Clear the Runway

 

The FAA requires a runway length of 7,500 feet for a 747 airplane to take-off and land. This length adds on considerable margin for slippery surfaces from poor weather or possibly malfunction. Have you ever noticed how exact air traffic control and schedules are? Your plane has an exact take-off time. It takes a few minutes to depart from the gate and taxi to the assigned runway strip. Then it stops, awaits permission from control, and then barrels down the runway lifting off into the great blue. There are so many great analogies and metaphors that speakers and writers have used over the years to compare this airplane take-off process to some process in our lives or businesses.  I was on a coaching call with Josh Melton in early November 2021 and he said this. "Ken, you need to learn how to clear the runway." 

 

Let me explain the issue first. I had booked a month-long trip to Florida over the summer and had 6 months to accomplish a significant goal. This is explained full in "A New Freedom Vision".  Essentially, I had to add 5 new buildings in my commercial cleaning company and delegate them to 5 new team members. But I would need to delegate and develop systems as a foundation for this all to stay together while I was gone. This seemed very doable once Coach Josh started guiding me. I was taxiing onto the runway and ready to take off. There were just a few giant obstacles blocking my take-off. 

• I had agreed to a major undertaking in the Royal Rangers with my son Kenny. He was going for National Scout and needed to earn his Wilderness in the Frontiersman Camping Fellowship (FCF). I decided to do it with him. This required a 24-hour survival vigil in the woods, building our own shelter, cooking our own food, and staying awake the whole time with no talking. And that was just one part of the testing for Wilderness. There were several other skills we had to learn like black powder muzzle-loader shooting, flint & steel, knife & hawk throwing, primitive navigation, assembling our frontier outfits, and much more. This took Kenny and I all August, September, and early October to accomplish. The Wilderness Vigil was on October 16th, 2021. We both earned Wilderness and Kenny was elected as the National Scout, one of 8 in the whole country and the highest Royal Ranger level of leadership for Rangers under 18. It was worth it. But it took a ton of time and I was not able to devote the time needed toward my cleaning business during that time. Tick-tock...
• I was trying to help my uncle close the estate of my grandparents. We had to sell the family house that my manic father was refusing to leave.  We had to initiate a lawsuit, deal with the lawyers, and try to formulate a plan with the realtor all at the same time. Meanwhile, I had a father who was a threat to himself and others. This made the summer and early fall of 2021 extremely tough. I took multiple personal days away from work to deal with the following: meetings with the lawyer and realtor, helping my brother move out of the family house, taking my dad to the ER to clear him for drug rehab (once he was ready for help in October), coordinating the moving company to empty out the family house, and sell the house. It took a lot of time, but my uncle and I sold the family house on October 20th, which would have been the 65th wedding anniversary of my grandparents. My dad went away for a month, which bought my uncle and I the time to do the "business end" of the estate. I prioritized this and the cleaning business slipped. Tick-tock...

Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website