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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 on to the episode. Ops Experts. Chloe. Ted Turner.
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B
What's happening?
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A
What's going, brother?
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B
Going well. How you doing? Good.
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A
We had an agreement. Do you remember the agreement?
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B
Yeah, I just.
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A
Do you want to practice next time? You want to practice from the mirror for a little before you come in with a show tunes? Show tunes hum?
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B
Yeah, I'll need to practice next week.
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A
Hey, well, listen, I don't want any. Like, I made a promise to the people. Like, people listening today. They came psyched. They don't care anything about we're talking about. They were just looking for your hum. And so just let's. Let's not let them down two weeks in a row. You know what I'm saying? Indiana. Indiana was what I was hoping for. I was hoping for Indiana. So I'm glad that you brought it. Just. Dude, seriously, I know you do amazing at ops, but if you ever wanted to go to like, show tunes, I think that you could. There could be a thing, like there's a whole indie thing that's going on out there right now where everybody's liking a lot of analog humming with your lips. It could be the next show tune, like Showstopper.
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B
I only know the two, so I'm gonna have to branch out.
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A
That's not true. That's not true. I'm not gonna buy that. So. But just think about it. Okay? So anyway, OPS Experts today we thought. Welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. We thought today would be good to talk about how fast is too fast when it comes to growing team. When it comes to determining, like where you're at in your growth cycle. I really do think that there are times where pouring on the gas is not the right move. I know that visionaries love just always pour on the gas. They're like, gas all the time gas 100% of the time. Gas all anytime.
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B
Do it.
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A
And you know, with the gap analyzer, we actually have, you know, part of the language is pour on the gas. I do think there's a season where, you know, like, you've got the base set, but man, and it's time now to just pour on the gas because you're ready to scale. But there can be a lot of danger in scaling if you're not ready for Scale. And I think that every visionary wants to believe they're ready for scale. But I do think that there's that honest moment where you just need to come to. Of. But are we really, you know, because it's not just about what you can sell. There's no doubt you can sell. Visionaries can sell ice to an Eskimo.
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B
Right.
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A
Like, there's all you can sell. That's not the question. The question is, how are we going to fulfill? And I think that's where you need to be really honest, because sometimes visionaries can be like, I fulfill so well, dude. I give people so much more than they purchased. And it's like, okay. And that could be true when it comes to the value they get based upon what you're presenting. But what are you delivering? And let's be honest with how your team delivers it and timeliness and actual fulfillment of what they're delivering and how. What the consumption rate is of what they're delivering, and then that's what's going to be your repeat customer. Right. So sometimes pouring on the gas on the top of funnel isn't the right move. Sometimes pouring the gas on mid funnel, like, or high ticket could be the move. And I think that sometimes you have to just think through where you at in your business. So, Taran, I thought we could talk today about how fast is too fast, when to pour on the gas, when to pump the brakes, when to think through what do we need to build so that when you scale something, it doesn't turn into the Leaning Tower of Pisa and then the whole thing just, the foundation gives out and the whole thing falls.
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B
Yep. Yeah. And I think pouring on the gas is always great. It's just. It's really hard if you've built up an environment where you're over and over and always pouring on the gas. You know, you've gone from, oh, this is just a sprint to we're always sprinting. And then you can really lose steam with people, too.
- [03:21]
A
You know, there was a. There's a good friend. I won't. I won't uncover him because he is a good friend. But I remember his wife would always describe how she felt, and she. She was just like, I just feel like we're. You're on a speedboat and you're gunning it all the time, and me and the kids are just hanging on by a rope behind it, just being drugged. And, man, that gets exhausting. And it's not just your family, right? Visionaries, it's not just your family that can feel like that, but your team can feel like that too. And what I see sometimes is when you're not being honest about when it's time to pour on the guest, what happens is usually you burn through team and then if you're not careful and you're very self aware, you can start to say things like, they just weren't built like us. Oh, they're not just, they just weren't built for the way we run or yeah, they just didn't want to work or yeah, they were just lazy or yeah. And we come up with all the reasons why people need to be let go. But Taryn, you and I see this a lot where we actually get into a situation where the visionary is like, yeah, I think we need to fire our team and we're like, let us spend a little bit of time with them. And when we spend time, it's not that they're not quality people, it's that we're not plugging them in the right way or we're not listening to them the right way or we're not engaging them in a way where we see the best lift out of them. And then in our minds it actually means that they're not a good player. Instead of no, no, maybe it's just a language problem, like a visionary speak versus NOP speak. You want to talk about that for a minute?
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B
Yeah. And I think it's very similar to working out. You know, the muscle build happens in the rest periods. You're just constantly trying to build muscle. It's not going to go anywhere. And it's the same thing if, if we're just constantly pushing. Without those rest periods, nothing's going to get set up. We're not going to have the correct documentation, we're not going to have the correct training, we're not going to have the correct processes because we just keep jumping into the next thing over and over again. And then your three iterations passed and now this content and knowledge is lost because we never had the time to properly set things up. We're just jumping into the next thing. So it's a, it's a rough one and you just got to make sure to build in those rest periods of now. We need to just grind away at working on the business in the business instead of jump into that other thing we're about to jump into.
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A
Yeah. So I think that what I hear you say, Taran, and there, I think there are a couple of things at play when you're as a visionary and you're thinking about should I continue to pour on the gas? Is now the season to pour on the gas? It's how many things are already out there floating and have I built out the ones that I already have existing in my ecosystem? And then number two, do I have the amount of people it's going to take to scale to where I want to go to, right? Because there are two different things that play in that. It's like, are there too many things where there are too many trees we're chopping at. Every time you turn around, you start chopping at a different tree. But man, none of them have a complete chop on it, right? It's just a bunch of forest, a bunch of nicks on the, on the, on the trees. Because we haven't spent the time to really chop that thing down and process it. And do we even have the manpower to be able to process as many ideas as you have? Because the economies of scaling is real. Like, you can't have a hundred ideas and think your two people are going to be able to work through your 100 ideas and document the right ways and fulfill the right ways and take people on a customer journey. That makes sense. Have a too lean of a team and too many ideas you're pumping out there can be a pain point. So there's probably like decision making on how many ideas are we going to attack this quarter this year, right? Some of those like big picture decisions of annual planning and quarterly planning and leading into quarterly rocks, right? The big things we're moving on quarterly basis. And then do we have the number of people to justify being able to move that many rocks quarterly into the year?
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B
And that's, that's a lot of times where we start out, you know, what are we looking at here with the big goal for the year and what are people already working on? What do we need to take off their plates? If you do want to do this next thing and people will follow you through, you know, any of your crazy ideas, any of your, your, we just really need to make some money. We've got this great opportunity. People will follow that. But if you start lying to them, people are going to catch on. If you start saying, no, it's just this one month, it's just this one month and then that month's over. And then you're like, well, now onto the next thing. And I'm just gonna say it again. People are gonna catch on and be like, well, you've just always been saying just this one thing and then we'll have a chance to Catch up. But it never happens.
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A
I think, to follow your athleticism analogy, you know, of being an athlete, I don't care how good of a sprinter you are, no one sprints forever. You just can't do it. There's. There's a amount of time that you can make a sprint work, and then there's a time where you need to say, I need to rest, right? I need to pace. I need to slow down a little bit. I need to catch my breath. I need to recharge, refuel. If you're always in sprint mode, you know, which I think is the danger. Cause I think a lot of. I think a lot of visionaries live at high octane all the time, and. But they don't necessarily have to do the doing of high octane all the time. They just have a lot of ideas all the time, right. The downside is, with ideas is we need those ideas, but somebody has to do the doing to execute those ideas. And then if you. If it's like building a fire, too, right? If there's too much wood on the fire, man, this thing can be a bonfire if it gets enough oxygen. But if the fastest way to put out a flame is by giving it too much wood, right, because then it can't breathe anymore. The thing can't breathe and it can't catch flame. It can't keep flame. It can't continue to burn. So I think that there's a real balance of. Are you creating space for everybody to breathe? Right. Are you expecting them to always run at highest velocity without realizing? No, no, no. We need spikes and drops and spikes and drops and then lets us take control of the spikes and drops. Like, if we're a seasonal business, let's name it as a seasonal business and realize a lot of the beginning of the year is going to ramp to that season. And then let's do our seasonal lift. That's going to be a heavy lift. Everybody knows everybody can calendar it. And then as we come off the backside, realize there's going to be like a downslope, right? Because you can't just fall off the backside. There's going to be all the cleanup that comes out of launch. And then let's let people take a breather and let's, like, refine our things and let's have some debrief on how that went before we do another launch. But if you do a launch every single month, which we've worked for, clients that do launches every single month, what you're going to find is a high churn rate on your team or deep resentment amongst your team. They may not tell you it, but nobody wants to run like that because people have lives, right?
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B
Like people.
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A
You want people and you want people to have lives. You want people to be happy because that's how they show up happy. You don't want them only when they talk to you. You want them the time because that's how you get long life out of your employees. And you want people around for a long time because those are the people that understand you. Taryn, do you want to talk about that a little bit like tenure and like what why we want people to stick around. Why we don't want to just like turn and burn. No matter like I think something I hear a lot of visionaries say is we can find somebody better. Oh, there's somebody better. And it's like that may be true, but there's a lot of value in somebody being with you for a good amount of time.
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B
Yeah, I mean anybody who's ever read a business book, talked about business with somebody who's been there knows it's a lot cheaper to keep an employee than hire an employee. Anybody who's ever seen the office knows this too. And yeah, that's the base of it too. It's a cost thing, but it's also a knowledge base. You're going to have a huge gap in knowledge base bringing on new people constantly that just money and experience can't buy. I think they could be better.
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A
You and I were just talking about this last week because we have a client that's trying to offset some of the load on current team and they're trying to onboard quick. And I think that no matter how skilled the players you're bringing on the field, they're going to need some time to understand the lay of the land. No matter how good they are. I don't care how long they've been doing this, they're going to need to understand your offer stack, they're going to need to understand your tech stack, they're going to need to understand rest the teamworks and where their roles stop and start. And if you just bring them in, even the most gifted person I can. We've been under the hood of dozens and dozens and dozens of businesses and I can promise you this, this is absolute gospel truth. No matter how skilled somebody is, the amount of load and confusion on the field and if you're a true visionary and there it's a little bit scrambly on the field, let's just be honest, it takes People time to learn that, and they've got to come in there and kind of untangle the web that has been created over the years. That's just how it works. So it would probably be better, Would probably serve you better to say, have we really squeezed as much as we can out of the people that work for us? You know, like, do they have KPIs that we're measuring them to? Like, do they have deadlines that we're holding them accountable for? Like, are we giving them a realistic amount of load? And how are they performing? Truly, not what your gut says, not how you feel about them, not what somebody told you about them. Like, let's do some honest auditing. Let's do some honest analyzing of the people you have now, because nobody probably knows yourself better than the team that you've had for a while because they've seen you come from the beginning and rise to where you are currently. And they can tell the history. Unless you want to get on a call with your new people and tell all your new people your history, which is not as sexy as it sounds because we're not talking about the story of how you ascended. We're talking about all of the breaks and all of the technology and all of the offers you've tried and all the community that failed and all. Like, that's not the fun side of the story to tell. Like, we love to tell, like, the hero's journey of all the good things, but, man, there's a lot of suck that's mixed into that. And it's probably just better to season your people, take care of your people, challenge your current people before you start making decisions on a bunch of hiring. Taryn, do you want to speak to that for a sec?
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B
Yeah. I mean, you just nailed it right there. It's, you know, back in the day, hiring for coffee shops. Sometimes it's a lot better bringing on people with no experience than people with experience, because they're a lot more moldable and trainable to the ways of your business. And that's exactly how you can think of people you already have. You know, they're much more seasoned, they're easier to move with you into different areas and grow with you into how you want to see them grow, rather than bringing in somebody outside who might have great experience but is also taking on a culture they've learned from other companies and a way of working from other companies that might not sit well with you or with how your people are used to working. And not that that's bad, but completely Changing work, people's habits and ideologies is going to take a lot of time. And so it's not always going to be the best use of the time.
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A
Yeah. And I think, I mean, so we're talking, we're talking about the specific tool now, right? Like, let's say we need somebody that's going to come in and help us with this very specific role, whether it's an accounting role or it's a marketing role, or it's a customer service role, whatever the role is. Very specific tools. Right. But then there's also the thought of, you know, we've, we just had a recent visionary and we've had a lot of visionaries over the year that are just like, I just want to fire my whole team and start again. And it's like, well, like, be careful of how many you're firing at one time and hiring at one time because then, and like, culture is a really hard thing to nail. Right? Because man, nobody knows you. And you brought, just like you said, you brought in all these people who've all been cultured someplace else and you bring them into this big melting pot and it's like, what is our culture anymore? Nobody knows because nobody's been there long enough to give them an established culture. So I would always say, hey, let's establish the highest burn and if we're going to replace people, let's do it one at a time and let's give them some space in between so you can begin to culture the people that you're bringing in. Otherwise you bring in too many new people and they're going to absolutely taint the culture of the business. I remember at one time I heard the CEO of ontraport talk about how they were growing rapidly, you know, rapid, rapid, rapid, rapid growth, really fast growth. And they were hiring all these high level execs out of all these different companies. And what he found was it really began to saturate their, their culture where it was no longer Entreport's culture. It was all of these other companies culture, all these other C level or director level individuals coming out of different companies, bringing a mixed culture. And then it was like, well, how do we handle this here at Entreport? Well, I don't know. Nobody's been here long enough to know how we handled it here on Entrepreneur, but this is how I handled it back where I came out of DocuSign, you know what I mean? Or wherever it was. So it was like you get this hodgepodge of culture and that really does affect the morale of team and the performance of team. If you can get a team that works well together, where everybody's rowing the same direction and yeah, there may be coaching opportunities and there may be things that you need to help them with over time, but if you can get them to highest optimum performance, all rowing the same direction, that's a force and that's not something you want to walk away from lightly. You, you can get great ROI out of that if you realize the value in them. But I think a lot of visionaries, they get tired of inconsistencies. They get but a lot of times are not willing to acknowledge the inconsistencies are theirs and then they blame it on the people when there's probably more to it than that. So, Taryn, as we wrap it up, if you haven't, if you haven't taken the gap analyzer quiz yet, that's what we talk about. Should you pour on the gas? Check it out. Gapanalyzer.com Score It's a free quiz and it'll tell you right where you're at. Are you in a spot you need to pour on the gas? Should you be pumping the brakes? Are you at a spot where you're almost pouring on the gas and you're almost there? It's going to give you a good rating of that. Check it out. Hope you enjoy it. Taran Turner, don't disappoint us. Next time I want to hear a humming right when we come in because that's going to be so good and I'm excited to see what it could be. And then I hope we get to see you back here next week, same place. Ops experts.