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The amount of visionary entrepreneurs that have built their businesses to keep them from their personal goals, from getting married, to having active participation in their children's lives, to a bazillion other things. Building your business around what you want for your personal life is vitally important for you at the end of this journey that we have called life, to not build yourself a whole bunch of regrets. Planning is really easy for most visionary entrepreneurs because it's dreaming. The execution part is difficult. Hi and welcome to another episode of Special Ops Podcast where I bring actionable insights to direct response marketers, e commerce sellers and online sellers. Super excited about today. I'm going to be talking about something that I love, that I built with my team and that we run all of our businesses off of. It's called Wave. It's the middle of the year. It's July. I know I talked about this in January, but I want to talk about it again because we're at the halfway mark and there's a lot we can recover and resolve if we're not on track. So I want to make sure that everyone is on the right track. So what is Wave? W written vision, A absolute focus, V values driven future and E execution plan. Let's break that down. So, written vision, what is our window into the future? I want you to imagine yourself being swept away by the Ghost of Christmas Future, bringing you 10 years into the future. It's 2035 and you're looking through the window into your life, into your personal life, into your professional life. What does it all look like? Give yourself an idea of what you're shooting for our reality. It's probably going to change. It's going to change over and over and over again in the next 10 years. Knowing where you're attempting to get to is really important for the next step. And that's where do I need to be in the next five years and where do I need to be in the next three years in order to be on track for where I'm ultimately trying to go. And I again, I want to think about that both personally and professionally. I cannot even empathize enough how important it is to look at both the amount of visionary entrepreneurs that have built their businesses to keep them from their personal goals, from getting married, to having active participation in their children's lives, to a bazillion other things. Building your business plan, essentially the foundational framework for your business intentfully around what you want for your personal life, is vitally important for for you at the end of this journey that we have called life to not build yourself a whole bunch of regrets. And you may decide to give up on some things. You may decide to not be the driving force CEO of your business after a few years, if it's going to keep you from accomplishing what you want to accomplish in your business or your personal life. Maybe you don't want to sacrifice, maybe you want to hire a CEO. So understanding those things is important. So again, three and five year flash forwards. What exactly are the milestones I need to hit to make sure I'm well on track for my ultimate 10 year picture? And then I don't really like the word goal. Goals are good for quarters, not for yearly planning. Goals are something that we attempt to hit. A commitment. That's a whole different word, isn't it? It hits differently and so I like to call them one year commitments. What is the milestones that we need to hit and we need to accomplish this year as a company and as a business, to make sure that we have ultimately set our pace for what we're trying to accomplish at year three, a year five and a year ten? Think about those and where you need to be, what you need to accomplish, and at that point we can take a look at what resources you need to provide, who's going to be responsible for each one, and we can plan and map those out. Another podcast, but that's ultimately our written vision. What are we going to do this year? What milestones do we need to hit year three and five? What is that picture window looking like for our personal and professional life 10 years from now so we can ultimately have a good plan that is well written and that we can easily articulate to our teams, our vendors, our investors, anyone who we want to share that with. It's easily understood. And it's not just some blanketed thing like I want to make a hundred million dollars, right? So we want to be really intentful about sitting and doing that. And so if you did that at the beginning of the year, that's really great. I think it's time to revisit those one year commitments and make sure you're well on track to accomplish those by the end of the year. The next part of WAVE is absolute focus. July is a great time to check in with yourself. Am I honoring and sitting in integrity to what I'm absolutely focused to accomplish? For most entrepreneurs, particularly visionary entrepreneurs, we have a tendency to have a bazillion great ideas. And unfortunately, a lot of times the five ideas that we have today kept us from accomplishing any of the five ideas we had yesterday. And those five ideas kept us from accomplishing the hundred ideas we've had in the past month. So it's really important to understand what our business is absolutely focused on. To sum up what that is, it can be as simple as guiding visionary entrepreneurs to sustainable operational excellence that allows either great profits or extreme growth. You don't usually have extreme growth and great profits from the same business at the same time. So understanding where you're going or what you're trying to accomplish and maybe something like we provide supplements that have zero toxins in them and only wholesome organic ingredients. Men and women over 65 if you want to get really niched in. So that's what we're absolutely focused on. And if we did that at the beginning of the year, great. If not, let's do it now. But if we did it at the beginning of the year, let's go ahead and look backwards and say, where are we today? Have we been in integrity with our absolute focus? Have we allowed wrenches to get in the way of our team's commitments and accomplishments over the past six months? The next part of Wave is values driven future. If you did this with me at the beginning of the year, great. If you didn't, it's basically the four to six things that your business lives and breathes off of. And if you think of morals and values, you want to align yourself with people who hold your value system and that are motivated by the same things. Now don't get that confused. When I hire for my team at Shockwave Solutions or or Seismic Wave Support or Aftershock, any one of my businesses or any one of my clients businesses, I like to find people who compliment what I don't know how to do well. So for the Shockwave team, Saka is phenomenal at understanding tech and project management, surrounding, you know, all things, direct response and E commerce builds, funnel builds, et cetera. Richard is invaluable with his marketing and traffic skills. I can't even wrap my head around some of the things that he's forgotten, let alone the things he knows. Thiago is incredibly wise and patient and really sees the details in the fabric that no one else notices. I don't have any of those skills. So surrounding myself with people who have skills that I don't have, perfect for my business, surrounding myself with people who hold the same values as me. Even more important at Shockwave we have a few that are just non negotiable for me. Proactive problem solver is one of them. If someone sees an issue and they know it's going to be a problem and they do nothing because it's not their job, they'll never thrive on a team. With me, integrity is important. I have to believe everything you say to me. If you're on my team, I have to trust that you hold the same honor and value system. We do what we say we are going to do and if something comes up and we can't, we let you know ahead of time. Check in with your values, check in with the people that you're working with, check in with yourself. That's going to be the hardest part. But make sure that over the last six months you have been in integrity with your values and your team has been integrity with your values. And if you haven't done so yet, now is a really good time to do a review on your team, on your values for your business and how they're showing up with those values. So, so, so important. And it'll help you get a lot further if you do that. And finally, execution. This is the part that I think is the hardest. Planning is really easy for most entrepreneurs, most visionary entrepreneurs, because it's dreaming planning, looking at what your written vision is, looking what your absolute focus values. All of that is basically writing copy for the foundational framework of your business. So that usually for most business owners that I work with comes really easy. The execution part is difficult. Here is where we take those commitments, those one year commitments and we break them down into quarterly goals. And each quarter we need to have goals that get us on track to get those commitments done by the end of the year. At Shockwave, we like to try and accomplish everything by the end of Q3 because ultimately things are going to happen and resources that you thought you were going to have or a project that you thought you were only going to need, X amount of, you know, a certain dollar amount or a certain amount of labor will ultimately be more. By pacing yourself to be done in Q3, you almost guarantee yourself to be done by Q4 if you stay on track. So creating your quarterly plan every quarter, a couple of weeks before the quarter is over, doing a post mortem on the previous quarter and then planning your next quarter. And we do call those goals and our goals get us towards our one year commitments. Yo, we interrupt this pod to tell you like and subscribe. What are you doing? Why haven't you liked? Why haven't you subscribed? Just subscribe. What's the problem? In all seriousness, subscribe so that you get notifications Every time we drop new content. Additionally, if you have not signed up for our visionary vault, what the hell? Www.specialopspodcast.com Go sign up. It's free. We never try and sell you and we're putting all kinds of stuff in there to help you with the operations of your business because we're passionate about it and we want to share operational Excell with our direct response, e commerce and online selling Family the next part of execution is we really strive to do a weekly meeting at Shockwave and we've made it part of our fabric and it's just part of who we are. We do them at the same time, on the same day every single week. For your business, it might be every two weeks. If it's a really small company or if it uses a lot of outsourcers and not that many full time staff, you may want to do it monthly. For me, I like to do it weekly because I can really stay on top of everything and keep things moving. So we do 90 minutes at Shockwave. We do 90 minutes every Thursday at 11am the first thing we talk about is what are you grateful for this week? It's really important for rapport building. If you want to have a team of A players, you need to create a space where people feel comfortable to be vulnerable, comfortable to call each other out, and comfortable to show up and share who they are. And if you can do those things, then you can have a lot of synergy in your staff. And your staff will really explode your business and you'll find that your C plus and B become A players pretty quickly when they mesh together this way. So we start with gratitude. What are you grateful for this week? And it might be that you are grateful for another team member who really helped you out last week, who got you to a place where you felt comfortable showing up for this call because you weren't going to be able to get your stuff done. Or maybe you're grateful for a vacation that allowed you some rest and relaxation. Maybe your child took his or her first steps and we share those things with each other in our companies as well as in our clients companies. And the next thing we want to talk about is what are you excited about? I want to know what you're excited about for this next coming week. And so in all of my businesses, as well as the businesses of my clients, we don't talk from Monday to Friday. We don't talk from Sunday to Saturday. We speak from breaker to breaker. If our breaker is on Thursday, we speak from Thursday to Thursday. For pmb Perry Belcher's companies, we have ours on Monday. We talk from Monday to Monday. Another client of ours, we have on Tuesday. So everything is Tuesday to Tuesday. You get the idea. We speak from breaker to breaker as a week or bi weekly. So what are we excited for in this upcoming week or bi weekly? One of the things you'll find is if you know what your people are excited about, you can help them stay stay really motivated throughout the week. And B, when you hear them say that they're excited about things that are coming up in the business, it really helps you to design their role and align their goals for next quarter. Because if they're excited about tasks, make it so that they're excited about your goals that grow your business. Finally, what is a personal or professional win? And you'll find that if you only talk personal, they'll only talk personal. If you only talk professional, they'll only talk professional. So I make it a point to move back and forth through personal and professional so that they know that it's okay. And I want them to share for both. I want them to share whatever their biggest win from this breaker to last breaker, what happened to you, Whether it be professional or personal, I want to know what you felt was a win. Maybe one of your kids did something, you know, for the first time, or they won a football game, or maybe you got engaged, or maybe the project you've been working on all quarter did even better than you thought it would do when it launched. Perhaps you learned a new skill or something from one of the masterminds we belong to that really helped you excel in your role that week. And so again, this all part of building rapport with the team. And this is about us meshing together and knowing what excites, invigorates, and makes us feel rewarded. Because a win is essentially a reward. The next part of our breaker, and by the way, Breaker, we name that simply. Our entire system, our entire Wave system was kind of thought up. I'm not a surfer, but it's all surfing terms. I was in Hawaii when I was branding all the actual names to make it fun. I loved Wave because Shockwave, obviously is my company, and so I really love that acronym. When there's a break in the waves, it's time for a surfer to do all the work to get to the wave so that you can ride the wave. And so I love that because a breaker allows us to take a break from working in our business to working on our business so we can catch the Wave. I like that whole analogy, actually. So that's why we call it a breaker. So the next part of the breaker, we're just reviewing our goals, every single breaker. So for us, every week we review every goal and each person that's responsible for the goal presents on the goal and essentially they just name what the goal is. I'm launching Scale Audit new product with one of my companies. I'm launching the Scale Audit funnel. And then they say, you know, it's on track, I'm not struggling, or it's off track, I'm struggling. And then they talk about what they did since the last breaker that moved us closer. Now that part is actually really important. And it took me a couple years to figure out every single breaker. It's on track, it's on track, it's on track, it's on track. And then right around week 11, it's off track and now it's not done. I like to actually see the progression of it. Each person presents very quickly on what they accomplished from last breaker to this breaker to get the goal done by the end of the quarter. And we just kind of review it, talk through it, and if it's something like a funnel launch, we can actually say, hey, we're on week four. Sounds like you got the bones all up. Let's take a look and review it as a team so we can give you feedback. This also allows your brain trust, your key staff without ego, because you've built a team that can hold each other accountable and values each other's opinions, can show up and take a look at what someone else is working on and give them guidance before it's at the end of the quarter and it's all completed and then they have to go back and erase some stuff. So that's a really great opportunity for that. The next part of the breaker is we call it movers. Movers gets us from this week to next week and moves us closer to our goals. Essentially, it's a to do list. So what are the things that we're going to work on this week or what are the things that we did work on this week that we created for ourselves to get us closer? So essentially it's just in ClickUp and we're looking through what movers did you work on? These are specific tasks that go to the projects that go to the goals for the quarter and that's it. And so we look through those and we make sure those are moving along well and that we're pacing well. We're going to review all of our KPIs, all of our KPIs are based off of our goals. So if my goal is to bring our podcast subscribers up by a thousand people by the end of the quarter, we're going to break down how many people we need every week. And our KPI is going to be adding X amount of people to the podcast each week. And we'll just quickly review all the KPIs in the business and make sure that we're on track for our ultimate goals through a number with the KPIs. And if we're grossly off track, it allows us a true picture. People say all the time. Mitch Burnham, a great friend of mine, says constantly, men lie, women lie, children lie, Numbers, they don't lie. So look at your KPIs. And then finally, we go over signals. I don't like negative words in my business. I like everything to be an opportunity instead of a hardship. And so in surfing, again, signals is something that everybody needs to look to because we need to proactively solve a problem before it becomes one. And so that's why we call them signals. And everybody gets to add to that list. We add to that list as we go through our goals and our KPIs and our movers. If we're seeing things aren't getting done, well, put on to discuss them further. And so this usually our meetings, 90 minutes. The signals portion usually accounts for about 50 to 60 minutes of this meeting where we're literally just going through what we all need to be aware of. It may be that someone's on vacation who holds an important role in our business and how we're going to cover that person. It might be that a client's funnels are struggling and we want talk that out amongst all of us. It may be that someone's struggling with something personally, and that's something that I encourage. A lot of companies and employers like to say, leave that at the door. People aren't built that way. If your job is to come in and grow my business, if you're having something that you're struggling with, if you have an issue or a problem at home or in your personal life that is causing you angst and you're unable to focus, that becomes my problem. So perhaps we need to talk about how we help you through that or how you take time off. And so I invite my staff to put that on the signals list. But mostly it surrounds the business. We launched a funnel. The funnel's not converting, or we launched the funnel. And Ryan Poteed, our attorney, sent us, you know, an email that said, this isn't compliant. You need to fix this or you need to fix that. And we need to talk about how to do that. But the signals list allows us to spend deep thought not taking other calls, not booking doctor's appointments, not booking sales calls. We do nothing during 90 minutes. And the only reason you don't show up for that call is if you're on vacation, if you're extremely ill, or if you're attending an industry event. And even then, we try and pop on for the call. So that is essentially the breaker. And then the final part of the. The execution plan, and the part I think that a lot of people miss, is if you're trying to grow your business and get from here to here, and you have these people that are trying to grow you from here to here, your job is to think about how to grow them. And so how do you deploy a system that develops your people while they're responsible for the daily grind? Do you add them to a mastermind? I actually put soccer in Genesis. It's Mario Castilli and Luke Mills. Mastermind. It's copywriting, marketing, AI. It's. It's mostly copywriting, positioning, marketing, but it's got a little bit of a lot in there. And they're two brilliant people who I adore very much, and. And I really wanted to develop soccer, so we put him in Genesis. I myself am a member of Driven Mastermind Custom Jason Fladlin and Perry Belcher, three of the most brilliant people I've. Jason is the webinar guy, the pitch guy. If you want to know how to pitch, how to do a webinar, Jason's your man. Not only is he just, like, the best person I've ever met, but talk about someone who is so embedded in how to build an agency, how to build a culture, how to build a team, how to delegate as a CEO, how to be wise about your money, how to invest. Like, he's just really, really smart guy. And then, of course, there's Perry Belcher. Perry's a client of mine. I have a podcast with him called Trainwreck. I have a business with him. We're writing a book on decision making. He is one of the foundational people in my life, but I don't even know how I got lucky enough to have him in my life and such an important member of my family. But the guy can predict the future like nobody else. He is so, so smart. He has, like, just his finger on the pulse. He was talking about AI five years before AI was a thing. And when AI came out, he started talking about robotics. He described mindpal to me two years before autonomous agents launched. The guy is just brilliant. So I'm part of Driven Mastermind developing. Myself, Richard and the rest of our team are very deep into Ignite Mastermind. That's Perry, one of Perry's masterminds. It's phenomenal. Mastermind Driven actually gets it for free for their staff. Ignite Mastermind really helps excel. People that are under a million dollars get to a million dollars. If you're over a million and you're in Driven, you have all the staff, it's so hard to develop them. You get Ignite for free. And the rest of my staff are in Ignite and get all these workshops and courses, all this instruction on how to do things and it's just, it, it's been a real blessing. So that is my like engine in making sure that my people are being developed along the way as I'm trying to grow my businesses so I won't leave them behind if they're not interested in growth. And that's part of our value system. Probably they're not going to stay very long. So it's really important to me that that's part of our value system. Turnover is expensive and tribal knowledge is so valuable. So why not try really hard to grow your people? So having as part of your expense execution plan to grow your business, to launch new products, to do the things that you want to do and build what you want to do, why wouldn't you build a team that can grow with you? That's wave written, vision, absolute focus, values driven, fuse, share and execute. Hope you enjoyed this episode. You can find more about wave@www.specialopspodcast.com. sign up there for our Visionary Vault there. I have all of our courses, we have tons of ebooks. Under my company, Tidal Wave Media, we have loads and loads and loads of free resources. No one's ever going to try and sell you anything there. It's never going to be at any cost to you. It's completely free. I just really like to grow my community and my network and this is one of the ways that I found to do that. So go head over to the Visionary Vault, sign up and take advantage of those free resources. If you're interested in learning more about wave, my foundational framework or about Scope, our operational framework. Scope is setting your vision, creating processes, operational excellence, people development and execute. If you're interested in that, you can pick up my book at Reed Scope or on Amazon. And of course, if you want to email me, leave comments on our our YouTube page. We'd be happy to hear from you and answer any questions you have. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I enjoyed sharing it with you. Until next time. Thank you so much.