Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Great operations looks like nothing at all. Great operations looks like no big client fires because we have the systems to proactively spot them and address them before they become giant fires. Great operations looks like Slack being quiet and meetings ending early and the team just showing up and doing their job and going home at the end of the day, fulfilled and satisfied and not frustrated with all the BS that they had to put up with.

• Speaker #1

  How do you build a performance based culture?

• Speaker #0

  Your team has all this potential. They have all this work ethic. They have all this creativity. They have all of this innovation. They have all this problem solving. They have it. The question is, are they giving it to you? Have you created in an environment that is optimized for human potential?

• Speaker #2

  What about entrepreneurs that think they can market their way to growth versus operate their way to growth?

• Speaker #0

  For many early stage startups, I actually think operations is a distraction because you don't actually know what you're doing yet. You don't have product market fit. You don't know what your sale process is. You don't know what marketing channels are going to work for you. You don't know what your offer is, your product is. Operationalizing chaos is not actually a productive use of time.

• Speaker #3

  You're watching Marketing Misfits. Norm Farrar, Kevin King.

• Speaker #1

  Mr. Norm, how are you doing, man? Good to see you. Oh, yeah, I'm doing pretty good. You wore me out, man. I'm still suffering from jet lag.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, I wore you out. Well, that's that. No, I think it's that airline that wore you out making you fly a red-eye.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, it's crazy. You know what? When I was younger, I could do that. But we tried to go to all the main marketing events, and I got a delay from 9.45 in the morning until the 11 o'clock red-eye. And I haven't done that in such a long time. It's taken its toll.

• Speaker #2

  Well, that's what happens when you get to be old and cranky and up there in the great white north seat. That's what... That's what happens when you live in the snow. Yeah,

• Speaker #1

  and you know what it is today? This is Celsius. It got down to minus 23.

• Speaker #2

  It's minus 23 today? And we're recording this in the middle of March, and it's minus 23 in Canada. Oh, my gosh. I think it's 82 degrees Fahrenheit here in Austin. So what's that? It's about 30. It's a divide by two. No. It's a double and add. 32, so that's like about 25. So whatever you can say, whatever you said. That's 25 times 2 is 50 plus 32 is 82. I can do that reverse. See, I'm good at the math side, Norm. I'm good at the math side. You know what you're not good at? The system side. That is true. You sound good at that. I do. When it comes to I've been a one-man show for a long time in my life, done millions of dollars. I've had an office with 16 employees and video editors and the whole nine yards, and I hated it. And so I got rid of it. And it's like, now I'm back for a while. It's back to, you know, just me. And I would partner. People would say, Kevin, how are you doing all this stuff? And I would partner smart. I would partner with people that had systems or that had employees. And then you and I decided to do this little. Dragonfish company. And it looks like it's going to take off. And we need systems because there's just no way that this can fly with the way that I've operated in the past. And that's your expertise is setting up those systems. And you haven't been having to be like, Kevin, no, quit messaging me here. Take it to the teamwork. Yeah, put it in the teamwork. Document it here. And you keep having to slap my hand. And so I appreciate that. But it's difficult. for someone to actually start using systems. I mean, where did you get this from? Where did you, what is it, was it out of necessity or did you?

• Speaker #1

  A hundred percent out of necessity because at the time, this happened during a hyper growth company. The first time I've ever experienced it. It was back when I was in my twenties. I never experienced this. And I didn't go to business school. Like this was all just thrown at me. And we were. growing like incredibly fast over every month. There would be month after month. It would be, well, put it this way. You know, I went to bed a half hour before I got up. It was crazy. And one of the things that I heard about was this, it was this person by the name of Peter Gerber or Michael Gerber. And I read his book, The E-Myth. And then I joined his E-Myth Academy. that. Absolutely, 100% changed my life, allowed me to grow, allowed me to have less stress. One thing I find with systems is it helps prevent crisis management. If you've got a system for it, or if you want to provide holidays or extra time, it doesn't worry. If you've got somebody to cover off somebody and they... have the system, then you're all set. It just makes things so, up front, it's tough. Like my first system was how to make a cup of coffee. It sounds so stupid, right? But what I had to do is I had to have buy-in. So what I did is I brought every, we had 23 people at the time, we had them in the boardroom, and it was all like, they were all pissed off that, you know, why are we learning how to make a cup of coffee? Well, we had to have buy-in, why do we want this? Different people had different reasons for doing it. You know, some people got in early and wanted to get up. Some people came in at nine. Some people came in at five in the morning and they didn't have any coffee. We had customers like these were all Fortune 500 companies that were coming to us. And sometimes they'd ask for coffee. They'd get it just before they left. And then it was, OK, well, where can you find a coffee? What is the proper process of making the coffee? Um, like we literally, you know, where do you put it? How many teaspoons do you put into it? It ended up being a five page coffee process. And, and you know what, like, just to make this a little bit longer, this is a bit longer intro than we normally do cap, but this is, I'm serious. This is what happened. I had a sales manager. He's making $120,000 a year back in the nineties, plus 3% overall sales over a gross. And. He was not a coffee drinker. He came in at five in the morning to beat traffic and he was a tea drinker, but he had to put on the coffee. That was part of the buy-in. You had a three strike rule. The first strike is just a, you know, verbal. The second strike was written in the third strike. You were let go. So, or moving to a different, a different area of the company. The first time he came in, he didn't make his coffee and I brought him into the office and said, Hey, Corey. Why didn't you make the coffee? Well, I'm a tea drinker. I said, yeah, but this is a buy-in. Everybody has to buy into these policies. If you can't follow this one, man, what are you going to do? Second day, he didn't do it. Give him a written. And then the third day or that day, I said, look, you know, if you don't do it tomorrow, I'm going to have to let you go. You know what? And I said, yeah, if you can't follow a simple rule, like how to make a cup of coffee and You had the buy-in and you had everything like that. Unless you have one hell of an excuse, I got to let you go. And that's how it started. And it just went crazy. We had an incredible operations, employee manual, everything.

• Speaker #2

  Thank God I didn't work for you because I don't drink coffee. But you know what? As you know, when you come to my house, I have a coffee machine. I have a tea machine and I have everything that's prepared for those that do. But speaking of these systems, that's who our guest today is. Someone I met at a high-level mastermind a few months ago, and she impressed me and said, hey, you got to come on the podcast and talk about this because this is pain points I have and I know I speak for a lot of entrepreneurs. She may have traveled the country in her RV or in a car for a long time, but that doesn't mean she doesn't know how to do systems. And she's got a lot of experience in actually implementing systems. and helping entrepreneurs get over that hump. So let's welcome her to the podcast, Yana Lee. Yana Lee. Yana Lee. Go get her one of these days. I'll get her one of these days. You know, that double J has got me.

• Speaker #0

  Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

• Speaker #2

  How are you?

• Speaker #0

  I am excellent. I am excellent. How are you all?

• Speaker #2

  Good. So tell me this. You were telling me a little bit when we spoke that you worked in some corporate, you worked in some agencies, you did a bunch of... that kind of stuff. And he said, you know, enough of this, I'm going to travel the country. So what was that about? How long did you do that? And how did that work?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, so close. Essentially, I always say like, before I found my way into operations, I was literally directionless. So I met a guy who was starting a digital marketing agency, and he was a big paraglider. And he was like, Hey, do you want to move into this van with me? I'm going to paragliding competitions and running this business. And I said, Yes, but only if we take the van to South America. I didn't know anything about business, didn't know what operations even was. And I kind of whoopsied my way into joining his team and then ultimately ended up becoming his COO. So I actually found my way into operations and into entrepreneurship by being that second in command operator inside of this marketing agency and learning how to grow and scale it while we were on the road trying to live this like international van life lifestyle. And then I became a operations coach inside of a program that had hundreds of. digital startups, seven and eight figure startups inside of it. And so I actually got to learn operations, not just from running my own business, but from working with hundreds and hundreds of different founders and all the different operational challenges that come up in that stage of growth and getting to learn from hundreds of businesses. And I eventually took all of that and started my own company, Spyglass Ops, about five years ago.

• Speaker #2

  So were you like a, when you were growing up, were you one of these kids that was all organized? Like you had the nice smoke holders and the labels on everything and like.

• Speaker #0

  I'm going to be honest with you, Kevin, I was. Like the back to school shopping day was like my favorite day of the year. Like new pencils, new binders,

• Speaker #1

  new dividers. That was, that's what I lived for.

• Speaker #2

  I can imagine. I can imagine that.

• Speaker #0

  Yep. Here's the thing though I find really interesting is that operations is so much more than just organization, right? It was fun listening to, Norm, your story in terms of the coffee and the buy-in around that. I think that the challenge that most people have with operations is that they associate it with, A, being like super boring, right? Like nobody likes the back-to-school shopping day except for me. I get that. It's super boring. It's unsexy. It feels like this kind of like necessary evil. And I think in a lot of companies, it feels like a constraint, right? Like I want to do my job and I want to do it the way that I know how. And who is this operator coming in? trying to build all these processes and all these systems and like put them on me and slow me down and make it harder for me to do my job. That to me is not operations. That's bad operations, right? Operations when done well should be like pouring soap on a slip and slide. It should be reducing friction. It should be making it easier for everybody to do their best work. And it should be unlocking their creativity, their innovation, their human potential inside of the business. And so that's the style of operations that I like, right? It's not red tape for the sake of red tape and systems for the sake of systems. It's how do we really creatively architect the systems and the team structure so that this company is able to actually unlock its highest potential and its highest growth.

• Speaker #2

  Hey, Norm, do you know any sellers out there that are just burned out doing this e-com game?

• Speaker #1

  You know, I know a lot of people that have talked to us, you know, when we go to events. And it's not only that, they don't know where to start.

• Speaker #2

  Who would you recommend they talk to?

• Speaker #1

  The first one that comes to mind is Quietlight Brokerage. And here's why. They're going to build you up. They're going to understand your company. And at the end of the day, you're going to know how to maximize your valuation. So the very first thing you need to do is go and get your free confidential valuation at Quietlight.com. They're going to ask a couple of questions. You're going to meet up. It's one-on-one with... somebody over there and then you know let the games begin awesome what was that website again it's quietlight.com awesome i'm gonna head over there oh yeah i find too that uh when you're setting up systems i'll hear these objections like it's so hard there's so much thrown at me uh nobody and this this is that entrepreneurial roller coaster That you're giving it over to somebody and you're not training them on the operations. So they fail.

• Speaker #2

  You don't give them the tools for success.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #2

  But that's so important.

• Speaker #0

  A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

• Speaker #2

  So when is it time to actually bring it? I mean, so as an entrepreneur, a lot of times you're wearing multiple hats and you're doing a lot of stuff. And sometimes that's because you think. You can do it better than anybody else. Sometimes that's out of necessity because you just don't have the money to hire people. Sometimes you're just getting things up and running. But is there some sort of point where that typically you need to start actually looking at serious operations and systemizing? I mean, obviously, it'd be great if you did it from day one. But most people, that's just not going to happen. Is it usually a point of like, okay, when you hit $200,000 or half a million or a million, is there some I know it's not across the board, but is there something like that baseline? Like, okay, once you hit, anybody can do, we always say this when we're selling on Amazon, anybody can, a one man show can easily hit a million dollars on Amazon, but getting to 10 million dollars, that's a whole nother game. What is it? What do you see in business that typically where that breaking point is?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. So it does depend on the industry and the business model, right? So in e-com or on Amazon, you may be able to grow beyond that seven figure mark without a team and really without the organizational. complexity that would require for you to come in and bring in a lot of operations and a dedicated operator. In more operationally complex businesses, logistics, manufacturing, even service-based businesses, professional services, digital marketing, et cetera, it just gets more complex faster. And so you need to bring more structure and more organization earlier in the growth. What I generally say as ballpark, and there's an important caveat here, which is that when I say bringing in an operator, I do not mean bringing in a COO, and we can talk about that. But if we're talking about making art. entry level, our first operations higher, generally entrepreneurs should start thinking about that at around the million dollar run rate. And the thing that you're going to see inside of your business is really your time as the founder starting to get dragged into things that it shouldn't be spent on, right? You're going to see your time start to be pulled into the day-to-day weeds of the business, client firefighting, and answering constant team questions, and picking up dropped balls, and doing all of these low-value things that are urgent and need to get done, but are not actually driving the next wave of growth to the business, and you're starting to lose the leverage inside of your time. When you see that inside the organization, that's generally a good indicator that it's time to start looking at operations, because operations is ultimately what's going to free the founder back up, get them out of the weeds and allow them to step back into that visionary CEO role.

• Speaker #2

  So you said you made a clear point. It's not hiring a COO.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah.

• Speaker #2

  So what's the difference between an operator hire and a COO hire?

• Speaker #0

  Great question. So I think like any other department, there's levels to the operations department, right? So at our entry level, right, if you're around that million dollar run rate, the level of operator that you need is not some 10 years experience, 200K a year COO. You need what I would call an ops manager who is focused on day-to-day systems and SOP building. managing the team and making sure that people are achieving tasks on time. They're managing projects. They're there to focus on the day-to-day and make sure the day-to-day moves forward smoothly. As you start to grow and scale up, now you're getting into the, let's say, 100 to 500K per month kind of revenue range. Now you're looking at all of that plus team building, team leadership, creating a high-performance culture, holding people accountable to tasks and to KPIs. That level of an operator is what I would call a head of ops. which is like a middle manager, a head of ops, a director of ops is honestly most often the operator that we hire for our clients' businesses. You only need like a true and proper COO. If you are either crossing that kind of eight-figure run rate, or you have some massive hyper growth goals that you as a founder just have absolutely no idea how to make that happen. And what you're buying in a COO is you're buying the proven experience from somebody who's already been there and done that and can be a partner and a died to you in terms of walking you through that growth curve. But otherwise, I see people go out and spend a lot of money on a really big job title and somebody with a really fancy resume. And then they get that person in and A, that person may actually not actually have small startup experience. They may not be young. They may not be scrappy. They may not be willing to just roll up their sleeves and get the job done. And then you have this really high paid consultant just sitting around coming up with good ideas, but unwilling to execute them. And then you get frustrated and you fire them or they quit. And you're like, see, this is why I can't have an operator. It doesn't work out. It's not right for me.

• Speaker #1

  Let's go to that. You just said why they don't work out. Why do they fail?

• Speaker #0

  Great question. A couple of reasons. I would say the first reason is, did we actually get the right person in the right seat? So before we as the founder go to hire an operator, are we radically and specifically clear on who I need in this role? Not just the level of operator I need, ops manager versus COO, but what are the specific skills? that this person needs to bring into the role? What are the specific bottlenecks that I need them to tackle in my business? What about core values, culture fit, leadership style fit, right? We need to get really, really clear on a custom profile for what this operator needs to be in our business because an incredible ops manager over at our competitors' business might absolutely fail inside of our company, not because they aren't good, but because they weren't the right fit for our culture or they weren't the right fit for our systems. So that's number one is like, who do we need? And then did we build a hiring process to go out and find that person as opposed to just trusting the first impressive looking resume that came across our desk? The second reason that most operators fail, even if they are the right fit, is that the business isn't actually set up to allow them to succeed. The business wasn't ready for that operator to step in and start introducing systems and change. The founder wasn't ready to know how to transition themselves out of the day-to-day weeds. hand off the reins of their business to somebody else. The team didn't have a role, Claire, built out inside the org chart to understand how to work with this person and how to set this person up for success. So we see a lot of clients who come to us with honestly incredible operators in the roles that are totally failing. And it's not because the operator's not good. It's because the business didn't know how to adapt and evolve to allow this person to be successful and bring change into the business. And then the third reason is that that operator was just not onboarded correctly. expectations weren't set. There wasn't clarity around what success in the world looks like. There wasn't clarity around how they were going to get ramped up. And so they just flounder and flounder and flounder. And six months later, they quit or they get fired. And again, the founder just goes back to like, just as being as involved in the day-to-day weeds of the business as they always were telling themselves, no one can run the business like me. I tried, it failed. I just have to double down and work harder.

• Speaker #1

  You know, when I, when I started doing this, creating SOPs, my processes were a little bit hard. harder to do than nowadays. And I love startups. So the first thing that I do is whenever I'm starting up a company like Dragonfish, I'm recording everything. Just anytime I'm doing anything that I think will be useful or repetitive, I just put it into a Loom video and store it. And then I just send it over. Right now it's my son. I send it over to him. He creates it. So are there any other ways that startup companies should, first of all, forget just recording a video, but how should they structure or format their SOPs or processes?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, great question. So a couple of best practices here. Number one, for like the early stage startups in the audience who are listening to this, for many early stage startups, I actually think operations is a distraction. Why? Because you don't actually know what you're doing yet. You don't have product market fit. You don't know what your sales process is. You don't know what marketing channels are gonna work for you. You don't know what your offer is, your product is. Operationalizing chaos is not actually a productive use of time. Because I could build an SOP, but if I don't actually know what my product is, I'm just going to have to rebuild that SOP 10 more times. And now I'm just wasting time rebuilding an SOP to share with who? My non-existent team, right? So I actually advise for most early entrepreneurs and Norm, I think you have the experience now that when you go to build a company, you kind of know what you're doing from the beginning, right? Like you've got that pretty figured out. But for younger entrepreneurs who don't have that experience under their belt, it actually makes sense to stay chaotic and stay disorganized. Because success when you're small is speed to execution and speed to iteration and learning. That's what drives success. Now, as we start to grow and we start to lock in what it is that we actually do, then it's time to introduce SOPs. I'm a huge advocate for putting people before process. So many operators out there will tell you it's process first, then people, then profit. I flip that. I like people first. If I get the right people into the right roles, they will build the processes and that will drive profit. So. as a running an operations company and being a formal operations expert, I haven't built a single SOP at my business. Why would I? It's not my SOP. It's my team's SOP. I hire in the right expert. They know how to do the job and then they document it and put that down so that the rest of the team can get cross-trained and can learn from that. So I actually like building out SOPs in a way where the team owns the process. Norm, you were talking about buy-in earlier. What people build they have a sense of ownership for. They are significantly more likely to actually follow that SOP and then improve that SOP and utilize it over time. And so I would rather rule out, if I have to write a player in the role from the beginning, I would actually rather that they be a part of co-creating those processes, at least with me, so that they feel that sense of ownership and buy-in from the beginning.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, I agree 100%. So you're training those people, like the trainer to anybody that they're training. should learn how to write an SOP for their department or for their role. That's so important.

• Speaker #2

  Yep,

• Speaker #0

  absolutely. And then the operator can like You should be doing an SOP,

• Speaker #2

  Kevin. That's building Dragonfish, this agency that we do email marketing and AEO for e-commerce brands. We have like 200 people on a waiting list right now. We have four people in beta. And we're using an audience that knows us. And we say, look, come in. We're building this airplane as we're flying it. We've done this for ourselves, but we haven't done it for others in the past. So it's going to be some hiccups. We'll give you a half price on the deal, and it's going to take us longer than it should to get this done. Just bear with us. And so far, all four of them think, knock on wood, it's been six months. They're bearing with us because the first time we went to do it, Norm was like, okay, we got teamwork. We got SOPs. Here's how it works. Let me show you everything. I start getting in there, and I'm documenting everything I'm doing because I'm building out the first system on the email side. And I'm like, wait a second. I don't even know what I'm doing yet. I'm like, and then I told him, look, I got to just go through this on my own. One time out. And I thank God because it was taking me so long to go and document each little step. And I'm like, nope, that didn't work. Let me change it. I got to switch it back. So I got to get this. Like you said, I got to get, I got to go through it once. And then I said, okay. And the second time, then I will document once I've done it one time. Because I'm flying here and flying here and pulling this and pulling that. And I don't just go document the whole thing. It's going to take, like you said, it's a distraction. So I think that was a good point that you made is get the system. They say the same thing with AI. And we will talk about that some now. It's like you can't have AI with all this agentic buzz and Claude, ClaudeBot and whatever they're calling it now, OpenClaw, and all this stuff now. All that stuff is great. But if you don't have a system first, that stuff is useless. And so that's where a lot of people don't understand is they haven't built. the SOP to tell the machine how to do the SOP. They're just playing and it looks cool because it wrote some emails and did a few lights and did a few cool things. But that so we'll talk about that more so. What is it the hardest part to getting an entrepreneur to actually change their mindset and actually let go?

• Speaker #0

  What is the hardest part? I think the hardest part is getting the entrepreneur to truly buy in to the understanding that what got me here will not get me there. And I mean truly buy into that. We all intellectually buy into that. But am I willing to accept that the behaviors... and the beliefs and the identity that made me wildly successful when I was first scaling to seven figures are going to actively begin to stall me out when I get to eight. So let me give you an example. One of the major beliefs that I think make us wildly successful when we are small is success comes down to me. I am the creator of my own success. Success is how hard can I work? How many ideas can I have? How fast can I learn? How many skills can I develop? It's all back to me. And if I put in the effort, I will win. I will be successful. That is 100% true. When you are small and you don't have a team and you don't know what you're doing and you're figuring it all out. But as you grow in scale, running off of that leaf system, what that now looks like is you're jumping into processes and you're interrupting your team's workflow. You don't know how to trust or delegate or hand off ownership to your team, not just around tasks, but also around decisions. You don't know how to let go of. certain functions of the business that you were already and always involved in, and you believe that you know how to do best. These belief systems start to actively stall us out at scale because now they are trapping us in the day-to-day weeds of our own business because we're operating under a belief that my business will not be successful unless I show up every single day and I white knuckle it to success, as opposed to a new belief system that says, my success comes down to my team. How strong of a team can I create? How hard can my team work? What great ideas can my team generate? What decisions can my team make without me? And shifting the focal point of success away from our own effort as a producer and into a new identity as a leader and a visionary. So the hardest part is not training a CEO on how to delegate, right? I can give you tactical tools and systems on how to delegate effectively. You won't follow them. If you're operating from an underlying belief that it's just faster and easier if I just get in there and do it myself. That's the hardest part.

• Speaker #2

  What about for a founder that has they can't cash flow it. They need to hire an executive assistant or they need to hire an operator. They need to hire a secretary or bookkeeper or whatever it may be. I don't have $20,000 or $50,000 or even if I go offshore and do it or it's cheaper, I don't have that money. How do I do this? That's what... What's your answer? Is it go find a rich uncle? What is your cap problem?

• Speaker #0

  I mean, the first place I would look is in the model of the business, right? If your business isn't already profitable with you just being a solopreneur individually delivering your services, it sure as heck isn't going to be profitable when you need to build a team to deliver on those services, right? The reality is that your profit margin should never be higher than when you're just starting out because you have no overhead and all of the revenue. And now we've. given ourselves this huge profit margin to cut into and eat into as we need to grow and scale, as we need to hire in roles. I talk to clients all the time that they're like, yeah, my company's wickedly profitable. I'm like, yeah, because you don't have a salesperson that you're paying 10% of your revenue to. Of course, it's profitable. You're the salesperson. But if you actually had to carve out 10% and no longer do the sales calls and hand that off to somebody else, would it still be profitable? So we have to build our model in a way that scales. And if I'm small and I'm... I'm already not profitable. I need to look at what I'm delivering relative to the price point I'm delivering it at.

• Speaker #1

  I remember back in the day, my accountant used to love me. I was fairly organized. My partner on the other hand, this is literally, used to bring all his receipts at the end of the year, literally in a shoe box. So I kind of think entrepreneurs are either fairly organized or they're messy.

• Speaker #0

  How can you take a messy situation or a messy structure and even start to, you know, build that, structure it?

• Speaker #1

  It's a great question. This is why I think so many founders are terrible at being their own operators, because you shouldn't be great at operations. You're a visionary genius. Go do that, right? Like, that's what the business actually needs from you. That's the function of your genius that is actually so expensive to replace and is so valuable when you get to spend all of your time in that visionary creative genius role. Why would you step out of that role to learn how to build SOPs that you hate and that you're not going to follow? It makes no sense, right? Versus if we bring in an operator like the people like me who had like multicolored dividers in their binders in middle school who are like, oh my gosh, I get to take this creative genius. And I get to build a systems ecosystem around them to magnify that genius and augment that genius and extract all of the incredible value of that genius while also mitigating against the chaos and mitigating against the whiplash and mitigating against all of the potential downsides that come from this unique type of genius. I get to create a system that extracts and funnels all of that value into the company without creating chaos or disorganization for the rest of the team. Give me some of that. Like, yes, please let me have the opportunity to build that structure, right? And so I think, again, back to this concept of like, it has to be me. If there's a problem in the business, I have to solve it. If there's a role to be filled, I have to figure it out. I see a lot of visionaries try and do that in the operator role. But the way that an operator functions in the business is so radically different, so opposite from how a visionary functions, that they either really, really struggle trying to install those systems. they like. get really frustrated and it just drains the life out of them. Or they just don't do it. And so they end up scaling disorganization and chaos and complexity and then having to compensate for that with their own time and energy and heroic effort.

• Speaker #2

  Hey, Norm, you'll love this, man. I talked to a seller the other day doing 50K a month. But when I asked them what their actual profit was, they just kind of stared at me.

• Speaker #0

  Are you serious? That's kind of like driving blindfolded.

• Speaker #2

  Exactly, man. I told them, you got to check out Sellerboard, this cool profit tool that's built just for Amazon sellers. It tracks everything like fees, PPC, refunds, promos, even changing COGS using FIFO.

• Speaker #0

  Aha, but does it do FBM shipping costs too?

• Speaker #2

  Sure does. That way you can keep your quarter four chaos totally under control and know your numbers because not only does it do that, but it makes your PPC bids, it forecasts inventory. It sends review requests and even helps you get reimbursements from Amazon.

• Speaker #0

  Now that's like having a CFO in your back pocket.

• Speaker #2

  You know what? It's just $15 a month. But you got to go to sellerboard.com forward slash misfits. Sellerboard.com forward slash misfits. And if you do that, they'll even throw in a free two-month trial.

• Speaker #0

  So you want me to say go to sellerboard.com misfits and get your number straight before your accountant loses it?

• Speaker #2

  Exactly. All right.

• Speaker #0

  We did the three-strike rule, and we didn't call it a three-strike rule. It was much more gentler. But when somebody did something wrong the third time, something had to happen. In your opinion, what's a way to work with people who just can't get it done? That was my idea for the three strikes. Yeah. But what... What would you recommend?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. So you're heading on a really difficult part of the operator job. I coach operators, right? I have a program for coaching operators and I tell them all the time, knowing what to do, knowing the right system or the right process or the right move here is only half the job. And frankly, it's like 49%, 51% of the job is getting people to actually do it. And that is so much harder, right? Changing human behavior is so hard. And so when you look at that and you study that, there's essentially two ways to go about it. You can use extrinsic motivators, which is what you're talking about, Norm, right? That is carrots and sticks. Here is the reward if you do it correctly. Here is the punishment, the three-strike system, if you do not do it correctly. Take that seriously enough and people will change, but they won't like it. They won't be happy about it. These are extrinsic motivators. They work, but they work slowly and they don't work super effectively. What I teach my operators is to focus on the intrinsic motivators. There's this incredible TED talk and book called Drive by Dan Pink, for anybody who wants to really nerd out on this, where he talks about the three pillars of intrinsic motivation, which are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These are the reasons that somebody would want to change. So if I can align this system and make it your idea and align it with your intrinsic motivators about why you think this is a great idea and why you want to take on this system, then you are so much more likely to adopt that system quickly to be bought into it, to make it better, et cetera. So I call it the Jedi mind trick. And I would rather teach our operators how to Jedi mind trick change into our team because it's going to work faster, easier and cheaper.

• Speaker #2

  Okay. What about good question? What about entrepreneurs that think they can market their way to growth versus operate their way to growth?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. So I, this is so fun, guys. This is like an operations pop quiz. Like, this is my dream. Okay. So I think of, I always tell founders to think of your business for a moment as a bucket, right? Your business is a bucket and marketing and sales is the water being piped into that bucket. That's revenue. That's cash flow, right? So we want more water in that bucket, more water always. Great. There's two ways to grow the water in the bucket. We can go all in on sales and marketing and just pour an enormous amount of water into this bucket. The challenge is that every bucket, every single one has gaps and cracks and holes. These are the inefficiencies. These are the places where time and energy and money is leaking out of the business through the operational inefficiencies in the company. The challenge is that the more water you pour into this bucket, the bigger the cracks become, more pressure, more growth, more leakage through the cracks. So if you want, sure, you can pay a bunch of money to throw more water into an ever increasingly leaky bucket or, and right, it's not turn off marketing. Don't do it. And we can bring in operations to actually target and close the cracks so that all the money that we're spending to generate all this revenue and all this water into this bucket actually stays in the bucket. And it's free because you don't have to. pay any money to just become better, to become more efficient with your time and your energy and money. You pay an operator a nominal salary, and all of a sudden, every single drop of water that you're working so hard to bring into this bucket actually gets to stay in the bucket. And so, Kevin, yes, you can outsell and outmarket most problems. It's just going to be wildly inefficient and wildly expensive at scale. At some point, if you care about profit, that's how much water is left over in the bucket when all is said and done. And if you want. profit and not just revenue, then the question becomes, how do we be more efficient with the water that we're driving into this bucket? Because that's what we get to keep and take off the table at the end of every month.

• Speaker #2

  So that's why I'm doing exactly where we have. We have high demand for dragonfish of what we're doing. These people are on a wait list and we took four and once we figure out with these four, we'll know exactly what we're selling, exactly what the system's in. And then we're not just going to open it to all 200 of them. We'll open it to, I don't know, four more. or something, make sure, verify that what we put in place actually works, and then wrap that up as we scale it up. And I think a lot of people, they just open the gates to everybody.

• Speaker #1

  Flood gates.

• Speaker #2

  When we get those systems in place, it'll be eight, Kev, not four. We got to start making money.

• Speaker #1

  We're going to incrementally ramp up. These guys are smart, right? Because you know, it's not just about how many clients can we get in the front end. It's about how many clients can we keep for a long time, how much water stays in the bucket. And so you guys are optimizing for retention and lifetime value, not just upfront growth and strike screenshots.

• Speaker #0

  So I want to go down a different rabbit hole, still sticking with SOPs and format. But this one is a very leaky bucket. We can lead to a lot of lost profit, poorly managed meetings. How can you structure a meeting so it's effective and that, you know, people take action and they're accountable?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. Okay. So meetings are one of what I call the hidden profit centers inside of your company, right? So again, back to our bucket analogy, meetings are one of the biggest cracks that I see in most buckets. And if we look at the math of that really, really quickly. So we had a client, he had a twice a week meeting with his entire team of like 10 people. And essentially this meeting was to just like go through every single client on the client list and say like, What do they need? What do they need? Are you doing that? Did you follow up with them? Is that task done? Essentially, he was just auditing the business live for two hours every single week. Okay. So when we ran the math on that meeting, two hours a week times the 10 people on that meeting times the salaries of the people that were in that meeting, that meeting cost him $62,000 in labor cost to just run the meeting. Ouch. But we've all spent more money on dumber things, let's be honest. The real cost. is that it was 2,000 working hours. He was spending 2,000 of his team's hours every year. talking instead of generating revenue, right? Doing the things, doing their jobs that he hired them for to actually drive growth into the business. For him, that came out to about 350K in lost revenue. So the real cost of this meeting was over $400,000, not just because of the hard cost of the meeting, but the opportunity cost of the growth and the revenue that could have been generated if that meeting was more efficient, or in the case of what we did, came in, rebuilt the system because you should never have to just audit your business. That's what a system's for. We built the system, eliminated the meeting entirely, and now he has 62K plus 2,000 hours to actually do the thing that makes him money.

• Speaker #0

  Wow.

• Speaker #1

  I didn't answer your question about how to do that. The short answer is number one, have a purpose and a goal for every single meeting. Every meeting needs three things. Number one, what's the purpose? Like literally, why are we here? What is the point of this meeting? And are we sure that it's actually ROI positive and deserving of the amount of money that we're spending to have us all in this room talking? What's the purpose? Number two, do we have an agenda? Meaning, what is the clear set of steps that we're going to follow in order to achieve the purpose? And then number three, we need a facilitator. We need somebody who is not the ADD visionary running that meeting, because otherwise that meeting is going to go all over the place. And 60 minutes later, we will have not achieved that purpose, but we'll have five new business ideas, right? So the facilitator is the operator generally whose job it is. is to direct the flow of conversation, ask challenging questions, run the agenda, and interrupt the founder. Tell the founder to shut up, sit on their hands, or write that idea down because this is not the meeting for that idea, but it's a brilliant idea. And I need you to bring that into our brainstorming session next week. Yep. A hundred percent. The parking lot. Yep.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. So, and that's really a good suggestion. It's always tough. Like you said, especially with founders talking, you know, you get so many other ideas and- A hundred percent. Just trying to keep the meeting straight. Building the agenda. Is it everybody participating and then funneling? Getting coffee. So, thank you.

• Speaker #2

  Is she for that? Does she have that? Does she have the SOP? Yes.

• Speaker #0

  To get the facilitators, not the mind reader. So if there's different ideas that are flowing for that meeting, how should they come? Does everybody like put their thoughts and just text them or whatever way? You've got the right idea.

• Speaker #1

  So the number one system that I recommend every entrepreneur install or have an operator install into the back of their business is what I call the single source of truth system. This is your project management system. This is Asana. It's ClickUp. It's Monday.com, Notion, whichever one you use. No, there's no right answer. They all work. Pick the system that you like the most and commit to it, right? So you pick one system and inside of this system should be housed your meeting agendas, your master dashboards, where you're like archiving and organizing all of the critical data and information inside of the back end of the business, client information, tasks, et cetera. So your master dashboard, your individual task lists. So this is where... everybody goes to get their to-dos for the day. Nobody is tracking their to-dos in like a journal notebook, like sticky notes, right? Like it's all centralized. Your project management and your SOP library. And then the way that that system works specifically for meetings is now everybody has their task list that they show up to every single day. If I need to address a question regarding one of these tasks inside of the meeting, I can add a tag that's going to move it into that meeting agenda. And so the meeting agenda gets asynchronously built over the course of the week. as people are adding agenda items into it. And then the facilitator, when we sit down on that meeting, pulls up that dedicated meeting agenda, that dedicated meeting dashboard. All of the items are pre-populated, and their job is to just facilitate the flow of conversation, make sure that we're tackling the highest priority items, and that we're moving through things at a steady clip.

• Speaker #2

  Okay. That's a good idea. Who determines that priority?

• Speaker #1

  Great question. So this comes down to who has the most context in the room, right? Again, not... the department, but what are we here to do on this meeting? What is the, what is the agenda? What is the purpose of this meeting? Because there might be some crazy big client fire, high urgent, high priority issue, but this isn't the client success meeting. This is the sales meeting. So we're not going to, we're not going to pull the entire sales call and the entire sales department into a founder flipping out about a client fire. It's not the time, right? So making sure that each meeting has its clearly delineated purpose and agenda says great. That is a gate. That's a huge freaking fire. Bring it up in the client success meeting with the people who can actually solve it, right? This is not the time for that conversation. And the reality is, is that again, Norm, what I loved you said around like... Great operations looks like nothing at all. Great operations looks like no big client fires because we have the systems to proactively spot them and address them before they become giant fires. Great operations looks like Slack being quiet and meetings ending early and the team just showing up and doing their job and going home at the end of the day, fulfilled and satisfied and not frustrated with all like the BS that they had to put up with, right? Great operations isn't measured in what doesn't happen. And so the question, if we have giant glaring fires all the time, is where's the breakdown in the system or the process that is causing this? And how do we solve for that? Because otherwise, I'm just playing fire whack-a-mole as a founder going through my business, putting out fires everywhere without stopping to ask, what is the root cause? And how can I tackle that so that these, like, I would rather build a fireproof house than spend my whole life firefighting.

• Speaker #0

  You know, when I was at the peak of... this crazy hyper growth company. I ended up with an ulcer. I would, I loved work, but it ate at me. Like it just killed me because I was trying to cover so many things. New problems would come up, more crisis management. And then when it all started to come together, I knew I had it when I was able to take a three week vacation, three weeks. And I just had email was just coming out at the time. So I had an email. Where, you know, just here's an urgent email. Don't bother me unless it's urgent. And even today we do that. And also what I loved is what I was able to give back to the employees at the time. Is that, hey, look, I'm going to pay you for 40 weeks. Just the job is done. You get, I support a week. But I'm paying you for 40.

• Speaker #2

  First of all, I think $40 came in. Yeah, 40 hours.

• Speaker #1

  Oh, I see. I was like, damn, you just gave me a salary?

• Speaker #2

  And you're looking for forwarding. So working for 10 hours a week.

• Speaker #0

  Here's a 40-hour pay raise. And so when the person comes to work on the Monday or the Friday or whenever they come back on the next week, they're all laid back. They're ready to go.

• Speaker #1

  They're happy. Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, absolutely.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah.

• Speaker #0

  And as productive, by the way.

• Speaker #1

  So there's this really key resource that I think we overlook inside of our businesses, right? Like we keep an eye on time. We keep an eye on energy. We keep an eye on money. I think the thing we overlook is human potential. Your team has all this potential. They have all this work ethic. They have all this creativity. They have all of this innovation. They have all this problem solving. They have it. The question is, are they giving it to you? have you created in an environment that is optimized for human potential? Because it's a resource. And what's cool about this resource is that you don't actually have to pay more to get it. Again, people don't actually work harder for extrinsic motivators. Statistically, pay increases and promotions does not do a very good job of actually increasing motivation and buy-in over the long run. Once basic human needs are met and people feel like they're getting paid fairly, wage increases won't actually drive. significantly higher levels of performance, but intrinsic motivators on average 2.1 X team productivity, not because they're getting paid twice as much, but because the team wants to show up and give their absolute best to this business every single day. How do you operationalize that? Because I can get twice the output for free. Yeah. That's a pretty big leak in my bucket that if I close, that is just free potential, free growth, free work ethic. It is just being poured into my business. I didn't pay for it, but I just built the systems and I built the ecosystem where people want to show up every single day and do their best work. So if that means giving them a four-day week, let's do that. Or at my company, that's an unlimited time off policy and absolutely zero constraints around working hours. Work whenever you want to work. But then I go into Slack and I see people working at like 8 p.m. on a Saturday because they're excited and they got a new idea and they want to just like tell the team about it to get back to it on Monday. Right. I didn't pay them to work over the weekend. They did it because they chose to. So how do we create that working environment in our business? That's where we're really going to get the biggest ROI on our people.

• Speaker #0

  What about quantifying SOPs? I don't really hear that talked about at all.

• Speaker #1

  Quantifying. How do you mean?

• Speaker #0

  Just making sure they're working.

• Speaker #1

  Like actually being followed and actually being done. Yeah. So in that single source of truth system, if you guys have a complex, Kevin's like, wow, love this conversation. We'll make a phone for you, Kevin.

• Speaker #2

  Oh, good. Who's been getting back to the marketing talk?

• Speaker #1

  We can talk about marketing. So the really quick tactical answer is for the more complex or important SOPs inside of the business, you make it a checklist. And that checklist is a template. It gets duplicated every time that SOP needs to run. Those tasks get pushed to everybody's to-do list. And so in order to achieve the SOP, I actually need to literally check off all of the steps in order to clear my to-do list. And that, again, is the system guaranteeing that the work gets done. So in the example of a digital marketing agency, right, what you guys are running, that was my first company. I was the COO there. Our onboarding process took, on average, we got it from five days down to three hours. And the entire thing ran. This was before AI. The entire thing ran automatically. And the entire thing ran without me auditing or checking in on it or making sure that it happened correctly. Because the tasks just fired. And the team knew how to do the tasks. And then they checked off the tasks. And then the SOP was done. And if it ever wasn't done, I would get notified. I would see exactly where the SOP broke down. And I would see exactly what the problem was. And I could go in and I could fix it for next time. So again, there's this great quote from the book, Atomic Habits. We do not rise to the level of our aspirations. We fall to the level of our systems.

• Speaker #0

  Beautiful.

• Speaker #1

  That's it. Build the systems because you will fall to meet them.

• Speaker #2

  Hey, Kevin King and Norm Farrar here. If you've been enjoying this episode of Marketing Misfits, thanks for listening this far. Continue listening. We've got some more valuable stuff coming up. Be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player. Or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel. because you don't want to miss a single episode of The Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?

• Speaker #0

  Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say.

• Speaker #0

  I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes But that being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it, and you'll go to another episode of The Marketing Misfits.

• Speaker #2

  Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm.

• Speaker #0

  Oh,

• Speaker #2

  I think you told me this, or a lot of times operate, it doesn't work out. It's like the last three, four months or something like that, and it doesn't. It doesn't work out. Why is that? It doesn't work out a lot of times with founders. Are they hiring wrong? Are there some things that they should be looking for? I guess that's the questions there. Why does it not work out? And then what should you be looking for if Norm and I are going to hire an operator? Because Norm's a systems guy. I'm a more visionary marketing. Norm is too, but that's my lean more on that side. What should we be doing? How should we be talking to someone to grease these wheels for us?

• Speaker #1

  I see that a lot. I'll share just one more quick client story. We had a client that we just wrapped up working with and he actually originally reached out to us two years ago and said, hey, I think I need an operator. So we came in and how we start every relationship was we do this in-depth operational audit. We came in, we did the audit. We told him exactly what needed to happen in this business for the next 12 months and his business operations, gave him the roadmap and gave him the operator profile. And he was like, thank you very much. I've got this. So he knew exactly what he needed and he knew exactly what this person should be doing inside of this business. He came back 18 months later and he said, Jonna, I have hired and fired three operators. I have burned 150K on operator salaries that didn't do anything. I am just as involved in the weeds of the business. My marriage is like on the risk of combustion because we're fighting so much about the company. And I should be $3 million ahead of where I am today. And I can, because I wasn't able to grow the business. I was too busy cleaning up this mess. We just got done. It took us 62 days to find his dream operator. She's fully running the day-to-day of his agency. It's been two months. And now he's working on second and third businesses because he's actually just so unnecessary at this point. What's the difference? To your question, Kevin, what's the difference? It's number one, did we start with radical clarity around what this operator needs to look like, do and be? Yes, we gave that to him from the beginning. The place where it broke down for him is that he didn't have a hiring process. The challenge is that most visionaries, We make kind of. gut intuitive checks, especially when it comes to hiring and especially when it comes to hiring a role that we know we really need to like and trust. So we go out and we meet with people and interview people and we look for a no like trust factor. But the challenge is, is that we're most likely to know, to like, and to trust the people who are just like us. meaning other visionaries. So we're going out looking for an operator, but what we find is somebody who thinks the way we do and somebody who runs the business the way that we do. And somebody who I could see being this mini me clone, that's just going to come in and do exactly what I do. So I don't have to do it. The challenge is doing things the way that you did them, bottlenecked you in the business and created this huge key man risk and this huge key man constraint. And so if you're just handing that to somebody else, now there's just... two bottlenecks in the business. Now we just have two chickens running around with our heads cut off. We haven't actually solved the problem and the operator quits or gets fired. And so the challenge with hiring an operator is that it's yin trying to identify yang. It's light trying to identify dark. You're looking for your opposite. You're looking for your compliment. And they think so radically different than you that it's really hard to go out and gut check that somebody is going to be the right fit for the role. So we actually can't trust the gut check as enough in and of itself. We need a process. So when we do this, we have an eight-step hiring funnel that we send these operators through before we present them to the client. And then we can say, hey, client, now you can pick the person you like the most because they've gone through an eight-step process that guarantees any one of these people has the operational chops to do the job. Now just pick who you get along with the best and let's go. And that's going to work better for you.

• Speaker #0

  Are there too many SOPs? Is there such thing as too many?

• Speaker #1

  Yes. Half the time we come in and we do a Marie Kondo on that business operations and be like, well, does this spark joy? No. Good. Get it out of here. Right. Again, I don't believe in red tape for the sake of red tape and systems for the sake of systems. Just because something's disorganized doesn't mean it needs an SOP on it. The question is, what's the desired outcome? Is this actually going to make us faster, more scalable, or more profitable? And if the answer is no, don't touch it. Right. Or is it actively slowing us down? No, there's times. in a business's growth cycle where disorganization is the name of the game, right? When you're in hyper growth and you're testing rapidly, break things 100%. You don't know what you're doing. Get in there, figure it out, right? To try and operationalize that with SOPs and systems, we kill all the creativity and innovation inside of the business. So it's not about throwing SOP everywhere that you see it. SOPs are just a hammer in the tool chest of this carpenter who is building your house. And a skilled carpenter knows when the right tool for the right part of the job.

• Speaker #2

  I think it was Ryan Dice that said that at Digital Marker, they had everybody make SOPs for like everything they did. And those all went in a nice little binder and they stayed on the shelf and they never got taken off the shelf.

• Speaker #1

  Nobody ever used them.

• Speaker #2

  No, no one ever referred to them again.

• Speaker #1

  Yep. Great. 100%. 100%. What a beautiful waste of time. Looks great on a bookshelf, but gosh, did it actually move the needle in the business? Not at all. So what an absolute waste of time and energy.

• Speaker #2

  So some people try to do this themselves. And other people, they hear about, they meet you, or they hear about a company like yourself. So tell me, how does your process work? How is it working with someone like you different than if me and Norm just said, hey, we got this, okay? We listen to the podcast. We ask ChatGBT a couple of questions. We could go hire an operator. Versus coming to someone like your firm, like Spyglass. What's the difference?

• Speaker #1

  Yeah. So I'll just walk it through really quick. There's essentially three critical differences. So when we start a client relationship, we essentially guarantee that we will place your dream operator into that role in 90 days or less, or you don't have to pay for it. The way that we're able to honor a promise like that is in three stages. The first is that we do that operational audit, right? So it takes a week. My team comes in. We look at your systems, your processes. We interview your team. We look at your culture, your Slack channels, everything. and we're building our own expert understanding. of what the business actually needs to do operationally in order to achieve your goals. So if you tell us you want 5x growth, great. Here's everything that needs to happen in the business operationally to achieve a 5x growth rate. And here's the unique operator profile required to pull that off. So we start with radical role clarity. That's step number one. If you're doing this on your own, you totally can. Step number one, start with radical role clarity. Do you know exactly who this person is? What success looks like in the role? and what they need to do in the first 12 months to scale to your goals. Get that. Step number two is we need to prepare the business and use a proven process to find this person. So we do that with our A-step hiring funnel. It's a done for you recruitment. And while that's happening, the fractional COO who just came in and did the audit is working with the founder every single week for 60 days to build a runway and lay the groundwork inside of the company that removes all of the blockers and all of the reasons that an operator would step in and not be successful for day one. So you set the operator up for success and you prepare the business for the change that they're about to bring in.

• Speaker #0

  Most founders don't do that, don't know how to do that, et cetera, but that's what you got to do. And then step number three, again, is onboarding. On average, a strong onboarding process, three S's employee retention and improves employee productivity by 72% on average. So you could get the best operator in the world, but if you don't know how to onboard them, they're going to quit. They're going to get fired, not because they weren't great, but because you didn't onboard them successfully. And so we walk our clients every single week through that 30-day process to ensure that, number one, on-boarder, the operators up and running and they're set up for success to move fast. And then number two is that if we somehow missed and they're not the right person, you need to know that in 30 days. You can't be wasting six months going, but they're new. I don't know. Give them another chance. Give them another month. That's so expensive. That lack of certainty is so expensive. So if we didn't place the right person, we need to know that in 30 days. And then we just work with clients for free until we found the right operator and it never happens. So that's an easy promise to make.

• Speaker #1

  I think you see that with great athletes as well. You'll float from team to team to team until they find the right coach. And then they flourish. And that's exactly what an employee can do. I've got a different type of question. And I believe this is so important. And so many companies don't spend enough time on it. But how do you build a performance-based culture?

• Speaker #0

  I love that question, Norm. again, back to human potential, right? Am I, do I have the right people in the right seats? Do I have true A players? Do I know how to hire A players back to the hiring process? Do I have a system to guarantee that I get the right people in? That's number one. And then number two, have I created an environment where they are not just invited, but they are expected to bring their absolute best to the table. And again, Gallup did this really big study where they pulled that 2.1x productivity metric and what they found. is that employees working under a great manager would always say something to the effect of, yeah, that manager got me to do more than I even knew I was capable of, right? So great performance doesn't look like I'm doing what I know I can do. Great performance looks like I stepped into an environment that pushed me and challenged me to level up into a version of myself I didn't even know that was possible for me. It unlocked everything that I have to give. And that's true high performance. the way that we create that. as simply as I can put it, is that we manage to outcomes instead of inputs. If we're managing to inputs, what that looks like is we're managing tasks, we're managing deadlines, we're following up with our team and we're saying, did you do this? Did you do it on time? Did you do it good enough? And now I am in a position of babysitting and making sure that my team is doing the inputs that I'm telling them to do. And then they come back to me the next day and they need the next round of inputs to give them. I don't manage to inputs. I manage to outcomes, which means here is what success looks like in your role. This is the finish line. And this is the race course that you're going to run. You figure out how to run it. If I've put the right A player in the right seat with the right finish line and the right context, they will sprint. Not because I told them what to do or how to do it, but because they are intrinsically motivated to see how fast they can run. And so when you set the outcomes correctly, and then you hold them accountable to the outcomes, you unlock autonomy and innovation and creativity and all the ways that they figure out how to achieve that outcome better, faster, and easier than you would have, because they're the subject matter expert. So they should come in with the expertise to know how to do that.

• Speaker #1

  You're almost off the hook.

• Speaker #2

  Kevin, do you have any more questions?

• Speaker #1

  We were close there.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah. So is there ever a time where it's too early to... I mean, we talked about the magic one, you said like a million bucks, but is it ever... too early to hire an operator?

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, totally. Again, when you're in really early stages of startup growth, where you're still essentially the turning point I think of as product market fit. Up until the moment we've achieved product market fit, we don't really know what we're doing. We're in constant trial and error mode. We're just testing things. We're learning things. We're figuring things out. We're changing things all the time. It's not that you can't bring in an operator. It's just that they're not going to be ROI positive for you. There's not enough to operationalize yet. to be worth their salary. After we achieve product market fit, now the question isn't what do we do? The question is how do we do it better, faster, easier, and without the founder involved as a dependency and as a bottleneck? That's where operations is really going to start to pay back for you.

• Speaker #1

  Very good. All right. Well, Jonna, at the end of every podcast, we always ask our misfit if they might know a misfit.

• Speaker #0

  Oh, I have a tribe of misfits. How many do you want? Like, no, there's actually a couple of people that come to mind that have deep, deep, deep experience in the marketing agency space, the AI space, the e-com space. I'd be happy to connect you guys.

• Speaker #1

  Fantastic.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah, absolutely. Thank you guys so much. This is a really fun pop quiz. I appreciate it.

• Speaker #1

  Before you go, Kevin,

• Speaker #2

  contact information, right? Yeah. How do people, if they want to learn more about this or maybe engage your firm to help them out or how would they follow you?

• Speaker #0

  So you guys can check out our website, spyglassops.com. I'll also drop a link in the show notes that is the direct link to our 90-day operator program if you want to learn more about that or work with us on that. If this was helpful and you're like, hey, I'm not ready or I need to learn more, follow me on social at the John Ali YouTube, Instagram. You can find me and I drop as much free content and educational coaching on operations as I can there.

• Speaker #1

  Fantastic. This has been awesome.

• Speaker #0

  Thank you, guys. Thanks for the fine questions. See you soon.

• Speaker #1

  All right. Talk to you soon. Thanks. All right. Now I'm going to start whipping your butt.

• Speaker #2

  Shake. Hey, you're looking at me in shape now, Yeah, but it sounds like, you know, once we get this going, we're going to have to call her and get an operator. Yeah, no, no. It's so easy. We're going to have to actually get that operator in place as soon as we figure out some of the systems. Because we're in that early stage right now with this company where we're trying this, trying that, trying this. But once we get it and before we bring on 200 people on a wait list, we're definitely going to need an operator in place.

• Speaker #1

  Right. I think so anyways. It's not going to be me.

• Speaker #2

  We got to keep our meetings on track. Four or five hour meetings are not productive. We can do our jabbering when we're smoking cigars and our brainstorming and visionary stuff then. But the meteorite is on track.

• Speaker #1

  You know what? Everything John has said. The most important thing for me anyways was the meeting part because, you know, you go into so many meetings, even with customers, you know, having that itinerary, even for them, it's so important. Manage expectations, get it out of the way, and move on. Because I find that, like, for us, yeah, we've got to plug those holes. But for customers, that's even way worse because you're on the phone so many times and they expect, oh, you know, you'll… you've got endless time. And that's not the case. So, no, it took me a while to actually just forget the internal meetings, but just people that want to have a meeting with me. Someone messaged me on LinkedIn or someone's introducing me.

• Speaker #2

  Like, this person does TikTok shop. You should meet them. And I'm at the point now, like, what's the justification for that meeting? If I'm going to sell them a sponsorship to the newsletter, I might take a chance and jump on the call, but it's going to be very specific and we're off. 10 or 15 minutes. It's not, yeah, we're gone.

• Speaker #1

  You've seen me on meetings. I'll like, you know, 30 minute mark. It's like, okay, guys, I got to move on.

• Speaker #2

  Yep, you're bailing. That's just when we get to the juicy stuff. We haven't hidden your miss out. Exactly. Oh, but he mirrors. But yeah, all right. So you know what? We have something new that people, and they made it to the end of this podcast. If you'd like to know more, how do they actually do that, Norm?

• Speaker #1

  Well, there's a few things. First of all, you can always go to our website or go to our YouTube channel where we've got the Marketing Misfits podcast. If you just like the gold nuggets, we've got Marketing Misfits clips. We're also over on TikTok, but we got something else that just launched a couple of weeks ago. That's right, at misfits.news. So misfits.news. You can sign up for our free newsletter. That's right. Every Wednesday,

• Speaker #2

  a brand new edition goes out. to all the Misfit Nation here. And we actually summarize some of what's in the podcast. So if you don't have an hour to listen to a podcast, but you don't want to miss a single thing, we'll summarize it. We bring some additional marketing nuggets in. It's a great little newsletter just started, so it's totally free. So be sure to subscribe at misfits.news. Just enter your email address and you'll be on the list. All right. Well, I guess that does it for today. That's it for today. We'll see you guys and gals again next Tuesday. Remember, a new episode, a newsletter comes out on Wednesday, a new episode of the Marketing Misfits comes out on Tuesdays. We'll see you again next Tuesday.

• Speaker #1

  See you later.