Welcome to Cash in the Cyber Sheets. I'm your host, James Bowers, and together we'll work with business leaders and industry experts to dive into the misunderstood business of cybersecurity and compliance to learn how to start making money from being secure and compliant. Welcome to Cash in the Cyber Sheets.
Today on Cash in the Cyber Sheets, we have Jerry here with us from JASB Management, Management Training, Executive Coaching.
Really excited to have you on, Jerry. Talk about all the different things that you're doing. I know there's some particular focus that you have, but if you want, tell me a little bit about JASB Management, particularly what it is that you're focusing on and helping people with.
JASB focuses on helping people and organizations be better, learn more, and increase productivity as well as profitability. We all have parts of our thinking that often holds us back because we don't really see ourselves or see what we do. We're all creatures of habit.
Now, what JASB is designed to do, and let me say certainly has been doing that for, at this point in time, 39 years, is help people gain insight into how they're thinking, determine what is not working for them the way they might like it to, and then set goals and develop a specific plan of action, a step-by-step approach in order to make changes. I like to take myself as an example in that regard because in a prior career, I was a CEO of a 125-person service business. When people used to ask me, how do I delegate? I used to say, I love to delegate. I'm terrific at delegation, and I really thought I was because I had good people. I had a productive company. I had a company that was profitable, a company that was growing.
At 40, 41, 42 years of age, it naturally seemed to me that I was doing a good job delegating. What would happen in those days is something would come across my desk, and I would say to myself, I don't want to do this to my assistant because she's also the office manager, and she's got 13, 14 people who report to her. The thought crossed my mind that if I do it, it's going to be done well. It's going to be done better. Therefore, I did it. One of the things I call myself at this point in my life and my career is I'm recovering perfectionist, and perfectionists cannot delegate.
And perfectionism happens to be a very common characteristic of driven, successful people because it does drive people to the top. It also can drive people to the gutter. That's just one example of an attitude, a habit of thinking that prevents us from doing what we otherwise could.
That's definitely a big one, and had a lot of trouble with the perfectionism myself. Not that everything came out perfect, but a lot of analysis, paralysis. Honestly, for me, you can't steer a parked car.
At this point, some of it's just let's go scrape the elbows, get moving, and fix it up along the way. With everybody that you're helping, with everybody that you've worked with, is there a common insane thing that you typically see, or kind a like the top three that's just really keeping people from getting where it is they want to be? Well, I think that probably I would have to say that the number one item for most everybody is email. Most of us get tens, hundreds of emails every day or every week that have no bearing on what we're doing.
Unfortunately, because of that, many people spend their day or a good part of their day working on their email and then also being distracted by their email. Because if somebody needs you immediately, I would certainly think that they're not going to send an email and expect to have you respond within a minute or two. They're going to pick up the phone.
Exactly. They're going to pick up the phone, and they're going to either send a call or send a text. So what happens with email is for most people, if they don't turn off their computer or turn off their screen, the sound of incoming email is a distraction.
And it may take you away from what you were thinking on, what you were focusing on. And interruptions, James, are extremely damaging to productivity. The time that it takes to answer the question or respond to the inquiry is usually not significant.
But with any interruption, there is usually a social interchange at the beginning and at the end. And then there also is the time that it takes you to refocus on what you were doing. Just not the train of thought.
Exactly. It may only take 15, 20 seconds, a half a minute. It may take a minute or two.
Or sometimes you're just never going to get back to where you were. And whatever time it took to get you back to there is wasted time. And number two is communication.
Unfortunately, most of us, certainly in my generation and yours, we're never taught communication. Communication is a process requiring three elements, a sender, a receiver, and a message. And unless the message is received, there's no communication.
And unfortunately, that happens all the time. You certainly know the old game where you pass a sentence or a thought around in a circle. And what comes out at the end of the circle is often 100% different than what started.
If the first person says, I want to bake a cake, by the end of the round robin, it's a monkey on a bicycle. Completely different. Precisely.
So communication, I would say, is number two. And that's really interesting with breaking it down like that, because we do the same thing on the audit side, where you say, are you doing this? Do you have this secure? And people always say, yep, absolutely. We've got this done.
Then you dig into it and you start looking at the work. And no, no, what we were asking for and what you were answering were completely different things. Is that something that you help? If we're doing an engagement, we're working with you for the personal development, the business development.
Is that one of the areas that you help develop for different people? Very definitely, James, because as I said, we talk about change and change is the essence of my business. With that, I mean, that sounds like it's the evil that I know. Grass isn't greener.
I know what I'm dealing with here. But is it more of a thing that people are just scared of making changes, or is it that you think that they're scared of not knowing what step to take? I know how to handle the situation I'm in now. I go over there, I don't know if I'm going to be able to handle that, if I'm going to be able to know what to do.
I think it's just a matter of we know what we're doing now. They've been good. Why do I need to change? Well, the reason you need to change is that good is the enemy of great.
What worked last month is not going to work as well as it is usualized next month. Shift in a little bit, because I think there is definitely a lot there that we could go on for days and weeks about. What made you decide to step away from having the company that you were managing and start JASB? What made you make that leap? Well, I went into business myself.
I purchased the business, and then I had a serious car accident. I broke my neck. I broke my back.
I was in the hospital for three months. It became necessary for my ex-wife to sell that business because they didn't know if I would recover. Fortunately, I did recover.
And when I did, I looked around about what I wanted to do, and I love to help people. In fact, I'll share with you my life mission at this point in time is very simply to do as much as I can for as many as I can for as long as I can to make a difference in the lives of hundreds of people. When you were starting JASB, what did it look like if you had it in your mind that, okay, once I hit this point, this is going to be what success is? Is that a particular amount of clients that you had or more like you said, once I help this many people, what kind of, I guess, was your biggest goal that you were working for or your first plateau that you were looking to get to? A very good question, which I would say that I was hoping to build a business that could be replicated and could eventually be sold to one of the people who was working with me as an associate or had become a saleable business.
So if I'm looking to invest in myself, I want to improve, I'm not really sure which direction I need to go or what I need to build on. What does that relationship and engagement with you look like to be able to come to you and say, Jerry, here's where I want to get or here's something that I feel like is my problem and maybe problem's too big of a word, but here's what's holding me back. How do we go about working through that? Well, actually, instead of problem, I always use the word challenge or issue.
But we basically can accomplish most anything that we want to. Again, everything is just a matter of time and resources. But the best way to do that is to determine, start with the end in mind.
Where do you want to be? Where do you want to go? What is the ultimate goal? And then bring it back to today. How am I going to reach that goal? How am I going to accomplish what I'm looking to? And the only way to do it is with shorter term goals. The best example I can give you is that, you know, most people start out a new year with goals or what they want to accomplish for the year.
And once they've written that down, and I emphasize writing it down, they then can bring it back to the present so that the goal for 2025, for example, needs to have goals for January, February, March, so on and so forth. And the January goals need to be broken down to weekly goals. And the weekly goals need to be broken down into daily goals.
Now, most everybody operates with a to-do list. A to-do list are very simply daily goals. But when your to-do list is based on the end in mind, what you ultimately want to accomplish, you're doing the things that are going to be necessary to get you to where you want to go.
You need to be uncomfortable before you become comfortable in doing anything. And we try to help people understand that the analogy that I often ask them is how they felt the first time they drove a car. And how do they feel today having been driven for X number of years and X number of hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of miles.
And obviously, it's night and day. I don't know. I've seen some of the people drive around here.
I don't know if they should feel that way. I couldn't disagree with you. But unfortunately, in Florida, I mean, just really kind of what it sounds like is using the same to-do list that I'm doing.
But having those goals, where do I want to be at the end of the year? And breaking that down into, you know, perhaps quarterly, then to monthly, and then to weekly to where then I can start throwing those things on my to-do list that normally it would just be things that are coming up. Maybe things like you said, like they're in my email. This is what I've got to do.
But now I'm actually adding the things that are going to get me where I want to be. Almost focusing more on myself and my goals. And is that really one of the big distinctions that people just don't realize that they're not working towards anything? They're just spinning those wheels? Very definitely.
And, you know, one of the suggestions I make to clients all the time is do first what you want to do least. Get it out of the way. Eat that frog.
Precisely. We hear about the overnight success, but you don't hear about all the overnights that go into the overnight success. Everything takes time.
Everything takes patience. Everything takes persistence. It takes perseverance.
You're going to find that many times you're going to fail at what you're doing. Failure is part of the road to success. If you don't fail, you're never going to succeed.
Yeah, and it's interesting. That's even one of our core values is be uncomfortable. You're not walking on that edge.
If you're not sweating, you're not bleeding a little bit. You're probably not growing. If you were able to go back to when you were starting at that company where you had the 125 employees and you could go back today to share one minute worth of to-dos or some guidance, what would you want to go back and perhaps have yourself do differently? That's an easy question for me to answer, James, because I share all the time that in retrospect, the biggest mistake I made in my life is that when I was in my 20s or 30s or even early 40s, I didn't find somebody who was then my age as a mentor, somebody that I could turn to, somebody that had a lot of wisdom based on life experience.
Had I taken advantage of that type of person, it would have allowed me to make many fewer mistakes. It would have allowed me to work many less hours. It would have allowed me to have achieved and accomplished even more than I fortunately was able to do in a whole lot less time.
And if I'm looking to have a mentor, I want to do that now. How is it that I get started with you? How do we engage? How do we start working together to get me to where I want to be? Well, I coach slash facilitate a seven-week program that focuses on attitudes. It focuses on what's called time management.
It focuses on goal setting. It focuses on helping people learn how and get in the habit of writing their goals. And what we offer is an effective course in goal setting along with these other items, one of which is communication that will allow us to understand and learn from the experience and the times and travails of millions of people who preceded us.
Because as I share with people, what I'm offering is not rocket science. It's wisdom. And there's nothing more powerful than wisdom.
If I'm wanting to get started with you, if one of the listeners is, is email the best way to get ahold of you or to give you a call and say, I want to be part of the program? Email is the best way to get ahold of me. Well, beautiful. Well, Jerry, I really appreciate you coming on today.
Like we said, the company is JASB Management. We'll have all of the details, your email. Obviously, we'll not have the phone number there since we want people to get ahold of you.
But we'll have all of that there so people can reach out. Appreciate you giving me the opportunity to share it with you. Now, Jerry, I really appreciate you coming on.
And yeah, you need to make sure to have the goals, write them down. And I think the last point there is have a good coach. Well, Jerry, thank you very much for being on.
Again, JASB Management. We'll have all the details below and look forward to having you on again.
Thanks for joining us today. Don't forget, click that subscribe button, leave us a review, and share it with your network. Remember, security and compliance aren't just about avoiding risk. They're about unlocking your business's full potential. So stay secure, stay compliant, and we'll catch you next week on Cash in the Cyber Sheets. Goodbye for now.
