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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Ops Experts Club. If you're at all interested in anything we talk about here in this episode, go ahead and check out the description down below and click any of the links there. Or if you just want to know more about us, click the links below. Now onto the episode Ops Experts Club. Yes, Darren, we talked about thematic dancing. Maybe we could start doing thematic dancing, which would really only benefit you if you're watching us on YouTube, but it still could be thiccca if we did it and we really nailed it. We talked about maybe pina coladas, maybe Hawaiian, maybe some grasses, maybe some coconuts. I mean, I don't know, you know how attractive we'd look in those things, but I think we could probably kill it.
- [00:37]
B
It's all about the views. I don't really care how I look,
- [00:42]
A
man. That's true. Is it the is us as the view or is it what we're looking at? The view?
- [00:47]
B
It's all about the number of views we get.
- [00:49]
A
That's true. Good, Taran. Well done, Ops Experts. Thanks for joining us today. We're not talking about Hawaiian music or Hawaiian dancing or Hawaiian hula skirts, even though those things are all pretty freaking cool. And who doesn't like a pina colada? But what we're gonna talk about today is something that Tara and I see over and over and over and over as an Achilles for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially in the digital space, especially who are creating education based materials and selling them. But I would say it's probably a likelihood for any visionary that has the ability to quickly create. And that is, when do you create something new and launch something new versus when should you just double down and really make sure that you've fleshed out what you already have built? So I think that for almost any visionary I know, like the tendency is new's always better. That's, that's, that is, man. Cause they're idea guys, they're idea gals. They love their new ideas. And man, they are like, they are like crack addicts on their new ideas. They will sell them. They will tell everybody how great they are. The thing isn't even built yet, but this is better than anything they've ever done before. And I think that we really need to expose the truths and the not truths about both sides of when do you create something new and when should you just double down on something old? Taran, what do you think about that?
- [02:10]
B
Yeah, I mean, we had, I had this conversation with a client this week. They're asking how do we, how is the best way to get more income coming in right now, first thing I say is, what have you done in the past that's worked?
- [02:21]
A
Right?
- [02:21]
B
And then from there you can say, all right, let's find out why that's not working anymore. And from there you can narrow it down even further to an actual starting point towards something. It's like maybe everybody on our list has already purchased everything they've got. Maybe we just need new leads. Right, okay, we'll start there.
- [02:37]
A
So good friend. So good. That is a great place to start. So I would say most visionaries are quick starts. Most visionaries are not high fact finders. Most visionaries are not high follow through. So as a visionary, if you're listening to this or if you're working for a visionary, what you just said, Taryn right there, is probably like full on nails on a chalkboard. They do not, they do not want to go and fact find why what used to work is no longer working. They would rather just create something new that's fun, that's sexy, that can get them all hyped up. They can get super excited about those things and then they go down the road instead of, no, no, no, take a breath, take a step back. Why isn't it working anymore? And a lot of times what I've seen is it's very, very easy to fault it on things that to prove. Meaning, like, yeah, the industry's just changed. Well, what does that mean? How do we get down to that fact of truth? You know what I mean? The economy's just, it's just cold right now on that. Right? So how do we, how do we get down to that one? Like let's, let's assess the things that we can actually do some fact finding on. Taran, what, what would be your advice to visionaries who are challenged with that, what you just said, that's a great one. Do we just need new leads? Well, that is going to come from like pulling it apart. Would you suggest, like let's get all the smart brains into a room and ask the right questions and realize that the deliverables that come out of that is probably not going to be the visionary's work. He's probably going to task down. She's probably going to test that down to somebody who is high fact finder who is high follow through. What are your thoughts on that?
- [04:05]
B
Yeah, exactly. I think you bring together people, everybody in the room, not just random people, but you know, people that have been working with the company for random people.
- [04:12]
A
Could sometimes that could be a Cool venture too. But anyway, go ahead.
- [04:16]
B
Yeah. And you're going to easily put together what's worked and what's not worked because you've priority tried a few things that haven't worked. And once you've got those lists, you can look at why, you know, why is this not working anymore? Why did this not work? Does this that didn't work need to be tweaked? That this that did work in the past need to be tweaked to keep it working again? So you can easily come away with some starting points. That isn't going to require a brand new something. It's going to be a what. What do we need to tweak? What should we try next?
- [04:46]
A
Object in motion stays in motion, right? Like let's, let's talk about what's already had some momentum, right? Cause it's so much easier to pour a little bit of gas on something that already has some momentum than getting something completely up off the ground. Two different clients of ours just this past week have come to us with a very similar scenario as this where something brand new means a ditching of the old means, man, a whole lot of work. So much work to get something new up off the ground. Even though every visionary is going to tell you, no, no, this is really quick, no, it's going to be a really easy one. No, there's not gonna be a whole lot into this. Every visionary, man, that's part of selling the crack, right? Like they've got to convince you that it's, it's not gonna be that hard of a build. But sometimes I think they're just, they just like to say those rules. Anybody that's been around knows it's gonna be a bigger, it's gonna be bigger than you think, you know. And I think that what people don't always realize is new takes a lot. It takes a lot of build. It may take expertise that we don't have on the team. It may mean we have to reach out to other consultants or other experts that we're gonna have to bring in. It means they've gotta be acquainted with all of our systems, all of our tech stack neighboring products within our product suite to know that they're not stepping on other toes or going to cannibalize something else. That actually may be a small money earner, but it's still bringing money contributing into the boat. Like new has a lot of collateral damage against new, I'm just saying. And really come at that, both eyes open because a product in motion is easier to keep in motion than starting something from zero.
- [06:09]
B
Absolutely.
- [06:11]
A
I know we have, we have a friend who does a lot with marketing and I. And who will bring in to help with marketing efforts. And I know that there was a time, there have been actually several opportunities where we brought them in, they built out the whole thing, looked at the entire product suite, assessed it all, driven it all, wired it all, we go out to launch it. But then the energy required is actually more than Visionary was expecting. And Visionary is actually the one that takes their foot off the gas. Which means like all of the new idea and all of the new implementation and all of the new build and all of the money we put out into this new thing and all of the money we've lost by taking our foot off of an existing product has all gone into this thing. Only for Visionary to realize now they don't really want to do this new idea after all. Taryn, do you want to talk about that just for a minute? For all the new that you've created, how often does new work versus we end up going back to the original thing or some iteration of the original thing in the end anyway?
- [07:07]
B
Yeah, I think there's times when new turns out to be an absolute hit and maybe that's the high they're looking for. But there's times when new, like you said, ends up being more work for them and they did not realize they were committing themselves to this work and they're going to get quickly bored of it after a month or two of having to do it. And that's a lot of things fall in that category of they thought it would be a good idea for them to get involved in something and now they're starting to really regret, oh, I have to spend my time on this consistently. But yeah, something where they don't have to spend their time on it. Those usually they can, they can have a bigger tail on them to actually test out, try and keep going at for. For a while before you determine whether it's going to work or not.
- [07:52]
A
Yeah. So gentle tweaks on existing things, so much easier, right? Like so much easier for us to gentle tweak something that you already have out there. So like you were saying, get a bunch of smart people in the right room and ask why is this not working? Right. And then probably the next click beyond why is this not working? Would be what's an iterational click that's not that much of a change but is a little bit that's going to take so much, cost us so much less time Energy, effort, outside skillset to be able to make that tweak, to see if we did this, could it work? If we did this, could it work? You know, are we offering it? Maybe if we cross collateralized it with another one of our products and combined the two things together and offer that as a bone, as a package, could that work? If. Could we offer it to this kind of an avatar? Maybe our original avatar was this. Well, just this one click forward could be this different avatar. Could we try that? You know, if it was really banging off with like mid middle aged women, could we, you know, like some sort of offering that. We could now offer it to a different age demographic, a different gender demographic by just some visual tweaks, you know, I mean, what are some things that we could do that would be minor tweaks, but in the end, really the same bones. We've just wrapped the pig a little bit different. I think thinking about it that way, Lipstick on a pig. Like what? What could we do that wouldn't cost as much money? Because, man, the other thing I found, Taryn, is visionaries can really spend. It's kind of like gambling. Can really spend gambling on this thing being a hit and then not realize, man, that you're draining money out of the bank account. The exact thing that you were hoping to achieve, and that is win big. You're actually bleeding all the money out of the bank account on your win big. And it can be a big gambler.
- [09:33]
B
Yeah. I like what you said there though, about expanding your demographics. We do. You probably heard us say before you want to try to narrow down as far as possible your niche at first.
- [09:44]
A
Yeah.
- [09:44]
B
And but once, once you get that to a good point, you can also look at that and then say, like you said, what small tweak can I then make to open this up to the next niche over? Because this circle that I have fits inside of a circle this big. So what can I do to move this to go a little bit bigger? And then you can keep doing that over and over again and you're just making your customer base bigger and bigger with small tweaks.
- [10:08]
A
John Acuff wrote an amazing book some years back. You probably heard me talk about it a lot because I love it so much. The book's called Soundtracks. Amazing about like the inner dialogue we have in our head, like how we allow, like negativity to really become such loud noise that it deafens a lot of, you know, really positive soundtracks. And the whole book is about how do we rewrite the soundtracks in our Mind. Well, he realized it did so well. There could be a companion book that was actually written for teens. And he actually, actually got his girls involved in writing this book, doing the audiobook for it. And it didn't perform as well as the primary book soundtracks, but it did carve himself out a whole nother niche. That was really just another rewrapping of what soundtracks was to a different demographic in a way that he could do something cool with his kids and speak to teens and create a new product offering out of it. That was a really great idea. So I think that's a great, great, like, example of could you just rewrap this a little different and relaunch it maybe to a different demographic that it could really bang off on, you know, Because I think that could be great.
- [11:09]
B
Yeah.
- [11:10]
A
You know what? What I would say I see a big Achilles for visionaries to do. Pedro Adeo was so classic with this. And I know he wouldn't mind me saying it because we really had to put up some pretty big guardrails on Pedro Adeo because his main knee jerk was, well, I'll just give him a hot seat. I'll just give him a hot seat. Like, I'll let. Which was essentially Pedro saying, I'm going to give them some of my time as a bonus. Like, and that was like, his go to move. Like, his go to move. And it got to a point where you. I mean, we're doing challenges every month. VIPs every month, big events every month. If every time it's time with Pedro, which is our highest, like, right. That's our highest billable commodity. Like, right, Pedro. We can get the best bang for our buck at an time with Pedro, but we're going to give it away as a bonus for free. No, like, so we had to tell him, hey, stop offering that. Because he would also get to a point where he was burned out. He didn't want to do any more hot seats. Dude, he was so burned out on freaking hot seats because he had promised it so many times. The list had gotten so big, people had given his. Yes. Which feels good on making the sales. Right. Because that's the bonus you offered. But then the list is so freaking long and it's bleeding the energy out of him because it's just too much to the point where he had to get to. Of saying, hey, let's come up with a new bonus structure. Something that's not going to cost you your time. Yes, that's a super generous give, but we're leading with the Wrong carrot because it drains you of your energy in the end. And it's also what we can charge for the most dollars like proximity masterclass like or sorry like mastermind time with you and proximity. That's what people are going to pay the highest price point for. Be careful what you're giving away. So even as visionaries, you're listening to this and thinking about this new product. A question really comes down to is how much time is it going to take for you? Like how much are you collateralizing yourself? We have, we have a client right now that his last big idea was in person stuff, like live stuff. But we're pivoting back now into prerecorded stuff because it was just too much. It's too much. He's already on stage too much. Right. So that we're going to do a whole nother thing that's going to require a whole nother overlay of his time. It just is too much. And so we're going to pivot back into prerecorded because it's just too much. Yeah. What do you think Taran about? I've also seen an Achilles be something where they don't take into account the amount of money they're going to have to spend to dive into a new sector. What I've seen a lot, especially with AI taking on so much and creating so much and enabling people to create so easily. People wanting to get more and more into SaaS. I mean like let's create a product that we're selling. You know, it feels so much better. That could be selling all day long but not taking in consideration. SaaS is a different, that's a different product line, that's a different way of having to sell it. That's a, I mean that's a, just a completely different market share than they've done in the past and really needing to take that into consideration. What are Your thoughts on SaaS versus just basic education, the way people have been doing education and coaching space?
- [13:59]
B
Well, I would say, I mean I don't have a ton of experience with SaaS or SaaS clients but in regards to new build outs like that, I can probably count on my hand the amount of times a visionary has asked me how long or how much effort or how much energy or people wise something like this is going to take to build out. They just, they don't ask, they don't go, all right, here's an idea. Now I know you've set up all these systems for this other idea. Tell me what you think it's going to take to do this new idea. And that simple question right there can stop them in their tracks. They realize what it's going to take.
- [14:34]
A
Yeah. And I think especially if they were looking to you to be the one to do it. Right. Like there's. There's plenty of things we can do at the co lab team. I think we're helping people all the time to really build solid foundations so they can scale their businesses. In fact, if you haven't checked out that we do a whole masterclass on that. Foundations that scale. If you check that out, Foundations that scale. Com. It's a great place to start of how do you build the foundation to be able to scale from so many people don't set the foundation up right and then as they start to scale with their name on the side of the building, that building begins to lean. And not in the sexy way of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The whole thing begins to come down and it really has a big impact on their name in the market, you know, how good their products are. You start getting people who negatively talk about fulfillment and it begins to poison the whole. Well, it's trust pilot. All the different things start working against you, you know. So I think it's super important to think about the foundations, but I think a lot of times they're expecting us to be able to do the build because we've always helped them with this sort of thing. So I think coming to somebody like you and saying, Taryn, what would it take for us to do this would be a really great place to start. So visionary, as you're thinking about it, maybe go to your existing team and say, hey, is this something you can do? And then how many problems do you foresee? Especially if they're just gonna go to AI to build this new app to do whatever. Like, is this thing completely foolproof? Like, is this sell or. Or is it too new for us to even know? Are we gonna have pain points? And if we sell it, like it's not gonna have any pain and then we get a bunch of people down the pipeline, could it cause pain for us? So maybe is that what you would suggest, Taren? Like, go to the existing team you've got, see what they can do. And if not, who do we have to pay to be able to get us to develop it? And then how reliable would it be?
- [16:11]
B
Yeah, I think we always run into the execution wall with not. I mean, not us, the collab team. But whenever we're working with teams, ideas are great. Next steps Very clear who's going to do it. We don't have a graphic designer on our team. We're going to have to farm that out, which is not only more money, but it's more time. We can't just go ask them today to have this ready by tomorrow. We're going to have to ask them tomorrow or find somebody tomorrow and then ask them the next day and then they're going to have it back to us a week after that. So, yeah, it's, it's not only about, you know, executing, but do we have what we have? Who do we have to execute?
- [16:47]
A
And then I think it comes back to conversations we always have around this topic of rocks, right? Rocks for the quarter. Like, what about the other big things that we were supposed to be working on this quarter? Does this new idea trump all the other big things that everybody's been putting energy into? And then that's been a massive waste of time and energy and money. Money of like, how, how are we going to move at all? We can't move at all. And does this new. Does your new idea always trump your existing idea? Because that's not a great culture to be setting for your people either. That means they're always only going to give you half effort because they know there's probably a chance you're going to pull the plug on this thing before they're done building it. So why would they throw themselves into it knowing they're probably not even going to make it to the end? Because every time they almost get it to the end, you have a new idea, you want them to go roll out and for you, you're like, what are they complaining about? At least I'm paying them and they're working hours. They should just do whatever I want them to do and some of that'. But nobody loves the idea or the way it feels to spend a bunch of time on something and then just watch it die in the elephant graveyard of never coming to market, never coming to fruition after they burned hours of their time because you told them it was urgent. You probably hit them on the weekend, you probably pinged them at night, you probably were pushing them, pushing and pushing them until the new idea came and then it goes into the elephant graveyard. Nobody likes that feeling. Nobody enjoys that. In summary, turn object in motion, stays in motion, man. Put some attention on what used to work and ask yourself, why is it not working now? And really do the due diligence there. Don't just like come up with half baked, hard to prove reasons why you're moving on. Like, let's really get down to why is this thing not moving? Is there an iterational tweak that you can make on it rather than creating something all new? Now, we're not here to squelch your new ideas. I think new ideas are great. Just make sure they're paralleling with right expectation on roi. Because if you overestimate your ROI and you're off, that means you could take gas off of something that has been proven to work in past versus some new idea that you're sure is going to work. But really at best is probably a 50, 50, right? And maybe even not 50, 50 50. So, and ask yourself the right questions. Make sure you're asking a room full of experts, people that know different sides of the business to get their opinions on why isn't this work? What could be an iterational tweak? How could we maybe package that with another product, change our demographics, See if there's something else we could do. I would say new is great. Just make sure you're budgeting time for new in a way that makes sense. Don't roll up with some big new heavy lift in the middle of other projects you've already put on your team for this quarter. Put that into next quarter. I know you don't like to hear that visionary, but the truth is it's better if we suss something all the way out and then move on to the next thing. And if we continue to stack and stack and stack and overwhelm our current team. So that's my advice. If you haven't checked out foundations that scale doc, check that out. Remaster class maybe we did three or four sessions, took you through every stage we think you need to build your foundation on so you can scale your business with power. So, Taryn Turner, always an amazing thing to sit with you. Thanks for spending time with me today on OPS Experts. Ops Experts, thanks for joining today. We'll see you next week here on Ops Experts Club.