Speaker 1: I think the easiest way to structure operations is first list out the things, the desired outcomes that need to happen. I don't get a lot of questions about operations, they just become obvious that they are a problem within a lot of the people that that we help serve. And so it's interesting because now that we work on the Allen side with resellers, it's very clear who is good at operations and who is not. And that is typically based on the size of the business. The people who are better at operating are the ones who make more money. And this is kind of one of the the unspoken secrets of the entrepreneurial world, especially within the internet space that we live in now. It appears to be all about marketing and sales and lead gen and acquisition. And although those are very important things and you have to start there, it becomes very clear that typically the entrepreneur has that promotion type of character traits and doesn't dedicate the time to study the operational components of the business, which typically are the reasons that someone is or is not successful. And so I wanted to give you at least my simple mental framework for how I think about operations in general and in scaling operations. And so for the vast majority of people listening here, you're probably under eight figures, some are under seven, but most people listening to this are probably business owners in the multiple hundred thousand year to, you know, several million a year. And so for that, so this is who I'm talking to within that context. I think the easiest way to structure operations is first list out the things, the desired outcomes that need to happen, all right? And I think of business very much as a pipeline, which is from click to close to resell, right? And resell within different businesses can be retaining them so that they pay again, or it could be a variation of a sensing. But when I say click, it means how do I get someone to click, and that's just within the internet environment. Click to opt in, to schedule, to show, to buy, to then ultimately want to buy again. And so if you have, like with our gyms, a four-step sales process or three-step sales process that's happening, there are clear activities that need to happen, right? And so in the beginning you will have your front-end sales, and so you need to list that as one of the activities, right? Because the objective would be to sell them. The activity is to take the call. Next you'd have the nutrition orientation, which would be the next time you'd meet with them. So then you need to allocate how many of those you're going to need based on your current inflow. It's the nice thing is, is that there's a ratio of for every ten customers, we need to do four of these, two of these, two of these, and one of these, right? And so what you can do is, once you realize what the outcomes are, you can list out all of the activities that are required. So for a typical client, we might know that it takes about two minutes per client per day, and if we know that a coach has three hours, like we want to say we want to cap a coach at a hundred, then we know that that coach is going to be able to do that within X amount of time, right? And so then we book that time on that person's day. And so what happens is, what you should do when you're creating your company, is when you're creating each of the roles that are going to support you, you need to look at a calendar and look at what the times of day that this person is going to be working, and what they're going to be doing with each hour of their day. And so you simply take the activities and the allocated time that they need to work, and place those on their calendar. And that's honestly all there is to it, alright? So I'm going to give you an example that hopefully fleshed this out a little bit, but within an online fitness business, which many of you guys are operating right now, there's really four, if Demand Gen is being taken care of, right? So if Lead Gen is being taken care of, and Lead Nurture is being taken care of, and I'm saying that because it'll make the example simpler, but also because that's what we do in our company for gyms, is if those two things are taken care of, then there's really not a lot that needs to happen, right? So first you need to have first sales calls, right? To get new customers, talking to prospects. Then you need an onboarding, alright? That onboarding is to be typically a nutrition orientation, and also walking through the app and the tech and the things that need to happen. And that's it, right? The third thing that will need to occur will be some sort of ascension conversation, which is going to sell them into continuity, alright? So that's number three. Now every customer is going to have one of these things, right? And so if you're selling, here it is, you're selling ten people a week, then you need ten. If you're going to maintain that flow, then if you know that your front-end sale is 30 minutes, your nutrition appointment is 30 minutes, and then your ascension is 30 minutes, then for every client that you're bringing in, you have an hour and a half per week that's going to be allocated, right? Now you can divide that up between different people, but the keys to scaling is that eventually it becomes too much for one person to do all of those activities, and then you start blocking entire pieces of that type of activity to the next person, right? And so I'm going to continue with the example. After that, the only other activity that's going to be there would be either recruiting coaches, right? And obviously the fulfillment. And so let's say that the average customer is going to take five minutes a day. I said two earlier, but let's just say it's five minutes a day, right? And somebody has, whatever it is, five minutes is a lot. Let's just say two, for math's sake. So 200 minutes, if you had a hundred clients per day, is what's going to be allocated. So that's three hours and, you know, 20 minutes. So you look at someone's schedule. Now that's obviously in a perfect scenario, but I'd look at one of my coaches schedules and say, okay, we're going to do 90 minutes in the morning, and we're going to do 90 minutes in the afternoon, and we're going to block those times out. So just like that, we had eight hours a day, now I have five hours left. What else do I want this person to do? Well, I probably want them to take the onboarding conversations with the new customers who are coming in, right? This is a coach. And I know that if we generate ten new customers a week, on average, then that's going to take five hours per week, which means I can block one to two hours a day for that and be totally fine, right? So I might block, now this is where availability becomes interesting, because if you just do it at noon every day, the new customers might not be able to make that time, right? And so I might have, you know, slots on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays at one time, and then Tuesdays and Thursdays at another time. And that way, it gives them some different times to select from, right? But again, we have our daily activities. Now that, you know, for that coach is going to be the fulfillment that's ongoing, we might also have them do the nutrition orientation, which would be an hour or two hours per day, right? So if we have an hour, we'll say an hour per day. So now we've got four of their eight hours that have been taken. Now we've got four more hours that can be used by this person. So now we have options. Do we want this person to create content? Do we want this person to do outreach? Do we want this person to, gosh, I mean, whatever, I mean, do we want to expand this person's capacity, right? So there's, or we would know that this person's currently at 50% utilization. Now if you flip that, and then think, well, maybe this person could take some of the exit meetings, right? So this is, maybe this person could take some of the content. Now this is strategic questions, not operational questions, but I'm saying this is how you structure it operationally. It's like, okay, if we're selling 10 people a week, then we need to have 10 halfway conversations where we're going to send them into continuity. And then we'll also maybe have transformation meeting, which is the end where we take the pictures and all that kind of stuff. And so if we know each of those meetings takes another 30 minutes each per customer, if we know that we get 10 new customers per week, then we know that's going to be another hour, so 10 hours per week total. So that's another two hours per day, assuming that they're working five hours a week. And so now we're at six hours per day of work, right? Now that's if someone's being perfectly efficient. I would still expect people to be perfectly efficient because I think you don't, you get what you tolerate. And so that would be six hours a day for a coach. Now at that point, this coach is handling basically everything post the initial sale, right? They're managing the ongoing fulfillment, they're managing the onboarding activities for these new customers, and they're managing the back-end meetings with them to convert them into continuity, right? And so all of these things put together would create a role within the business. And so my ask or my recommendation for you is if you haven't done this activity, it provides you immense clarity in understanding what are the different activities that need to occur in the business to make more money. And then once you have the list of the activities, then you know how long each of the activities could take and then the only variable that will dictate how many of them you have is what your inflow is, right? And so if you know what your inflow is and you know what your base of customers is and your attrition, you can very accurately back into what an ideal day looks like for each of the roles within your business. Also, the bigger you get, the more you will find inefficiencies where you're starting these partial roles. They're getting full-time pay for half-time work, right? And so this allows you to be more efficient because you can say, hey, I know you're only at 40% utilization. Why are you telling me that you're too busy right now? Why are you telling me that I need to hire another coach? What else are you doing that is not within these parameters? Now if someone then says, well, I'm doing this, this, and this, then it's like, oh. Now either they'll be founded at things, like things that are useful and value-producing, or they won't be. Many times they're not. But that's not because the person who's your employee is doing this out of nefarious intentions. They're not trying to be malicious. They're not trying to hurt your business. It's simply because a lot of people just don't even know it's valuable, right? And so they're trying to work. They're trying to provide value. But a lot of times they just don't get how. A lot of times they don't understand the bigger picture or why you're not having someone do something, right? But if the thing that they're doing is a core activity, like I got to check in on these people. I got to add them to this. It takes this long to get the documents back. Or sometimes we have these password issues. Then you can see, is this something that we can fix operationally with an additional process? Or is it something that we can either throw out, and then get this person to refocus, and then increase how much work they're doing by adding more clients to their roster, etc. And so all this to say, this is how I've thought about operations. It's just in terms of activities and units of time, and then expected inflow. And so based on those three variables of, this is how many people are coming in. These are the activities that need to happen. And this is how long they should take. Then it allows you to account for all the things that need to happen in the business, and will ultimately allow you to have a more efficiently run shop. Now, I guarantee you that because of the headline that I had, Operations Redundant, this will be one of the least listened to podcasts out there. But it is the reason that the people who make the most money, make the most money. And I just cannot tell you, the amount of people who have access, who have tried to copy our stuff at Jim Lunch, and are 110th, 120th the size of what we are. And guys, just like, it's the boring work. It's the rolling your sleeves up. It's the repetitive work. It's the meetings and training your team on improving how good they are at doing the things, that is ultimately the thing that's going to propel a company. And those things are based on culture and tolerance of the leader. And so I just want to leave you with that. So if you feel like you're constantly overwhelmed, and you don't feel like you have transparency into what your people are doing. You're like, what are they doing all day? This is the activity that you can do, that will give you immense clarity and transparency into what their actions are. So you can ultimately structure the business to make the most money, and also find inefficiencies or additional tasks that you're not accounting for, that they are doing. Which are either revenue generating, or requirements, or they're totally worthless activities that they're simply doing because they just don't know any better. And so I highly recommend doing it. And if you don't know where to start, the easiest thing to do is have your employees take a time study. So a time study is very simple. You have an Excel sheet, you have every 15 minutes of the day, and you just have them write down what they did for each of those 15 minutes. Now they're gonna think that's gonna take a lot of time. You are never more efficient than when you do a time study. Every time I do one, I tell myself I'm gonna do it again like forever, and then I don't. But you will literally be more efficient in your work than you ever will, because you know that you're being held accountable to it. So it's like whenever Layla and I need to go and take a closer look at a department, the first thing we do, these numbers aren't adding up. This feels weird. This feels heavier. This feels light. Whatever it is, we go, we ask them to do a time study for a week, and then we look at their activities. You can also very quickly see where there's bullshit, where people are responding to emails. I'm like, why do you have three hours of emails? Is there something I don't know about? How long does it take to reply to an email? How many emails are you getting every day? And so that's how you can start peeling the layers back and seeing if someone's being dishonest, which happens, and that they're doing it because they want to keep their job, and I get that. But that being said, it's not useful for the business. And so that is how, if you want to get a baseline of like, okay, well now I know what all the activities are. You can deem whether they're valuable or not, and you can deem whether you want them to keep doing it, or whether they're expending their time, sorry, expending their activities to meet the amount of time that they're supposed to be working. Alright, so that is my quick, that's that's kind of my mental framework for how I look at operations, and how to structure them for different roles within the company, is first look at the outcomes that you want, the activities you need to generate, that outcome, how long does activities take per customer, per unit, and then you can extrapolate out based on the volume, based on the inflow, what each role needs to do, and then at what points you will have breaking points where somebody will become overwhelmed, and you need to create a new role. Alright, so anyways, I hope that was valuable for you, hope that made sense. Otherwise, have a happy Thursday, happy Corona, happy quarantine, and I hope you are adapting because you have no choice but to do so otherwise. Alright, lots of love, catch you guys soon. you