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Action Academy | Millionaire Mentorship For Your Life & Business
How I Prepared My Business to Run Without Me for 8 Weeks in Europe
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Most business owners can't leave their business for eight hours without everything breaking. But in 30 days, I'm leaving for Europe for eight weeks. And if my business can't run and grow without me there, that I didn't actually build a business. I built a freaking job. Now the crazy part is this isn't my first time doing this. For the last three years, I've spent my summers traveling through Europe while building Action Academy into an eight figure company. And from the outside, it probably looked like freedom. But behind the scenes, I was still attached to the business every single day. Constant text calls, problem solving, while I was physically in Europe, but mentally still at work in my own business. So this year I decided something had to change. Instead of just working remotely from Europe, I became obsessed with operationalizing our business at an entirely different level. Real leadership, real systems, real accountability, real ownership. And so we spent nearly a thousand man hours rebuilding how this company operates from scratch. Because this isn't really about Europe. It's about building a business that gives you actual freedom to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, whether that means traveling the world or just being able to pick your kids up from school every day. So because I'll be gone for eight weeks, I'm breaking down today the eight systems that we built to make sure that this will be possible. Let's get into it. System numero uno that we built that probably took the longest for us to get right is building clear ownership and accountability systems. All right, so when you run a business, you need to think about it in the context of you need a chest to poke and a throat to choke for each and every function of your business. What do I mean by that? I mean, if you have three people that own your sales function and your sales data, you have three people that own your fulfillment data, and you have three people that own your marketing data, there's not one person that actually truly owns it. So if multiple people own a function of your business, nobody owns a function of your business. And right now, if you're watching this video, it's probably you that owns every function of your business, which again means that nobody truly owns the function. So when you think of clear ownership and accountability, the main difference that we made here is I think everybody watching this video or listening to this on audio audio understands the concept of an org chart, right? And so for somebody that's brand stinking new to business, an org chart is an organizational chart. So incorporate. It's like you have the CEO at the top and then you've got like your VPs, managers, sales department, marketing, finance, HR and ops. Right? That is your organizational chart. But we implement a operating system in our business called eos. From the book Traction by Gino Wickman. A quick plug. If you just post a little picture of the Traction book beneath me, I think it's absolutely wonderful. From scaling from zero to eight figures, I don't know if we're going to continue running it in the future, but for right now, this has really helped us operationalize our business for Europe. And so the main thing that Entrepreneur operating system teaches is that instead of thinking of your organization like an org chart, view it like an accountability chart. So you have each one of the positions, instead of like Stacy and hr, John as the sales manager, you just have the position as hr and then what that position is accountable for. Okay? So that is how we set it up is called an accountability chart. We built every single role and responsibility independent of the people that are in it, just what is actually best for the company and for us. We realized that we actually needed to restructure how things went and restructure how we had the org chart set up because we had too many owners owning the same data. So from an accountability chart perspective, what we changed was we need to have have one person that owns the metric of sales, one person that owns the marketing metrics, one person that owns the customer delivery metrics, one person that owns the finance metrics, so forth and so on. And this is how things are done at large. Companies like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, they're doing this. They have one person for one function. If you have multiple people for a function, like, nothing will get done. And so this is how business is done at the ultimate level. So not only do we have that, we have defined roles and responsibilities for each person. The other issue with number one here is that a lot of companies that are run poorly, and again, like, this is me speaking to me not speaking at you, is when you have a lot of people doing the same job again. So you need to have everybody have a very established lane for them to operate in and operate within. And so we had a lot of roles that were just like, man, you guys are kind of doing the same thing. And when two people are in the same, same role, one of you is not needed. And so that was a huge thing that we had to focus on, was making the accountability chart was defined. Every single position on your org chart needs to have a written, formal job description, okay, that exists in a PDF or exists in A Google document that is in a shared drive for everybody to have visibility to. In this job document. And this job description details every single function that you are in charge of, what you own and what you don't own. Okay, because again, like to close out the clear ownership and accountability. If you have multiple people reporting on the same thing, what happens is nobody's clear about who owns it. And so you have a lot of animosity and a lot of people start fighting over the same data. All right? So again, just clear roles, clear responsibilities, eliminate overlap and set KPIs like a throat to choke, chest to poke for each and every core KPI of your business. Okay? So if everybody owns it, nobody owns it is the key idea for, number one, clear ownership and accountability, which leads us very easily into number two, KPI scorecards and visibility. If you do not have a score scorecard for your business that is a public, live, living, breathing organism that every single person in your organization has access to at all times, you don't have a business straight up. The there's nothing more important for us than our scorecards. So for number two, I'll go into how we built our dashboards, our weekly scorecards for each department. Revenue, sales, fulfillment. The key idea here is what gets measured, gets managed. Okay? And so if you're not managing people, then you need to have again, your org chart and accountability chart with chest to pokes, throat to choke throats, chest to poke, throats to choke. And you need to have your scorecard so that you can clearly see across the organization who is winning, who is losing and who owns it. Right? So for us, an example of our scorecard may look something like total booked calls on calendar, total live calls on calendar for the sales professionals, close rate or win rate, and then also no show rate. So that's kind of a marketing and sales scorecard. For our operational scorecard, we have time to first onboarding. So we try to do onboarding calls within 48 hours. And if that's stretching out, we realize that there's a huge lag in refunds. So as soon as somebody joins our community and wants our service, then we need to have that within 24 to 48 hours. We also have another one called TTFloi, which is time to first LOI, which is our number one metric that we track. So the point of this being is you need to have scorecards that you can do either on Google sheets or what you can also do is go into Claude. You can have Claude AI build out your entire scorecard for you in HTML, which is like this living, breathing, awesome dashboard that is a live interactive dashboard. And you can have it have things on a bar graph, a chart. You can have it color coordinated if people like red, yellow, green, if people are hitting it, missing it, or crushing it. Like you can have all of the different KPIs color coordinated. But you need to be reviewing your KPIs once a week or if you are removing yourself from the business we are now having, where I have people in place that are going to be reviewing it once per week. So nothing is more important than the KPIs and the scoreboards, because what this allows for also is the definition of done, like the definition of a good job. And you want to build a culture where A players are with other A players. So the edit. So the issue with most organizations and most companies is that there's not enough visibility for you to see who actually are. The A players versus the B players versus the C players. And when you have a public scorecard, then what that does is it allows everybody to very publicly see who is where, because the B players are going to be hitting about 50% of their metrics. C players are going to be hitting like 30% of their metrics or 40% or whereas the A players are crushing their metrics each and every week. And so you can see that in course correct much, much faster because you have a live feedback loop each and every week. So nothing more important than having KPI scoreboards and visibility. So again, you can do this in Google sheets. We have one that's a Google sheet that we use every single week. You can also make this in Claude to be an interactive HTML, almost like your own private website that your team can go update. And that's the last thing for the KPI's scorecards is we have each one of the owners, the person that owns that on the accountability chart. They are responsible for manually inputting that data for when we review that scorecard weekly. Okay, so they have to go collect their data and they upload it. This is important because you want this person to physically and manually feel the emotion of inputting their data and seeing that red, yellow or green on that public scorecard. They need to see it, they need to feel it, they need to own it. And if it's red, they need to be able to explain why that happened instead of everybody showing up to a meeting on your on your weekly meeting to cover your scorecard and they're surprised or shocked that it's red. All right? So every single person needs to manually upload their data once per week. Number three is going to be our leadership meeting cadence. And this may sound super corporate and cringe, but there's nothing more important than the actual cadence of your meetings. And I'll give you an example of this really quickly outside of Europe, but just what I used to do in general, that actually worked very well for me is you have to to remember that there are no rules to business and you can create your calendar to whatever you want it to be. And the only reason that your calendar is kind of never ending is because you allow it to be and you don't have any constraints on your calendar. An example of this is I don't do any meetings in the mornings. So I blanket say no. Like 90% of meetings, I will only do a meeting if it's absolutely necessary to have in the morning. But from 7am till noon Central time, no meetings. And so all of my meetings are in the afternoon. So that way I have my entire morning free for me to focus on stuff like this, recording content or working on the constraints of the business. All right, so that is super, super important. Another thing that we just implemented recently is that I don't work Fridays, so I have no standing meetings on Fridays. I have all my one on ones on Monday mornings. So how my calendar looks today is my Mondays are one on ones. So all of my meetings I jam into Mondays, then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I have my mornings open so I can work on the constraint of the business. It's my deep work time or content time. And then my afternoons are podcasts or my meetings with my team that pop up that need to be had. And then Friday is left completely open so that if I crushed Monday through Thursday, I have earned the ability to have my Friday off. And if I didn't crush Monday through Thursday, I have a free wide open area for spillage so I can have an entire extra day that's wide open with no constraints, no commitments that I can use to now focus on the core constraints of the business or put any meetings that need to be had on that last day. And so for a business owner watching this, no matter what stage you're at, I actually recommend that you try to do this. And you'll be shocked at how more efficient it makes you because there's this thing called Parkinson's Law, which work expands to the amount of time allotted for its completion. And so for Parkinson's Law, I was like, man, if I just condense the amount of time allowed to Monday through Thursday and Then I condense the amount of time that I'm available, then I'll be able to accomplish a lot more. And to put a pin in this, I started working out with an in person personal trainer midday from 12pm till 2pm, four days per week in my work week and that's eight hours of working time taken out. And you would think that my business did worse, but it actually got better because I had to be more efficient with my time. So that's another wacky example of why meetings and leadership cadences are so important. So the key idea behind this is that a business scales at the speed that problems get solved without the founder. So, right. What I just told you is like my current calendar management system. But for our leadership management system, what we implemented was we have our leaders meeting once per week on what's called our L10. So again, that's eos and traction. And so they all meet and they cover our scorecards, then they cover wins, they cover headlines and news that people need to be updated on. And then they go into what's called ids, which is identify, discuss and solve. And this IDS section of our leadership meetings is where everybody brings all of the problems together proactively and you list them in the document before you come into the meeting. And then everybody goes through these issues and either solves current constraints of the business or proactive constraints that will arise later. And so we do that every single Monday. It's a 90 minute meeting, the L10. And the reason it's called an L10 is because it's, it's short for level 10. And what everybody does at the end is you give it a score of 0 to 10 with 10 being okay. This was a great use of everybody's time. We all feel very proactive and valuable being on this meeting. And if it's not a 10 out of 10, you keep tweaking and tinkering on the meeting until It's a perfect 10 out of 10. And again, I had my one on ones on Mondays, but now I'm training my team to where I'm gone. I have people in place on the accountability chart that will be replacing me for those one on Ones meetings. So this now leads us to number four, which is communication, rules and boundaries. This sounds stupid simple and it is. But for some reason this is one of the most difficult ones to implement because it's actually you speaking to your team that's the problem. Not as much your team speaking to you, because your team isn't going to be speaking to you as much if you're on vacation, because they're going to be terrified to, like, reach out to you and ruin your vacation. But you're going to be feeling so antsy because you're like, all right, like, what's going on? What's happening? You know? And so we'll go into that, into a further section here. But for communication, rules and boundaries, there's a few things that we want to focus on here. So number one is we need to define what qualifies as an emergency. Number two is we need to reduce unnecessary texts and calls. Number three, we need to shift to what's called async communication, which is not like requiring you to respond immediately. And number four is we need to create escalation paths before the problem reaches me. So. So all of this is broken down into what we call a 1, 3 1. And I want to give a shout out to Dan Martell, the author of Buy Back youk Time. He was on the podcast, he's a mentor of mine, and he taught me this strategy. And this is what we implement here, which is the one three one. And the one three one is for every problem that somebody on your team has their job, instead of just bringing you the problem and you solving it as the business owner, which does what? Trains your team to continue bringing you problems. What you do instead of is you have a format to problems. So for every problem one, then your team member must bring you the problem. They must bring you three solutions to the problem, and then at the end, their recommendation to solving that problem. So the problem, three solutions and a recommendation. So here's how this looks practically. So somebody right now on your team comes and they're like, hey, you know, we have a problem with ads. Ads aren't running and we don't know what to do. Then they come to you to solve the problem, right? And this is where most of you are probably sitting in your business today as chief problem solver, right? So congratulations, you're CPS chief problem solver. And so what that trains your team to do, again, is to bring you problems 24 7. So that's a really shitty existence as a business owner to be in. So now what that same conversation looks like using the 1:3:1 method again, shout out. Dan Martell is. Is. Hey, Brian. The ads aren't running correctly. And the three solutions I've identified are, number one, to reach out to Tyler or Eric, whoever's the person that's in charge of that, and see what they want to do. Number two is I'VE already gone into Claude and I've figured out a solution from Claude that tells me to do this, this and this. If you just give me permission to go in, I'm going to solve it. And then number three is to change the creative because it was flagging something. So again, these are just random solutions. But. But those are three solutions brought to solve the problem. Right? And then so now my job as the CEO is to just pick which of the three solutions, which takes away much less bandwidth and brain power for me because I can actually just pick a multiple choice question instead of having to code shift and solve the problem. Right. And so the last part of the one three one is then they're saying, well, actually out of the three, I've tried all three, I recommend just taking it to Nick and to Tim or whoever runs your ads. And then eventually it gets to a point where they get so good at this process of just thinking it through themselves that they just solve the problems and they don't even bring them to you. Duh. That's the point. Like that's where business gets really fun, is when you stop solving everybody's problems. That's called. This is called weaponized incompetence. Just because you can solve the problem doesn't mean that you should in your business because otherwise you will be the cps, the chief problem solver. All right, so number five, the fifth system that we implemented for me to travel Europe unencumbered while I'm hanging out having fun in Paris and on the, on our boat in the south of France is SOPs and documentation. We recorded loom videos for every process. We built SOP libraries and playbooks. We made every single task standardized and repeatable. And the last thing is, we removed information. Living only inside my head. So why SOPs and documentation are more important today than ever before and what will finally, hopefully convince you guys to see the light that is SOPS and documentation. Because again, I'm a recovering chaos guy, visionary founder that just likes doing things the way that I want to do them is the surgeons of AI agents. So you have all of these AI agents now that can come do things for you. And so a lot of the times now I would say it's about 50, 50 a coin toss where if you build a proper SOP and documentation for each and every function of your business, you can actually just train an agent on through AI to work this for you 24, 7 for free, essentially to where you don't even have to pay somebody. That's insane. And so that's why right now, it's the people that lean into SOPs and documentation will 10x to 100x their output because they can train AI agents. Again, this is outside of even your current human team with, you know, heartbeats and pulses. There's nothing more important than this. And the coolest part is you can even do a loom video of you doing something, or you can verbally describe it as you're doing it. So what I do is anything that I'm doing online, I record record it and I verbally describe it as I'm doing it. I'm like, okay, so now I'm going to take the cursor, I'm going to click on this button here, and then this button here opens up this webpage here. And when I'm on this webpage here, I click this, this, and this. And when I think about titles, here's how I think about the titles. And I just verbally dictate everything that I'm doing. After I finish the video, then I transcribe the video, I upload it to Claude, AI or Gemini or whatever is your AI flavor of the month. And then they can actually produce the SOP for you. And then you can literally go to the AI and say, hey, what details are missing for you to be able to create an agent that does this for me automatically. And it will literally help you produce your SOP. So if you don't have SOPs and documentation for every single step of your process, like, literally, it's to the point now where at this point, I'm like, man, if I wake up in the morning, like, how am I brushing my teeth? I need a freaking SOP for that. Like, give me an AI agent to brush my teeth, baby. It's that crazy. So you need SOPs and documentation. If you do not have systems where by which a business can function and tasks can function and be completed without you, you don't have a business, you have a job, okay? And so the. The seven words that are the most expensive words in the human language as the key idea for number five here is nobody can do it better than me. Don't fall for this bullcrap, okay? Everybody can do it better than you if you learn how to train them, okay? And the reason that this is true is because you had to learn it somewhere. You had to learn from somebody else. So somebody that was better than you trained you and taught you how to do it, okay? So you can do this, too. My gosh. And a last example of this is in one of our portfolio companies, Pearson Shout Out. Pearson was like, I can't train a VA on how to take these. These client calls and customer calls in the middle of the night. I was like, well, didn't you just buy this business a year and a half ago? He's like, yeah. I'm like, well, you didn't know how to do that, but now you learned. So every skill that you have, you learn skill, which means that it is, in fact, a learnable skill that somebody else can learn. Something to think about. Now this takes us into number six, which is hiring for six. I put hiring leaders, not employees. This is a key difference in your business is basically who, not how. Wonderful book by Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan. So hiring leaders, not employees. In my notes, I put focus on ownership mentality, put leaders in place that can solve problems independently, build trust through accountability, and empower the team to make decisions. So the key idea here is you don't build the freedom. You don't build freedom through systems alone. You build it through leaders. All right, so there's kind of three different employees that you're going to have. You're going to have an employee, you're going to have a manager, and you're going to have a leader. There's three different tiers to people that work for you. Okay? So the employee is somebody that is maybe like a virtual assistant or somebody that you just give them a task. Task. They do the task, you know, so this would be me like saying, hey, edit this video. Like, here's how I want you to edit the video. Do it right now in this way specifically. So this is something like an AI agent or virtual assistant, like just an administrative grunt work task. Okay, next is a manager. So manager is somebody that can come in and you can give them your process, and then they will take that process and implement it to implement it to your team. All right, so that's a manager. So they'll make sure that they're filling out their scorecards, that they're following their KPIs, that they're doing things the correct way. So like in real estate, think of like a property manager, right? So like, they're just doing the blocking and tackling, and they're managing your general contractors. They're managing your, your, your cleaners, your, your maintenance staff. Like, that's what they're doing and making sure that the, the trains all run on time. Okay? And now your third and final level of employee is your leaders. So your leadership are people that not only can enforce a function in your business, but they can also build a function in your business. So an example of this is I hired essentially a CRO, a chief revenue officer for my company. And his, his formal title is growth director right now. But he came in and built processes and built systems from scratch that were better than what I knew how to do because I had a limited amount of knowledge. He was able to do that and absolutely crush. So not only does he build the systems and the scorecards that a manager can manage, but he builds the entire machine that somebody is running and, or she. So you want to hire leaders, not employees, because if your entire team is dependent on being told what to do and dependent on being managed and being whipped and being followed up with every single day, it's like your team's never going to allow you to be free. You need to hire really competent people. And that's why when you buy companies, it's important for you to buy a company that's large enough, with enough revenue to actually support the payroll. For good people. There's nothing more important than having good people on your team. And sometimes, yeah, they're, they're more expensive, right, than the cheap labor. But cheap is always expensive. When it comes to hiring, you don't want to find the most low cost person. You want to find a right person for a fair price and you want to pay them a fair price or even 10% above fair price. That's just a cheat code to business is pay really good people really well and your business will be so much more passive than you ever thought of, than you ever thought possible. System number seven that we built was decision making frameworks. So now on top of all of this, to give a quick recap, we have clear ownership and accountability. We have KPIs and scorecards. We have leadership meeting cadences. We have communication rules and boundaries. We have SOPs and documentation. We have leaders, not employees. And now number seven, here is decision making. So, so the notes that I have here are defined company values and principles, clarified spending authority and escalation thresholds, and then teaching the team how to think, not just what to do. So I actually got this from the Ritz Carlton. The Ritz Carlton has this 500 rule where it's anything that's under $500, any single person on the team, whether it's a bellhop to a front desk, to a housekeeper, has the Authority to spend $500 on their company account to do something for the customer. Right? So this is a spending threshold. It's a decision that does not need to be made by a higher up. And what they realized was is people actually took very good stewardship of the rule and didn't spend money frivolously and it actually impacted the customer experience much better. Because there's so much bureaucracy in politics for a house cleaner that realizes that, you know, you, you messed up your luggage, they want to go get you a new piece of luggage, like a surprise and delight activity. And if you run that up the chain to your manager, to the vp, to the general manager of the hotel, it's going to take too much time in the you know of your. Your guest is going to be gone by the time it's approved. So you need to have authority and escalation thresholds for each and every decision in your company. So for me, I have a spending threshold, the same thing. If it's under $500, I don't need to know about it, just track it. If it's between 500 to a thousand, let your manager know and get a manager approval. If it's over a thousand, you better have written approval from a senior leader and also have everything tracked. But for the most part we've done that and then now things can just operate especially from a paid ads perspect me that's really well, going really well. And you now also need to kind of let go of control and train your team to be able to make decisions without you. So again, that goes back to that one three one now they get used to coming up with solutions and solving problems for themselves. So that's why that is so, so, so important. Because now your team is not only running the business without you, but now they're growing the business without you. And they're are empowered to make decisions without you. And you have leaders in place that are now making decisions and growing things without you. And you'll be surprised at how much better your business actually runs without you because you're probably chaos. All right, so now this takes us to number eight, you chaotic freak that is watching this video up to this point, it means that you really have a problem with this, which is founder detachment. Sounds stupid simple, but again, is really, really difficult. So founder detachment in my notes is letting go of control, stopping the addiction to being needed, and allowing the team to solve problems without me. All right, oh, and the last one I put accepting that some mistakes are part of growth. All right, so again, shout out to Dan Martell here. He said 80% done by somebody else is 100% effing awesome. So maybe somebody on your team can't write copy the same as you, or do sales calls the same as you, or fulfill a customer or do a job the same as you. But if you could train them to get 80% of you and you're not the one doing it, that's pretty effing awesome. That's a hundred percent effing awesome. Awesome. Okay, so I love this. And this finally solidified for me now after four years of doing this, because I went to a Tony Robbins event and he said that freedom and control can't simultaneously coexist. That's a bar. I'll say it again. Freedom and control cannot simultaneously coexist. So if you're, if you're holding on for control so hard, you're never gonna have freedom. Like, you need to let go to have freedom. And so what that means is you need to accept that mistakes will be made and they're going to be minor and they're going to learn from it. And you need to allow for mistakes to be made. Because if you don't allow for mistakes to be made, then you don't allow your managers and your leadership team to flex their muscles of problem solving and fixing things and improving things. And if you allow for mistakes to be made, then they're like, okay, hey, you did this. Please don't do this again. Here's how we do this instead. And then they're going to learn and they're going to have permission to fail, which actually allows them to innovate and grow the business without you. You. Okay, so in recap, the eight systems that I built that will allow me to be gone for eight weeks again. This took a while and hopefully this video gave you guys at least one core idea to take and that's clear. Ownership and accountability, KPIs and scorecards, leadership meeting cadences, communication, rules and boundaries, SOPs and documentation, hiring leaders, not employees, decision making frameworks and escalation frameworks. And lastly, founder detachment. If you can knock out these three, these eight things, you can actually have the freedom to be able to travel the world, do what you want, when you want, work a four day week, work a three day week, take your family on a cruise, or even just pick your kids up from school every day. Okay? At the end of the day, this video wasn't really about Europe, it was about freedom. Because a lot of entrepreneurs think that they own a business, but in reality, the business owns them. If you can never step away from your business, if every decision depends on you, if your phone controls your life, you did not build an asset, you built yourself another job. And honestly, this is something I'm still learning myself. But over the last couple of years, I've realized that real wealth isn't just making more money. Real wealth. Real wealth is building a business, a team, and a life that can actually function without your constant presence. It's building a life that you don't need to take a vacation from. So whether your version of freedom is traveling Europe for eight weeks again just traveling to pick your kids up from school every day, I hope this video helped you start building towards that. And if it did, drop a comment below with the biggest bottleneck currently keeping you stuck inside your business. I read every single one, so appreciate you guys. See you in the next video. And if this gave you any value, like subscribe, share with somebody else that you think will want to travel Europe while running their business.