Michael E. Parker
speaker
131 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Michael E. Parker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thank you for having me, Charles. It's such a pleasure to be with you.
Well, I started off, Charles, I was really someone that was trying to figure out what I wanted to do in business. And, you know, fortune would have it that while I was wrapping up my bachelor's degree in business operations and procurement, I actually got hired by Toyota. They had a special operation in California. where Toyota and General Motors had came together. And it was very unique.
There was a lot of dynamics that were interesting. But it just so happened that there were problems in North America. I was in my early 20s just getting going. And they sent Akio Toyota, who is the grandson of the founder of Toyota, someone in the real Toyota family. But I think you have to be 60 years old to be the president or whatever. So he was going through this whole process.
journey of getting the education he needed to prep him. Everyone knew he was going to be the next president and now chairman. So he comes there and I give him a presentation. He loved it. And the next thing I know, he handpicked me to be a part of a special project team, sent me to Japan. And I saw some of the greatest operational excellence in the world. And it taught me about systems.
It taught me about operations. And, you know, to fast forward after getting that experience and really becoming, you know, very profound and proficient, I should say, in the lean management discipline. I was able to break away and become an entrepreneur. And so for the last two decades, I've started many, many businesses.
And by starting those businesses, I started to understand a framework that actually helps to move a business from six figures to seven figures. I had a lot of businesses that made six figures, but it wasn't until I learned how to really be a CEO and how to think differently.
And I found that it's actually that you have to learn how to be not just the CEO of the business, but the CEO of yourself, as well as learning more about wealth as well, since you know how all these work together to create a freedom. And so this is what I'm passionate about is seeing entrepreneurs move from just the art of solving problems to
to actually building systems that run a business so that that business can scale.
Yeah. Well, I think when you think about an entrepreneur, you know, anybody who can really solve a real problem. Right. We could say as an entrepreneur, we have inventors who are coined as entrepreneurs. And this is why so many people make a mistake, Charles, as I know you well know, because they can cook.
They think they can start a restaurant because they know how to do certain things and they have the talent. They think it translates to running a business and they find out very quickly, well, no, you can solve a problem in terms of people being hungry and you can help them feel full and even like your food. But running a business is a total different thing.
So when you think about an entrepreneur, you simply understand that there's a problem in the market and you know how to solve that problem and people will pay you for it. And you can get to six figures just from just solving a problem with it.
But if you want to be a CEO, a CEO is actually able to think about the systems that would make that business work and actually begin to systemize the business so that now there is something to actually run the business. So people make the mistake and think that the CEO is the big boss. They're the ones who.
into the one who is in charge, the one who has the last say, the one who's the decision maker. Those things are true. But the biggest thing a CEO could ever do is put the right systems in place and then let those systems run the business. The person who's the CEO that always has to run everything
They have just created a sense of self-employment and not actually having a business that is actually accomplishing a goal with or without them. And so this is where we start to see the power of understanding what a CEO is truly supposed to do versus what people think the label means.
Well, there's a lot of ways, and I agree with you. There's so many different ways to talk about it, but something I always like to point out is the difference between a process and an operation and a system. A process is, you know, I'm trying to go from here to here in a way that delivers value to a distinct goal. An operation is something you find inside of a process.
It's like one of the boxes on my process map. I can have an operator. I might have five operations that make up a process. In that operation, I have steps and there's steps in the operation that I must fulfill. But a system is different. A system may have a mixture of processes, operations, and standards that all work together toward creating a standard outcome from how this whole thing's working.
When we think about the transportation system, Think about it. There's the traffic side. There's what you can do on the freeway or expressway. There's what you do on the streets. There's what you have to do if some particular thing comes up. There's all these rules we have to learn.
And when you look at how you go through driver's education, you take your driver's test and then there's a police system to make sure that you're following the system. So all of that works together to make the transportation system work and has many elements to it. So when you think about system, you're able to describe how many different pieces work together for the whole.
So when you think about the way you develop team members in your business, you think about the way that you actually generate leads in your business or the way that you convert a sale. There might be many elements to it. It's not just one thing. So this is the difference with systems. Systems combine the different things necessary to get a outcome to be consistent.
And sometimes it's not just one thing. It could be multiple things that come together to make that happen. We even talk about the different systems that's in the body. Right. So we've got a metabolic system. We've got a cardiovascular, all these things that make the body work. So there's a system of how my body works.
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