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- [00:00]
A
Hey experts listeners. I want to key you into something that we do very special here at Ops Experts Club and that's a masterclass. We have a free masterclass called Foundations that Scale. And the great thing about this masterclass is it's for operation professionals who are growing businesses. One of the most dangerous things you can do as an operator is grow businesses on a foundations that's not stable. So in this particular masterclass, we take apart all of the inside pieces of your team, your tech and how they're using time and, and we make sure that you're building on a foundation that's stable. So if you want to check out a great masterclass completely for free, go to foundationsthatscale.com we'll see you there.
- [00:36]
B
Welcome to the Ops Experts Club with Aaron Taran and Savannah. This podcast will take you behind the scenes of some of the finer details of multimillion dollar companies. These ops experts have dealt with operations for scaling companies and well established businesses with anywhere from small to large teams. If you've ever been deep into the details of a major company, then you know how much it takes and these conversations are just for you. Welcome to the Ops Experts Club podcast.
- [01:07]
A
Ops Expert Club. How about that? Is that a good one? There it is. Coming up. There it is. I was thinking about that the other day. That ad was amazing. I don't know if it was amazing, but that was my most creative ad I ever made.
- [01:19]
C
Anyway, it was amazing.
- [01:21]
A
Karen Turner, excellent to see you this fine ops exposure for club day. How is your day going?
- [01:25]
C
You too? Yeah, it's going well. Monday is full of new ideas, clients, entrepreneurs, creatives have an entire weekend. This weekend they had one more day than usual to reflect on everything they possibly can and assign out new things to be done.
- [01:44]
A
So, you know, I was on a call with a visionary from Wellspring, Pete Vargas's mastermind that, that I'm a part of. And he was talking to me about Mondays and excited about Mondays and I had made the mistake of telling him that I hate Mondays, you know, I mean, because, you know, we come from a different place. And then he, he spent a long time trying to really explain to me why I really should love Mondays. And I just told him, bro, we're just cut different. Like for us, the reason why we ate Mondays or Mondays are harder for us is because visionaries come so freaking excited for Monday so they can just like megaphone blast, like just open up the floodgates on all their greatest ideas to their team. And then the team that has to support that. They're just like, dear God, it's Monday, I forgot. Or, you know, I mean, they come into Mondays like the Monday blues because they're like, oh, he's not even going to ask about all the things that he gave us last week and he's going to forget even asked us that. But we've been working on it and now he's got a bunch of new ideas that he or she wants us to be working on straight out of the can. And it's almost like they forget about the other stuff. So Mondays, anybody that's running operational support, we feel you.
- [02:39]
C
Yes, yes. The list is long on Monday and it's short on Friday.
- [02:45]
A
That's it. That's it. I love that. Just, I mean, just know operators that are out there. We always advocate for visionaries or if you're a visionary, listen to this. Like, don't do your all team meeting on Mondays. That's just not the best day to do that. Like give, give your team a break. Do it on Tuesdays because that gives them like Monday to calibrate a little bit. It gives you Monday to temper a little bit. And then by the time you enter into Tuesdays, everybody's ready for all the questions you might have and all of the energy that you might bring. So I know it's hard to wait till Tuesday. I'm always a Tuesday man. Because Mondays, Monday meetings are brutal. Because unless you want people preparing on Sunday, they're not going to have good answers for you on whatever questions you have for them on Monday morning.
- [03:22]
C
Yep, yep. True, true.
- [03:24]
A
Well, Taryn, we had a pretty cool guest last time and really an out of the box kind of guest. Like we've never had somebody like that on the show before. Mark Zook from I'm going to butcher this every time, but from Stolspas Structures and Horizon Structures, CEO of both. Young dude, I don't even think the guy's 30 yet, but just super insightful. Really bright guy. And you know, the thing that he brought different than our normal people. You know, we deal with a lot of online entrepreneurs. You know, Mark does a lot of online marketing and he's savvy to those things. But his product is largely, you know, like a physical product. They're building structures in an Amish way. He was raised in Amish country, raised by Amish people. He isn't necessarily living the Amish lifestyle now. I told him, hey, listen, we're not going to do an episode on Breaking Amish. Just going to, you know, come straight at the business. And you know, he's such a good, just quality person. He's so still tied to his family. But the two different businesses he was telling us about is Stalsfus is this building. You know, they go out and they do a lot of outbuildings or they do structures that are Amish built and they cater to people. You know, a lot of people all around that whole area will come into the Amish community and want them to come out and do buildings. Because there's such a high quality building, they'll ship those buildings to people. But then he also has another business called Horizon that actually partners with other Amish people or Mennonite people that are doing the constructing. And so it's solely a pass through business where products are offered that other people are selling. But because they've earned the name, they've got the customer and they've got people producing the product. So I thought today we could talk a little bit about some of the brilliance we saw in Mark and especially talk about things like knowing your ideal avatar, knowing your product offering and really nailing that. But also business adjacent. What are business adjacent opportunities that like Mark found not only is the building, but we also have this large pool of people that will probably continue saying yes to things that we don't want to build. But we know builders who will. So maybe. What do you think about that today?
- [05:24]
C
Sounds wonderful. You know, and I mean, it's not even just things we don't want to build. It was taking something that you might traditionally think of being location specific. How are you going to sell barns to somebody on the other side of the US and solving that problem and being like, oh, we'll just have somebody else make the barn on the other side of the U.S.
- [05:46]
A
Yeah, I think that what I think is brilliant because I. And obviously we're talking about a different culture here, right there. The Amish people, the Mennonite people are a lot of times they stick really tightly together, right? They, they live in close proximity, tied together by religious beliefs, but also by lifestyle choices they've made to be separate from the general population. And so there's a lot of trust in those communities of others in those communities. And I think that's what I really loved was he's catering to the outside world. He wants them to build things, but he's also building these bonds with people that are of like mind who even though they're craftsmen, maybe they don't have the online brilliance that Mark and his family have put together where they can take those Offerings. It's a very craft based website. What I've noticed is a lot of people that are very craft based brilliant are not always tech based brilliant. You know, they just because they can build something amazingly with their hands, they're probably not too geared for selling things online. So how can I partner this buying pool that I've gained? Right. We need to talk about that first probably how do we build this business? How do we make our core offering clear and then how do I gain others so I can scale this business with without necessarily breaking my core business which is building. So I think there's a couple different pieces we could attack there today.
- [06:58]
C
Yeah. And it's just been a great insight into, you know what, what you can look at. If you're running business and operations and different things, you can pull into your own ecosystem.
- [07:10]
A
I think it's probably important to identify first what is your core offering and does it work? I mean like if you've, if you've got a business now, do you feel like your core offering has gotten you where it's at and it still has legs to carry you forward? And if so, be really careful with messing with the magic. I know that's something that you talk to me a lot about Taryn, is be careful not to take your eye off all of something that really works. And you know, I think sometimes as entrepreneurs we can get excited about our new ideas and chasing different things. Hey Moose, good to hear from you brother. Like I love hearing mooses bark so we can get distracted by other things that we're chasing, you know and I know you're really good at challenging me of hey Aaron, before we go, put a bunch of time and energy into building that out or putting ads at that or putting time and energy at that. Like is, is that really going to be as good as what we know is working really well for us this side? This what we do at the COLAB team with operations and coming alongside with operations consulting and then us putting members of our team into other people's team, helping them identify the gap and then saying hey, why don't you let us just come in and hold space in that gap, sop out those roles, create standard operating procedures and then go out and do your recruiting for you, bring back to you the best recruits that we can find to fill these positions permanently. Help you with interviewing, help you make the hire and then onboard those folks and then we'll exit but still be the resident expert that can help them grow in their role so that you as the entrepreneur you as the visionary, don't have to slow things down. That's our bread and butter. Like whatever you do, don't mess with the juju, don't mess with the magic of that. And you can do other complimentary offers as long as it doesn't distract you from your main thing. Do you want to talk about that for a minute? Because you're always really good about keeping me on the rails.
- [08:51]
C
Yeah, I mean, when it comes down to it, like you, like you first said, you know, is your core offer working? I mean, are you making more money than you're spending? At the end of the day, that's pretty good. Telltale sign of if you're working or not. And so from there you can go into these other areas too. Do you have room to try new things? You know, so my. We ask Aaron on the cloud team, sometimes we do have room to try new things and so we'll try new things. But if we don't have room to try, then we'll push it back. We'll say, you know what, we're doing great. We don't really have the room, let's just keep on doing what we're doing. But sometimes an opportunity comes up, you get a friend, a partner wants to do something with you, and it's something you can't really say no to because the list might be so small and the reward could be so great that we give it a shot. And that's kind of brings to the point of, you know, you don't always need to have the products, sometimes you just have the customers and you can have an opportunity show up and realizing you've already got the business, you've got the systems, you've got the customers, you've got the marketing, you just need somebody else's product to get given to them.
- [10:07]
A
No, I think it's super smart. So. But I think you said a couple things there that are really good and that is you usually have created a core business that's generating enough income that you're, like I said, you're making more than you're spending first off, like really be clear on that so that you know what you're pouring gas on. Right. So have this core offering, but realize they're going to probably be other attractors that other needs that people have when they come to that core offering. And then you need to ask yourself, do we want to be the one stop shop which could distract us from our core offering, or do we want to build out some partners that we can easily have as referral? Partners or affiliate partners maybe where I know for us a great, a great example would be because I, I love when we can talk in practical experiences instead of abstracts because sometimes I think that people don't know how to place that. But for us, Caleb PV has been a great thing for us and unmutable, the marketing agency has been awesome for us because I always tell clients as we come in, we're in operations, we're a one stop op shop. I mean like we're coming in to help you with all things operations but we don't do sexy. Right? Like we're very functional but we don't do anything sexy. Meaning we don't do graphics, we don't do website build outs or funnel build outs. As far as making those things sexy. We can make them functional all day long, but we don't make them sexy. So you're going to want somebody that's going to help you with your hooks, going to help you with your brand guide that's going to help you with your, your creative pieces and the copy that goes in it and all the emails that come out of the back of it. You're going to want a marketing shop for that. And so as we begin to expose that need then I partnered up with Caleb PE we refer a lot of work to immutable for helping with the sexy. And what that does for Caleb is, is it keeps him out of the weeds of all the operational nonsense that comes with building out all those pieces. Right. Because once you tell people you build websites and you build funnels, you get pulled into a lot of what I would say is the marketing automations that really would be so much easier if you could just throw those back over the wall and let lab team handle the automations and keep you in your brilliance of being the creative and let us handle the operation. So I feel like if there's a complimenting offer out there, think about that to yourself, your core offering. Make sure you don't pollute that or taint that or dilute it by trying to offer and think, could I make just a, is there somebody that I could just bring in as a partner, bring in as an affiliate, maybe I'll get a, get a cut out of anybody that you push their direction. And so income is still coming in but you don't have to fulfill on it. All you're doing is providing the leads. That's a great example.
- [12:20]
C
Yeah, I mean it's, you know, the referral market is huge. Like that's where a lot of people are getting their Their customers. I mean, that's where we get a lot of our customers. Yeah, it's where multiple places of business, you know, it's all referrals. Yeah.
- [12:40]
A
So I think know your core offering. Right. Know where you can offer something to customers that are coming to you. I feel like that's what Mark did with not only Stoltzfis, but also then have a horizon where he was able to make partnerships with other Mennonite Amish people that were making things that could be part of his fulfillment House doesn't build anything that's offered out of Horizon. It's all fulfilled by other people. I think that another thing I would say that that would be called is something business adjacent. So then I do think that there's an opportunity where if you have a core business, is there a complimentary business to yours that you could start as a side hustle and just pour a little bit of energy onto it? But. But because you already have something funneling that direction, it's not that big of a lift. So for us, an example would be Colab Team. You know, we've been doing a lot of consulting for coffee through the years. That's where I met Taran Turner. The amazing Taran Turner. Came out of a coffee client. He moved away. I said, dude, the owner of the coffee shop reached out to me. He's like, hey, I've got this guy. He's running five or six of my locations. I'm really worried about losing him, that I don't have all the things in his head. Can you come and extract from his brain all the things that you can before he leaves? And I said, sure. And that was like the first iteration of the gap analyzer that we went on to go create. Gap Analyzer.com, a great tool to be able to extract those kind of things as people depart or just knowing where your team is spending their time. So I met with you, extracted all those things out of your brain, and I'm like, this is a smart dude. I'm going to pull him into some of my work, you know. And so I said, hey, what would you think about trying this thing? I know it's a lot different than what you normally do, but your brain's built for it. And that was 10 plus years ago that you started helping me with that. But from there, I went into doing a lot of coffee consulting. And then we were consulting all these franchises and we're consulting all these independent coffee shops, and I began to pick and pick up on all the best things And I thought to myself, I really love the country of Belize. It's someplace I've been going the last 20 years. I've got a friend down there that would like to start something coffee. There aren't drive thru coffees down there yet. What if I took all this knowledge that I've gained here and start a business adjacent where I take all those pieces, find a partner that'll do it with me. So I grabbed Drew Moody on our team at the collab team and I said, hey, why don't you think about doing this business with me down in Belize? And we went down there, we started the first drive thru coffee in the country of Belize, taking these knowledge based things that we had and it made the application so much simpler because we had already been doing it for all these years. So it enabled me to do a business adjacent that was a much easier lift because I had gained all these skills in the primary business. And then once I'm down there with this drive thru coffee down there, I thought to myself, you know, the biggest savings we can make that I've seen coffee shops make throughout our experience with coffee is energy drinks and blending powder. Why don't we make our own energy drink and blending powder and then call in other coffee shops with us, Start Indie Coffee Coalition where a bunch of small independents are all pooling their resources towards these big spends that normally you can't buy as just an independent shop. And then we'll, we'll bang down the price for all of us for blending powder and for energy drinks. And it was another business adjacent, you know, and it enabled Coffee de los Mayas, our coffee expression in Belize, to get a cheaper energy drink, a cheaper blending powder and also these other clients of the COF Coalition that they're able to also get there. So I think that there are opportunities where collab teams, my bread and butter, we're doing these things and learning these skills and then you begin to think, is there a business adjacent that wouldn't take that much more energy but could really be profitable? And then you're back to square one again, right? Is our core offering profitable? Is it working? Is it not going to work? So I think that business adjacent I think can be a really powerful profit center that helps you spread out your eggs. So all your eggs aren't only in one basket.
- [16:03]
C
Yeah, I'll even throw another one at you, Aaron. And I think I'd call it customer adjacent. Yeah, you know, we've, I've been working with Melanie McGrice down there in Australia for A while. She's a dietitian, Early Life Nutrition alliance, teaching dietitians about early life, specifically geared towards dietitians. But what she found was her message was hitting a lot of healthcare professionals as well.
- [16:25]
A
Yeah.
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C
And instead of turning them away, instead she just created different, smaller offerings for other healthcare professionals. Her main program is still geared just towards dietitians wanting to learn early life nutrition for their clients. But then she realized she was attracting other customers and just created a subset of products for them instead of having to turn them away every time too. So, you know, what can you be creating that's might not be your ideal customer, but can be a quick win for customer?
- [16:58]
A
Yeah, I like that a lot. I like that a lot. So seeing an opportunity, having to tell people over and over again, no, we don't offer that. We really are pretty specific to this, determining, hey, we're getting a lot of people asking for that. And sometimes that can be where you can begin to raise your head and say, oh, that, that is a. I like that customer adjacent. Maybe not my. My main avatar, but is a very close cousin and I could be able. I can spin some of the things that has been pretty routed towards dietitians and actually sprint it in a different way that might complement and add to value for other people. Bring another rev stream in for me. Let it be a win win because they get the same knowledge they're looking for spun their way instead of just for dietitians. And it could be revenue into the business. So that's super smart.
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C
Yeah.
- [17:43]
A
Hmm. What else? Turn. What are some good. You know, I know the affiliate model is something that we roll out for clients all the time. It's something that we do for a lot of people. You know, I think back Pete Vargas days, Pedro Adeo days, where we're dealing with hundreds of affiliates. Right. They open it up to their customer pool. They open it up to all their buddies that are selling something pretty similar, you know, are selling something kind of similar that want to come in and, you know, come alongside of them for a joint launch of a challenge or a joint launch of a webinar or whatever it is. I think it's something that a lot of businesses don't take in consideration of. You've accrued a list, if you've been building a list over time. And there's probably a fair amount of those people that have told you no, I mean, like you, they're just not going to take your offer, you know, and so maybe you've created a lesser dollar offer and you've tried that and there's continue to say no. So now you have this dead list that just is like carrying, like just dragging your CRM down right by number of clicks, number of opens, it's dropping your percentage because the pool you're sending to, you're sending to too large of a pool and the majority, and maybe not the majority of them, but a good cross section of them have told you no. So a great thing to think about doing with that dead list or the nos that you've gotten because they've, they've already subscribed to your stuff, they're already getting your things is why don't you partner with somebody that might bring in an offering different than yours. Why don't you partner with something? I know we're doing a ton of joint webinars with people right now on helping people roll out their weekly meeting. You know, we've done a collaborative effort of pulling together eos and pulling together scalable and pulling together etw and like we've kind of brought together this hybrid of how we think the ideal 60 minute weekly meeting really is set up. And we're doing this joint webinar with folks, eight week webinar. And then I give them a percentage of everything we sell off of their list and we give them the assets, we give them the copy that they need to set up their list, we send them the graphic assets if they want to promote it on their socials. And then it's all to drive traffic to this webinar. And at this webinar they come on, they edify me, you know, I get on there, I present for 30 minutes and then I open it up for question and answer and I drop my offer. And then as, as I close deals on that, then I split off for them, you know, a pretty handsome percentage of something they didn't have to do any work for. All they had to do was send me to their list of no's. Like give me the quiet list, give me the list that you're not able to mine any more value out of. And maybe by making a different offering you might re engage them, which is a win for you and a win for me. Because if they say yes to me, I'm going to give you a piece of it. And there's a very good chance it might trigger them of oh like it reminds them of the value that you bring and that you don't uniquely only offer this one thing, but you partner up with other really smart people that are going to bring other value adds to the community.
- [20:18]
C
Yeah. And I mean, it's, it's such a good win for people. And if, if you're not sure about affiliates or what we're talking about, if you've ever listened to a podcast that's probably the, the cleanest version of affiliates we see in everyday life. It's, it's a little commercial. They're saying a promo and then it says use my promo code at checkout. Basically the same thing, but an email form just with magic links and tracking and cookies and all the good things. But it's, it's such a great win win for everybody involved because if you're the person who has the product that wants an affiliate to promote it, you know it's going to cost you X amount of dollars to acquire a customer over a certain time frame to get them to buy this product. And so all you're doing is taking away that equation, paying somebody else that money who's got a list of people that trust that person because they're on their list. Now he's gonna promote your product. So instead of paying, you know, a few hundred dollars in marketing over six months to acquire this customer, you're gonna give $300 to this affiliate if one of his people purchases and the affiliate knows it's a good deal because he's gonna get probably what would equal the same amount of money he would earn on his own product, on profit. So he's going to get the amount of money he would actually spend years developing, implementing, fulfilling on a product just in profit right away without having to do anything. So they're both understanding the value there. And that's why it's such a great thing, is because it's, it's so symbionic to each other and you get some really good results from it.
- [21:56]
A
Yeah. So I think more than anything, as we wind up today's show, I think the thing that we really wanted to highlight today, first off, man, brilliance of Mark Zook. What a smart dude, really good guy on the show. Like, the offering that he had, I think was so unique. And I think it causes our brain to open up and say, okay, it's really easy for me to see in his business who's his ideal avatar, who is he going after, what's his core offering? And then let's also not forget like we talked about, are there businesses adjacent? Like, could there be something adjacent to me that I could, without very much energy, knock down some good dollars to? Or is there a customer adjacent that maybe I could offer something that would be a little bit different. You know that like you're mentioning with Melanie McGrice, like what a smart lady, like things that she's offering. And then finally, is there a partner adjacent, right? Is there somebody that I could partner with who maybe is offering something that I'm continually being asked for but I know I don't want to provide myself? Could I then partner with somebody that can make that same offering and I could make a rev share an affiliate cut off their offering? So brilliance out of Mark Zook. Always great to have smart people on the show. Tarant. Thanks for talking with me. Ops Experts. Thanks for joining us today.
- [23:00]
C
Yes, Aaron and my barn will be here soon. The order in.
- [23:03]
A
Yeah, that's great. I love it. Well, I hope you use my affiliate code. Just kidding.
- [23:08]
C
Absolutely.
- [23:09]
A
Thanks for showing up, guys. We appreciate your time here on Ops Experts Club and we'll see you next week.
- [23:16]
B
Thank you for tuning in to the Ops Experts Club podcast. New episodes available every week on Spotify, Apple, itunes, and everywhere you listen to podcasts. If you're curious about how some of the biggest names in entrepreneurship have scaled their businesses to the next level, check out some of our best content on this topic by going to foundations@scale.com.
- [23:41]
A
You.
- [23:41]
B
Can find the link in our bio and do your part to improve as an OPS Expert.