A (3:07)

Seven. That's like before eight.

B (3:11)

That must be too much.

A (3:12)

I had five at breakfast with you today. Wow.

B (3:15)

Yeah, I noticed two of those for sure.

A (3:17)

Yeah, definitely. Definitely poured that cup about five times and took it to go while you guys left.

B (3:22)

Wow. I think that's something that we don't look at it first, but the body is like the material substance, the basis of how you're going to think. And then we can think about some frameworks you may have and beliefs you may have that also help you be at that speed. So, first of all, I think it's about the body. It's about, like, calming down. You have a lot of mindfulness tricks for that. You probably shouldn't have seven espressos, and you can start lowering that down.

A (3:47)

I'll argue that with you. I can have seven espressos. I drink coffee, not espresso, but I can have seven cups of coffee and.

B (3:53)

Then.

A (3:56)

Sit down and have a reasonable conversation with you all if I know it's coming and we've planned for it. And I think that's the thing to ask someone to change what they do in their daily dynamic. I think that a lot of visionary entrepreneurs, and I'm not, I wouldn't label myself as a visionary entrepreneur at all, but I identify a lot of the same traits as them, which is why I'm a really good integrator, because I understand how they think, because I think that way. And so coffee, caffeine, those type of stimulants for you might be a stimulant, but for someone with adhd, it actually slows you down. It actually is a calming effect. So when I have coffee, if I don't have coffee, it's actually a calming effect and it helps you be more focused. So I don't necessarily think it's a coffee, but let's go and dive into the actual slowing down and really thinking things through, because I'm guilty of this myself. One of the things that has made me so successful in the industry isn't my ability to do things. It's my ability to hire people who know how to do things and get them to be as loyal to me and to the work that we're doing and then believe in the vision. That's the only reason I've been successful. You know, Richard knows, Saka knows. I don't actually know how to do anything. When I try and help. When there's an emergency, other than casting the this is what we need to do and XYZ to push all the buttons, I couldn't do it right. So I think there's a dynamic of allowing someone's creativity to flow, which as an operator, operations, we all kill that. Perry Belcher says it to me all the time. So does Kassam. Visionaries I've worked with in the past, Stephen, Georgi, Mario, they've all said to me, like, hey, let creativity flow. Like, don't knock it before we've even hit, like, let creativity flow. And so I think as operators, we want to kill anything that that isn't gonna fit right away instead of letting it come to fruition and be born and then we can poke at it. And that's when I think the heavy thinking needs to come into play, because I believe that I create more fires for you than I put out for you. Probably. As the person who's the right side of me, you're like, Richard's like my left marketing, strategic analytic hand. And you're like my right operations, logistics, common sense hand. And so without those two things, I'd be pretty screwed. And I think a lot of people don't have those two things. And. And that's why. So talk to me about, like, when I give you like, we did the scale audit, me, Richard and Saka all met in person in London, and we built this entire funnel and we came back with what we thought was like, well thought out. And you had like 90 valid questions because you slowed down enough. So talk to me about when you're looking at a plan or a path forward from a visionary, what you're doing to make them stop and think about all the outcomes that is about to happen or the consequences.

B (7:11)

Okay, so the first part is actually hearing and listening. So if you give me that resource, for example, is making myself time to dive in and analyze what's about and what's the goal? What's the purpose behind these? What are we trying to achieve? It's pretty blunt, like, why? What for?

A (7:29)

It's not understood. Yeah.

B (7:30)

And I think those short questions as well as at times not a question, but say no, even just to like trigger the other person. Not because we're not going to do it, you know, but visionary entrepreneurs can really help someone telling them no at times. So I'm only to ask why? What's the purpose? And then going to analyze what, what we set in place. And usually what happens then is that a lot of the things that we put in place that the visionary created, for example, or the marketer created, a, maybe they don't serve the purpose directly. It's just like legacy kind of framework structures something that is being dragged from a separate project. Or B, it's actually causing a lot of problems operationally, which in the end is going to end up putting the whole purpose of these, let's say funnel at risk.

A (8:24)

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 excellence with our direct response, e commerce and online selling family. Well, when you put a funnel at risk and it doesn't work or it causes a lot of chaos on the back end of it, you absolutely kill your team morale. No one's excited about a broken anything, no matter how much quantity you have coming in. So talk to me about that. Let's go through. We've done this many, many times at Shockwave where we are handed things that were not thought out. We've got a million pieces on the floor and we gotta pick them up. Talk to me about what is the framework you use when you're looking at something to get it all identified and then fix it through deep thinking.

B (9:37)

So I'm very visual like that. Even if I don't get to map it in middle or any sort of whiteboard. I need to take that drone view of the whole process and map it out in my head. So what resources are being demanded, at what times, how much clarity or confusion is being put into the systems. And basically operations is economics. So we have limited resources. I think that again, visionary. I love them. They are prolific in the sense that they don't have certain boundaries and limitations that I have, for example. Right. As an operator. That's why we work very good together. So again, map the whole process out. Think about the implications that these funnel these new operation has to the rest of the operations and identify what's waste, what's noise, what's actually can be trimmed down. So if it's not needed because there's.

A (10:33)

A lot of noise and a lot of the stuff, we get a lot.

B (10:36)

A lot of waste. Yeah. And noise.

A (10:38)

Talk to me about that.

B (10:41)

Man, I hate noise.

A (10:42)

I know you do.

B (10:43)

I hate it.

A (10:44)

I'm noise.

B (10:46)

You can be. Yeah, you certainly can be. Yeah. But again, it's, it's those things that are yin and yang, you know, I won't express that.

A (10:54)

No, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. We get along really well.

B (10:57)

I need noises at the same time.

A (10:59)

I need someone to tell me to stop giving me noise. Yeah, Works well together.

B (11:04)

Noise is processing power, let's call it like that. So it can be one context switching. So hey, every new thing you add, every new process that you add into the systems and I'm thinking about the whole business systems like human factors included, that's noise added. And every time you have to change from one process to the other, that takes a certain amount of processing power. And even worse, if you've got to keep that process on the background, just when you open, like the task administrator in your computer, like you're going to see all the processes that are running on the background and that's taking processing power. And if you stress the processor enough, you're going to cause issues, fires. And that's just like snowballing from there, right?

A (11:49)

Yeah.

B (11:51)

So for noise, the simplest part is just looking at the noise like from the apps. Slack, look at Slack, look at the Google Drive, look at ClickUp, look at your inbox. That's the first place where noise is going to hit you right in the face. It's going to get everything sparse out. I think that's the first place. And I think about that both for the internal side of the operations, for the company, for the humans, like making the, the machine work, and I think about noise for the customer on the client at the same time.

A (12:29)

Brilliant. I like to give a couple of actionable things that I think is super helpful. The first thing is I would recommend, and I wish I would have brought it with me, I would highly recommend reading the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. I don't know if you've ever read it, but to our listeners, like, absolutely. Take a moment and read this, Read this book. And I think there's a place for visionaries. I think that there's a place for operators to do this. I was introduced to the concept of deep work probably about nine years ago. Ish. And the person who introduced me to it, I remember saying to him like, I'm an operator. I the whole premise is to shut everything off, shut all the noise off. Your Internet, your phone, everything. And whether it be for a week because you're writing a book or it be two hours twice a week because you're running a company, find what you need to do and shut it all out. And I remember being like, I'm an operator. Do you know how many times we've gotten this text? Hey, unless you say no in the next hour, I'm going to insert awful thing that I'm gonna have to deal with for the next month of my life here, Right?

B (13:35)

Yeah.

A (13:35)

So I can't shut things off.

B (13:37)

Right.

A (13:37)

When I learn to quiet everything, I and I don't do it well. It's still a work in progress. But once I learned to do that, I realized all of the pieces that were on the floor that I was leaving that really, if you're going to talk about operational excellence, shouldn't be left there. And so I think reading that book and then assigning yourself deep work time, if you're a visionary entrepreneur, you may do that, you know, once a month for two days so that you can look at everything in your business and, and just shut out all the noise around you and just focus on that. If you're an author, you may do it, you know, for a week or two so you can write a book. If you're a content creator, you might do it two hours a day. For me, my sweet spot is two to three two hour blocks per week. And then I believe we decided it was once a quarter order with the team. I think we decided to do it once a month because it's just as we're going. It's not, it's not enough anymore. And so I would highly recommend opening up your calendar and putting some deep work time into your calendar so you can do deep, deep, deep dives and deep thinking. Read the book by Cal Newport, Deep Work. And then also grab Tiago's how to Slow down and Reduce Noise. He wrote an ebook. It's in our visionary Vault Again, special opspodcast.com. you can go over there and sign up our visionary vault for free. Any last minute parting words?

B (15:09)

Yes, I think identify your triggers as well. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah, there's certain Triggers that are going to get a visionary entrepreneur into just high speed immediately.

A (15:21)

What's mine?

B (15:22)

I. I gotta think about what's yours. You think it's only one.

A (15:26)

I think I have. I think I have three.

B (15:28)

I'll hear you.

A (15:29)

No, I want to hear yours. I want to hear if you know, what are my triggers to get me to stop and think.

B (15:36)

Not of the top of my head. No.

A (15:38)

The first one is, I would have guessed that you knew this and you pull those levers intentionally. The first one is someone coming to me and letting me know one of my staff members is in some type of negative situation. Whether it be they might leave because they're overworked or the quality of work is dropping, or they seem stressed or. Or, hey, I think something's going on. That's my first trigger. I'll stop everything. The second one, and this usually comes from Initia, our controller, where I'll stop to look at everything. Hey. Profit is down. It's lower than what our goals are.

B (16:07)

I have one.

A (16:08)

Oh, there we go.

B (16:11)

Quality. That is not up to par to what we have as a standard. That immediately triggers you off. You need to change that. This second.

A (16:20)

Yep. That was going to be my third one. Anything that makes me look bad, whether a staff person put it out or I put it out. Anything that makes the company look less than excellence. I'd go so far as, say, perfection sloppy. Infuriates me. Everything stops. That's my number one. Everything. There's a. There's a button that is in my office that is not real. But it is. And when I push that button, everything stops. And we are all going to focus on this because this makes us look poorly to the world. Those. Those are my three.

B (16:53)

Yeah. So I think it's identify it just so you can default to putting. Even if it's a 10 minute buffer, we just say pause, like 10 minutes. Change it. Yeah.

A (17:04)

Pause for 10 minutes.

B (17:05)

Put a buffer. Yeah.

A (17:06)

Love it. Anything else?

B (17:08)

No, that's it.

A (17:09)

I'm so excited to read your ebook. I actually have it on my phone right there. You just sent it to me. I'm super excited to read it, visit our visionary vault and see all the things that our team made for you guys. Tiago put a lot of time into a lot of the stuff that's in there. So did Richard, so did I, so did Ryan Poteet. Like many people have contributed to that. So make sure you sign up and see you on another episode.