworks, of course, around communication, frameworks around process and frameworks around accountability. But you know, ultimately, if you think about that from a leadership perspective, how important is it for you to be working on this year we're halfway through the year how important is it for you to work on better communication skills, both internally to your team and externally let's call it marketing, right? How important is it for you to talk about process work, the process? Get it out of your crazy brain onto these papers, onto the videos, so that you can then align and assign the accountability. Do you want freedom? Because if you do, that's the way.

Okay, well, this is great because it seems like it's a cyclical pattern, right. Anytime you run into problems, you start over again, go through. What am I not communicating? What processes do I actually need to set up? How can I make someone or myself accountable to all of this?

Yeah, and I mean I'll flip it back. One of the great books that I really like and I would encourage everybody to read is an older book now. It's called Traction by Gina Wipman and it's all around the EOS Entrepreneurial Operating System. And although it's not one that I coach to specifically, I still like a lot of the principles, and one of the principles there is around having an accountability chart, not an organizational chart. It's different and that's that A piece of the CPA right. And when you think of it, it doesn't matter what the person's title is. Titles are titles, people are. They get in the framework that it's like oh that's not my, that's not what I do, that's not my title. In small business in particular, it's more about accountabilities what are you accountable for? And when you think of that, it looks the same on a piece of paper kind of thing, but the idea is this person's accountable for marketing and may be accountable for two or three other things. On the let's call it organizational chart, I call it, but I call it the accountability chart and from that perspective, if anybody has needs any clarity, the C you know communication and clarity, because clarity creates confidence and if you're not unconfident, you're going to go to the owner to ask the question and you're going to be bothered again and you're going to say why don't they know? Because they don't know who's accountable, so they just assume. Well, I'll talk to the owner.

What approach would we need to take to grow this business then? Well once I've got more freedom and I'm giving more people accountability, how does that actually help to make the business better?

I'll give you an example. Back to my shoe stores again. Okay, because it's near and dear, I mean it's, it's how I live. I work about a day a week in my shoe stores. Now, all right, because I have aligned and assigned the accountabilities to the people that actually own those accountabilities. We just hired somebody yesterday. I haven't even met the person. I haven't hired people in seven years now. So you know, from that perspective, that's off my accountability list. But when I look at the last three months that we've had in our shoe stores best ever May, best ever June, and may not be best ever July, but we're pretty close I mean I'm not making those decisions every day. I don't open the store, I don't hire the people, I don't, I'm not the bookkeeper, I don't even do the purchasing for all of the shoes that come into our store. I have somebody that's aligned and assigned. I used to. I used to do all that kind of stuff because I had to get going and all that stuff. But soon as I got to a point where I was feeling confident and I had my processes down, I was happy to unload those to someone else so that I could do other things. We wouldn't be having this conversation right now, matt, if I mean, I spend most of my time these days coaching entrepreneurs through these things because I love it. When we talked about love it or leave it, I love doing, I love having these conversations. They're awesome to me, it fills my tank, it doesn't drain me, so, but I couldn't do this if I had to open the store today, if I had to serve the next customer, if I had to order the next pair of shoes, if I have to deal with the next return, if I had to hire the next employee. It's a no go, right. So I've spent my life basically running more than one business at a time, because I do this with every business that I have.

So when you started the shoe store, you were doing those 60, 70 hour weeks.

Well, I bought this one of the shoe stores I bought and the other shoe store we opened. We got it up and started and stuff like that. And yeah, I did, for a very short time, pound in the hours because it's like we're starting a new business, right. So when we opened the new store, yeah, I was there a lot. I was the front person, for I hired a manager there, but I had to kind of train that manager along the way. So first few weeks I'm there and then not there as much, because we already have a process manual. It's like here's how to manage the store. We're already doing it, but I'll be here to help you and guide you and communicate and all of the stuff that I would do as a leader.

Okay, did you start out with the processes already? Was this something you had already been through and learned? Before you started it.

It depends on your business. It really does. I used to run service-based businesses. We had a cleaning franchise and service 300 businesses. I also had a bathroom renovation company and I had multiple trucks out on the road. So basically, processes are never perfect. You start with what you have and then you build upon them along the way. So the nice thing now with technologies like we didn't have 30 years ago Matt I mean, we were both there 30 years ago and the nice thing now is that video is so easy. It's so easy and then you can transcribe the stuff. And when you transcribe a video, there's your documentation. Throw it in a chat, gp, build your chat, gpt, build your documentation forms. And so it's so much easier to build process now so that you can literally say here's the book, here's the video, here's how you do it, here's how you order the shoes, here's how you check somebody out, here's how you whatever install a bathtub all of those different things you can video now and you can lay all of these things out. It's so much easier to set process than it ever was in the past that there's very little excuse for anybody now not to have proper process in place in their business so that they can then say hey, if you need to know how to do this, go to file number two and watch the video.

You used to be a realtor.

I did yeah.

That's great.

Yeah, so well, when I was exiting a couple of my businesses. So, long story short, I took my executive MBA later in life and I had decided that my cleaning franchise and my bathroom renovation company I wanted to exit those and get into big business. Well, that was in 2009 and the crash happened and they weren't hiring MBAs and stuff like that at that point in time, and so I jumped back into business. One of the key projects that I did was for Sunbelt business brokers when I was doing my MBA, and Sunbelt business brokers in Canada was headquartered in Ottawa at the time, where I was living, and you know, I worked with Greg, who's the president of Sunbelt Business Brokers Canada, and he said why don't you become a business broker? And to do that, you have to be a licensed realtor. And I said, sure, I'll go through the process and that's how I found Chutopia, you know, but ultimately, working there, I didn't. I never. I mean, I was licensed to sell houses, but I really was more interested in selling businesses and you know, for the longest time, with one of the businesses that I had, I worked with so many property owners. Like that's all we did. We were in a thousand units a year refinishing bathtubs, putting in bathtub liners, acrylic wall systems, spraying kitchens, you know, fixing up units to be turned and rented and we worked I call them honey holes. We worked in some of the worst apartments going that you could never imagine being in, and we worked in some of the best units as well, so kind of seen it all worked with all kinds of different property managers over the years, worked with all sorts of realtors in order to help them flip their homes if they were putting them up for sale. So it's a really interesting business in the long the way of marketing all of that sort of stuff too. And running multiple trucks right, you know, retail is different because everybody comes into your store, but when you're running a service-based business, you're going out to the actual client and that's a different way of framing the marketing you were talking about growing and stuff like that. When you start off with your promise and you align all these things, it really gives you all your pinpoints to move ahead into how you're going to market your business and how you're going to talk about your business so that you can grow your business right.

Yes, yeah, and that's where I get stuck sometimes. How am I going to grow the real estate business and really turning it over to a property management company? Yeah, basically those are the options. Right, I mean, they're going to run it myself. I'm going to turn it over to a property management company and pay a lot of money to make sure that I get a good one that's taking care of my tenants, or hire the people and almost start my own property management company to take care of the units that I have.

Yeah, yeah, and I mean all of these are viable options and it depends, like and as we talk to the listeners here, depends on where you are in life, depends on what freedoms you want. It goes back to those same questions, right, do I want? What freedoms am I missing, what ones do I want and how much am I willing to pay for them? That's the profit piece. Right, how much am I going to take? Because profit isn't just about cash, dollars. Profit is about how you live your life. There's only 24 hours in a day, and if you're not enjoying any of them, that's a problem. So you may want to give up some of the profit in order to have some of these things tackled for you. And the alignment of that is if you know, like, if we're talking to property managers and people that are renting units, you have a certain class of units probably within your portfolio and you know who your client is, and so you're going to be aligning your property management company, if you're going to hire a property management company, with that, because if there's a misalignment there, then your client isn't going to be served justice and they're not going to be happy staying in your unit If they're not happy staying in your unit. You're going to lose money because you're going to turn them every year, right, right, yes, we want long-term clients. It doesn't matter whether you're a retailer I want repeat visits all the time or whether you're just signing on for another year release. It doesn't pay you to go and get the next person. It pays you to keep the one that you have.

Okay, so now I want to go back to your business assessment tool. Could I take that as a real estate investor and still get out of it what I need to get out of it?

Yeah, because, as a real estate investor, real estate investing is your business. So you look at it from a business perspective and you say, okay, well, like, I own properties, but you still have to market those properties, you still have to manage those properties, you still have to finance those properties. All of those different pieces are the very same whether you're buying a retail business, a service business or a portfolio, and or whether you're a lawyer, whether you're accountant or any of these things. Right, we're all going through the same process. And from that side of things, it's like, okay, well, what is your marketing plan? And you'll say, well, I've never really done any marketing, I just put an ad in the paper. Well, do you want to make sure your units are full? Do you have any vacancies? Maybe there's room, maybe that's one of the areas that shows up red on your airplane, right? Do you have a sales facility? Do you want to be going out there? I mentioned earlier that I don't do any hiring. I didn't want to do any hiring anymore. I offloaded that. So maybe one of the things you'd like to do is to offload even just the showing of your units. I mean, you can think of all these different things in ways of offloading certain pieces. If you don't want to offload the whole thing and if you want to start your property management company, it's like, okay, well, maybe this is a good tool to actually start thinking about how am I going to set the property management company up? And then, hmm, maybe if I manage my 20 properties and I'm already setting doing that, I should manage five for Joe and seven for Julie, and you know, and take that on, because I've already got the process in place and I've got the people in place then it becomes easy.

It's time for me to go start writing down all of these processes, maybe even just turning on the video and explaining my process to nobody at first and then transcribe it.

Yep, and then I use tools that I like for that sort of stuff. I use Loom just to kind of ramble and talk about stuff. Then I transcribe it in order typically, and then I take the order transcription and I pop it into chat GPT with some great prompts and it spits me out generally something that's probably in the vicinity of 80%. Right, tweak it and then we're good.

We could probably call this show creating systems. Right, you've just given everybody like this amazing way. So, besides your brilliant coaching and everything that you talked about, it's like this new, unexpected thing of oh, here's a good way to make a system, and I'm kind of excited about that.

There are so many awesome tools out there, matt, these days that in my opinion, there's very little excuse for not having process in place anymore. People would always say, oh, I don't want to spend the time writing, you don't have to just talk it, transcribe it. And that's even better, even if you don't clean it up with chat, gpt or anything else just having the transcription and the video that somebody can watch or read if need be. If you're sick, if you're away, if somebody needs to do something when you're not available, it's there.

Well, thank you so much. So, as a business coach, if you had 43 seconds to talk to the entire world and you could tell them anything, what would you say?

Well, I'd say there's only 24 hours in a day and if you're working 16 of them, you're not enjoying life. And you got into business probably anyway because you had a dream that if you worked for yourself you would have a better life than working for someone else. And if you're not experiencing that, if you're not feeling that and you're feeling overworked and overwhelmed, then maybe we should chat.

Well, thank you, Pete. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate your time and your expertise today.

It's been my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Make it a great day, hey you too.

Hey, before you go, how can people find you? Where would you like to send them?

Yep, as we said earlier in the show, just go to simplifyingentrepreneurshipcom. That's the name of my business. If you hang out on LinkedIn, it's Pete Moore M-O-H-R.