Creative Thinking and The Value of Time in Business with Katie Burkhart

One of the reasons you might suffer from a lack of creativity boils down to time. You have become so busy, so there's no time for your creativity. But, what would life look like if you value your time as much as you value other things? In this week's podcast, join us as we welcome our guest, Katie Burkhart. She is an entrepreneur, author, and keynote speaker. Katie has founded several companies and is currently the CEO of MatterLogic, where she and her team support leaders and organizations clearly define what it means to be a purpose-driven business. She advises business owners on how to align their time with their goals and run a purpose-driven company. Listen in for ideas on how to maximize your time and become more successful in all areas of life. --- Listen to the podcast here: Creative Thinking and The Value of Time in Business with Katie Burkhart Welcome to Actions Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing that we all need to try to do to achieve the life that we want, no matter what form that takes, focus on what really matters. We live in a world full of distractions, there are distractions everywhere, and we all now have a portable distraction in our phones, purses, wherever we put our mobile phones ready to distract us at any one given point in time and, sometimes, the difference between someone that truly succeeds at achieving what they set out to achieve, achieving the life they really want, and someone that doesn’t quite get there is how often we get distracted and how long we allow ourselves to get distracted for. These distractions can come in, of course, many different forms and my guest today, Katie Burkhart, is all about helping businesses focus on the things that really matter in order to achieve their mission. She is the mastermind behind a system called MatterLogic which she implements through her organization, MatterPulse. --- Katie, welcome to the program today. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. Definitely. So, first of all, MatterLogic is the system you implemented. What did you view in the world that made you decide that this system was something that businesses needed to help them really focus on what matters? That’s a great question. So, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of extremely passionate leaders who are excited about their big idea and how they’re going to improve or otherwise change the world, but I’ve also watched those same leaders struggle to pull themselves in one to many directions at any given time and, as a result, really stunt their growth and their ability to do what it is that they set out to do. In particular, I think about conversations with people where it’s like, “Well, this trend is here. We should be pursuing that,” or whatever and, all of a sudden, whether it’s between more ideas and things that they could do, because I find people with big ideas tend to attract ideas naturally, or through other things that are pulling their attention away from what it is they set out to do is that we need to go about fixing this and, inherently, gravitated towards the purpose of the model. But what I found in that process was that it wasn’t overly well defined. I ended up thinking, well, the issue is really that people don’t have the right data, they don’t have the right information, we should be trying to build technology to support that. But quickly, it was, actually, we don’t really even have a good definition for what it means to run a purpose-driven business, really to reap the benefits from it. Most people look at it as, “Oh, you did something impactful and it’s inspiring,” and I’m like, well, okay, but once you have the statement, and we’ll debate whether that’s the right definition later, what does that mean for how you run your business every day and what does that mean in benefit for how you grow your business? And as you said, focus, and being able to focus on the things that matter is the number one benefit.Share on X Purpose-driven business, do you see a lot of people just saying, “Okay, I have a mission statement, I have a statement of purpose,” it makes a majority of people feel good and that’s enough right there as opposed to just understanding like every single thing that really needs to be put in place to make that purpose actually come into fruition? So we see a lot of what we would call kind of purpose imposters and there are a number of big ones, like, “Well, we’re doing stuff with ESG so we must be purpose driven,” “We donate to a charity so we must be purpose driven,” “We made this really fluffy statement that doesn’t mean a whole lot but we have it, therefore, we’re purpose driven.” You sort of have people in that camp who are like, “I got my statement, I did the thing that I needed to do, now I’m going back to business as usual.” You will also have a group of people who are saying, “No, I really wanna do this. I really put thought into developing an actual purpose statement but I don’t know what to do after that,” and in fact, the last study I read said something like 56 or 60 percent somewhere like well more than half of business leaders don’t know how to operationalize it, like we’ve gotten them to the point of saying, “Well, I have one and I understand why it’s important but I don’t know what to do with it now that I have one. How do I actually run it all the way through my business?” We’re hoping to come into the conversation and say, “Okay, we worked that out for you. We’ve actually developed a system to make sure that it hits all the most important points of your living organization. Let’s help you run that through line all the way down to the bottom and back up again and so that things are really clear and you’re able to get aligned and then know how to stay aligned as you continue to grow.” So it’s interesting to see where people are falling but there will always be people who are sort of in that, “Well, I feel like I checked the box so I’ve moved on,” category. What I think about is the challenge of someone who just has a dollar amount, say, “We want a revenue growth of 10 percent for our shareholders,” and there’s a pretty good process in place for operationalizing that in the sense of like, “Okay, this is what we need to do. This is the revenue stream, this is the payment to people, payment to vendors, payment to your employees,” etc., it’s a balance book type of situation and a customer acquisition one. But when it comes to operationalizing a purpose, I’ve seen materials come around like the triple bottom line, premise behind conscious capitalism with the six stakeholders and everything like that. Where do you think those falls short and what do you think people need to really think about when they say, “Okay, the purpose of what I’m trying to do, my business, my endeavor,” is there a specific way you need to measure how you’re enacting that purpose or is there a different set of operationalizing besides customer acquisition, cash flow, and all that stuff? It’s a great question. So I’m going to start sort of all the way back and say the big shift is starting to say like the point of business is different. It always had a point and you landed on the first one, which is to make money. I’m here to make money and everything I do needs to be finely tuned to make me as much money as possible. There are numerous problems with that but from a strategic point of view and from a cutting out the noise point of view, if you exist only to make money, there are infinite options that you could pursue in order to make money, which just amps up noise in your business because you are chasing every latest trend, every, “Well, this may make us some short-term cash and who cares about the long-term ramifications to my business or anybody else, but we made money,” that was the only goal so it’s not an overly strategic way to operate. Whereas if you shift to saying the point of my business is to deliver value, to deliver value to someone specific, that’s actually why I exist, that is my purpose, and then look at how does everything I do drive towards delivering that value to actually fulfilling my purpose. Now you have to make strategic decisions because some things are going to fulfill that purpose, many things are not. You start to be able to cut out that noise and really find that focus on what you’re doing. And that goes for everything that you do. The fundamental question that we ask in MatterLogic is, what’s the point, so now you’ve defined what’s the point of having the business, you can then carry that question down everything you do. What’s the point of having this meeting today? And if it’s not actually going to achieve something, probably don’t need to have that meeting, which really keeps people focused on moving the ball forward. To your question about measurement, like how do you know what’s going on, certainly, I think understanding where your money is coming and going from and why is a really important piece of understanding how money works, because, in the purpose of the model, it’s not the point, it’s actually the resource. We need capital in order to pay our people well so that our team is there to execute our mission. We need capital to expand our infrastructure so we can grow our reach. We need money as a resource to move our business forward. So we do need to understand where it’s going and why and whether or not it’s helping us to do those things. But more importantly, from a measurement point of view, this is as specific to your point as anything else, which it gets into did we actually make the impact? Did we deliver the value we set out to achieve or not? So if you know what outcomes you’re supposed to be delivering, have you thought about what we like to call your so what factor, which is did you actually, as the person on the receiving end,...