← The Ops Experts Club Podcast
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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.
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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.
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A
Ops Experts Club. What's up brother? Good to see you. Was I laying down a beat? Were you thinking about getting there for a minute?
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C
I was.
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A
That was good. That was a good beat I was laying down. I was thinking about going into rap, but I decided I back it off a little.
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C
Yeah, that. That could have been fun.
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A
It would have been something. It would have been something. And then one of our suckers on our team would have taken it and he would have spun it and then he would have pushed it out there on the socials and then it would have been a nonsense. So I'm glad that I backed off when I did. Brandon Turley would have had me underneath the wheel well, so.
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C
Yeah, well, you don't dance at work events.
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A
That is exactly why territory, especially not in this day and age. Although I will say I have seen some people posting some things where via AI they are dancing and they dance way better when AI is dancing for them. Way better.
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C
Hopefully.
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A
Hopefully. Anyway, Tier Turner, I thought we could talk about today on the show Optics first, thanks for joining us. Great to have you on the show today. If you run an op, if you run an operation for somebody, if you're a visionary just needing some extra operational help, maybe you're moving from a solopreneur to an entrepreneur stage. This is a great place for you. We got tons of Tools for you here. Opsexpertsacademy.com if you ever want to check that out. 35 modules of just something you can plug your team into to help them with the lift. We also have foundationscale.com, which is a masterclass. Four episodes of just super good content on laying a foundation that's going to scale with you today. Taran Turner I thought what we could talk about which would be kind of fun would be when do I need full time team? You know, because I think that especially in the online space there are a lot of people that use agencies and use agencies for a lot of different things. And sometimes I hear visionaries talk negatively about agencies about the way agencies show up and the kind of attention they give. But sometimes I feel like that's because there's a misaligned expectation. I would say in some ways the COLAB team operates like an agency. Right. People pay us for a certain amount of time we come in and I'll give you a certain number of players from our team. They're going to work up to 120 hours a month is our high level retainer where we're just going to plug into your operations. We'll just do the dang deal, you know, help with CRMs and tech, help with customer support and lining out a ticketing platform, help with like your org chart roles and responsibilities, rolling out eos throughout the whole thing with a weekly level 10 meeting, helping you with quarterly evals, all those different pieces and finally helping you look with sales and finance. Right. Like how can I help us bring together a foundation that's going to be able to be scalable? So we come in kind of like an agency from an operations perspective. But sometimes I think there can be a pain point when expectations are misaligned and I feel like I've seen that pretty recently lately for friends of mine that are using agencies for different things and even friends that are asking me about hiring and I think it'd just be a good idea for us to talk through when should I be hiring a full time person for this versus somebody fractionally somebody at an agency model.
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C
Oh, that is. I could not have said it better myself. I. The only topic I came up with today was maybe we could talk about whales. But this sounds way better.
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A
Dude, that would be a whale of a tail. I would be a man humpbacks. Like we gotta, we will talk about whales at some point but let's jump into this for today.
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C
Yeah, that's beautiful and relevant. Something we come across all the time, which is the best kind of topics we talk about is things we have lots of experience in.
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A
That's right, 100%. So Taren, when from your perspective, you know somebody's thinking through, they've got this, they've got this situation they're going through in business, they have this need that's come up. I think from my perspective it's always easier to hire an agency because they probably already have somebody that does that. Right? There's already probably somebody that's done that if they're an easy reach out. You know, a lot of these guys, gals are in masterminds or have friends that are in the industry somewhere they can reach out and say hey, who do you use to do X? They say hey, I use this person. So it's already a proven, you know, it's coming from a good lead source. They can go to this place, maybe pay a little bit more because you know you're paying somebody as a contractor versus bringing somebody in as a full time hire but you know immediately you're, they're going to get the job done, they're just probably going to be a little bit more expensive. But when would you say is the time as there's a vacancy that people should actually think to themselves should this be a full time hire?
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C
Yeah, I mean a good, good thing to think about too is if you've already got part time hires, how many part time hires do you have? Like once you start getting too many part time hires that's when you also need to realize, oh maybe, maybe I can combine some of those into a full time hire, get a discount since you're kind of getting a bulk discount on hours. So that's a good tell. You know, I guess when, when your dreams and what you're able to achieve of your dreams become bigger than your team's bandwidth, what are they working on? Do they have any room to work on something else? But we actually can't cut anything. That's a great time to hire somebody as well.
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A
And we, we love that conversation. Right. I think that, you know, we were just talking before we jumped on, on the call today and we were talking about a client and working in hours and you saying yeah, I'm probably gonna have to pump the brakes a little bit this week for us to stay in budget and I think that that's just real. Right? Most, most agencies out are doing things fractionally for you having an allocated amount of time they've donate, they've dedicated to your account for equitable amount that you're going to pay them on some sort of flat fee rate at a retainer. Right. That's way. Most. Most retainers work for agencies. And so you're going to be banging up against the lid of how many hours they're able to give you. And maybe that's the beginning of the conversation. Right. If you have things more that you're wanting to do and the people that are providing you with the service at a limited amount of hours, and that happens end over end, week over week, month over month, that may be the beginnings of. Maybe I should think about hiring this out full time. Would you say that's one of the. One of the things.
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C
Yeah, exactly. You know, you can really combine some things together, too.
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A
Yeah, I think that. And maybe that we talked about some of the pros of agency at the beginning. Right. Of you have an immediate need, you need note to know somebody quick that can jump in the middle of this thing and just grab it and handle it and dial it in. And I would say, I would always advocate for start with somebody fractionally. Right. Let's get the thing lined out. And what I would say is, as you bring in somebody fractionally, make sure they're creating SOPs. Right. As we come in and take over ops for people, we're continually stepping into roles where they have vacancies. Gaps we call them. You know, we use The Gap Analyzer, gap analyzer.com, tool we created to identify where the gaps are on the team. And then we'll say, hey, why don't you just throw us in the middle of that gap? We'll hold space, sop out the role, and then we'll go recruit for you, bring you back our best selections. After we've gone through initial vetting of the applicants, do the initial set of interviews, we'll bring you back the best two or three, and then we'll help you with the hiring and onboarding and we'll let them backfill our slot that we've been holding. I would say anybody that you're bringing in a fractional level, though, at the bare, bare minimum, should be as they're doing the dang thing for you, whatever that is, whether that's social media posting, whether that's maybe bringing them in as a graphic artist, maybe that's somebody that's helping out with the podcast. Maybe that's somebody that's help me with customer service or your finances. I would say make sure they're creating SOPs that are going to be easily transferred to somebody else. Right. Because the last thing you want is to get too connected to somebody else holding all the keys to your kingdom. And then either by a fallout or disappearance, they disappear off the scene. And then you're like, well, that was a complete waste of time and money because I don't have anything to show for it. So maybe be asking anybody at a fractional level is doing work for you to start creating SOPs, so that when you start to hit the lid on your fractional worker, your contractor, you can say, hey, I'm going to start looking for somebody full time. I need you just to hold this space until I find that person. And then once I hire the full time person, I would love for you to onboard them for me and hand off to them the SOPs. And then the transition is smooth. And it's not just knee jerk where you cut loose your agency. Then you're in a mad scramble to start hiring. And everybody knows recruiting takes time. Like you don't want to rush the hire. You know, Gina Wickman in traction says fire fast, but hire slow. Might be really slow on how you bring people in because you can cut people loose pretty quick, but if you bring in the wrong person, it takes a while to figure out, is this the right person, is it not? And then you're three to six months into realizing this was the wrong person, you know, so you want to make sure your onboarding is slow. So don't rush it. Find somebody fractionally, let them be a placeholder, then let them sop that out. And then as you start hitting that lid, that cap. Okay, now let's start doing some recruiting and backfill based upon the most apparent need.
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C
Yeah, sometimes a good place to start if, you know, you're a little hesitant to make that jump into a full time position, it's going to cost a lot. Is a VA sometimes a va? You can test it out, see, is this a role that needs to happen. I can make 25% of the investment. You know, I can start feeding taps to somebody else. I can find where my own gaps and holes are in the sop. You know, a complete transition process before we find somebody more qualified, more expensive.
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A
And we've. If you're Interested in using VA's virtual assistants, you know, we've done quite a few different topics on that on the podcast here, so you can just go back through the library. Because time we've pulled apart, where do we feel like the ideal fit is for a virtual assistant? You know, because I think that probably need to be careful on what you're throwing in the middle of. And I told the story of a friend of a client of ours actually that said, hey, I think I'm going to hire out a controller that's a VA for their finances. And I told them, hey, that's, that's probably the last role you want to hire out for a va, right? That they have too much access, they have all your bank account information, they have all the controls. Do not hire that person as somebody that you don't know. You know. But there are a ton of great roles for VAs and we've gone through that in pretty good extent as well. So that's a good call too. So probably what you would say, Taryn, is because I know you so confirm if this is how you feel. Like the assessment show. Do you have someone internal? Right, Because a lot of times there are people internal that maybe they are willing to take on more hours. Like you said, maybe they're a part time person, but maybe they'd be willing to go full time and they have all the institutional knowledge of that you've invested in them for all this time. Right. So their 0 to 60 is going to be much faster than somebody even brilliant that you bring in off the street but has to learn your voice, has to learn your product suite, has to learn how you handle customers, has to learn your offering base, has to consume your content. If you have somebody internal that could maybe just use some more hours, I would start there and then maybe complement them by maybe a va that's a lesser expense hire. That is something that you can begin to maybe do the Delegate Elevate exercise. You know, EMS has a great tool called Delegate Elevate where you could create a whole list of things that could be delegated down and maybe handed off to a VA so that you get the best bang for your buck from your top paid people. And then Taran, when would you say is the time to stop using somebody fractionally?
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C
Well, good time to stop using somebody fractionally is when you know there can be a budgetary reason. So you're obviously going to get a bulk discount buying hours of a full time person than a fractional person. You know, you pay more per hour for a part time person. So that's gonna be a budgetary decision. And then there's also going to be, you know, if they're just overworked, you have too much for them to do. So you just need more hours in general. That's gonna be another great time to, to get that figured out. And then probably, you know, when you're sitting there looking at your annual plans for the year, thinking through where you want to see yourself, how your current org chart fits into that structure and you know what you're going to need along the way.
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A
So if you're. So what I'm hearing you say is that if there's a spot where you're going to be transitioning into a higher growth. Right. You're bent on, hey, I'm going to radically scale. You should probably have some sort of game plan of how much can current team bear and when am I going to need somebody else. Right. Like when is it, when is this going to require? Like if I want to scale by five new clients. Well, how much can current client load be born by the team that you have now? And then what kind of multiplier do you need to put on? If you know you're going to grow by five times, how many internal people is it going to be able to take to facilitate those five client growth and then exponentially growing from there? So you have some sort of trajectory. And then I would say probably, like you said, putting it to the annual plan. What's going to happen in quarter one, what's going to happen in quarter two? Like what, what kind of growth can I expect? Because a lot of times visionary just get excited and they want all that growth like now, you know, and that, that's not, that's not realistic either.
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C
Yeah, for sure. And I think, I think another, another thing to think about too is the, the position you need to fill doesn't always end up being the position you're going to hire for.
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Yeah.
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So you might, I mean, a good example, let's say you want a sales manager.
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Yep.
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But it doesn't mean you're going to hire a sales manager. It means that's the role you have to fail. But you also have somebody who's really good at sales already that can fill that role. You're like, okay, they're going to be a sales manager, but now I need to do salesperson. Oh, but you have this person over here who's in customer support or has told you they've been interested in sales and so now you've moved them to sales. So now you're actually hiring a customer support person.
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A
Right? Yeah. No, that's good. So I would say always think an internal first asking yourself, could there be somebody on the team that could fill the slot that I'm thinking is going to fill and then really identifying what the need is. I think that's good. I'd say too probably a time when you're wanting to think about is it time for a full time person? Is has the performance dropped to a place that you're not willing to continue to allow that performance to drop to? I mean, if your fractional person just is not able to perform at the level that you expect for the organization, probably time to think about, okay, so I'll limp this along. And I would say don't just fire that person.
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C
Right.
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A
Because then you're going to go from 60 to 0 really fast. You know, you turn off the engines on a plane. That plane was doing really well when it had some. You have gas in the engine but you cut, you cut the power. That's a big heavy machine that's coming out of the sky really fast, you know, So I think, really think through even if you're frustrated. Okay, so we're not performing at the level that I want. Okay, so then what is my onboarding and offboarding trajectory? Right. So if I'm going to offboard the fractional and onboard the full time, how is that going to fit into my annual plan? Because you have to allow for that kind of stuff. Because if you just try and jam it in and I see a lot of visionaries just try and jam it in, hey, just get it done. I'm not going to lessen the expectation of like what the client load needs to be. I'm not going to lessen the volume of expectation of what I expect you to be able to perform. But I need you to off board this main vendor that we've been using, this fractional person and hire a new person. Well, like that's not real. They're not going to be able to maintain the volume that you've been driving. Max, you've probably been driving them pretty hard. And plus this and it becomes like, yes, maintain the same velocity. Plus, plus like that, that's. That, that can't.
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C
Yeah, you want to swap the engine out of the car while driving it.
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On the freeway, right? Oh man. So I would say for sure, thinking through and maybe that's a good one, Taren. And maybe I haven't even talked about that. Are you in the middle of a launch or are you coming up on a launch? Bad time to make this decision. Don't do it right now, like limp it through unless you're willing to, like there's some big moving pieces. If you're coming up on something big that's going to have a huge customer facing impact, that's probably not the time to mess with the big change. Right. Like get through that, swim out of that on the other side of it now. Allow for some time, hopefully you made some good money on your launch. Allow for some time for infrastructure development. Well, okay, so now I'm going to allow for the next four weeks to be this person, winding down this person, hopefully being hired and wound up. And therefore we can make a transition within the next four to six weeks into a new player and then realize that new player isn't just going to turn on and just be like ready to go. Like they, they're going to need some time to get their bearings. No matter how smart they are, you don't want them making key decisions for you until they understand your brand, until they understand your voice, until they understand how you want them to guide things, lead things, create things. Because it can get real wild real quick when you start empowering the wrong kinds of people to do the wrong kinds of things.
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C
Yeah.
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A
What else, Taren, what else should we talk about along the lines of full time versus part time, fractional versus actual FTE full time?
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C
I mean very metric based positions are going to be your easiest ones to figure out if you need to hire, you know, more people for or all of our customer is being responded to in a timely fashion.
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Right.
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If you're watching that trend go up and up and it's taking longer and longer and longer to solve tickets, it's time to get a new one and then it's going to go back down. You know, as our salesperson, sales reps, schedule two closed. He's booking three, four weeks out now. Yeah, it's another one, you know, what's our, what's the delivery time on new products? Fulfillment? Are we struggling there to get things up and running? You know, projects. If you're using task manager, you can see our projects lagging, our tech issues piling up faster than we can solve them.
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A
Yep.
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C
You know, but I think a good question a lot of people would ask, and a lot of people do ask us, is when's a good time to finally hire like a full time operator or some of the topper tier positions? You know, those can be very nuanced answers of if you're ready for it, if your company's ready for it, if you're ready to trust somebody else with the culture and decision making of your company and you can finally move into that visionary role and just be the leader.
- [18:54]
A
Yep. Now that's good. That's a good guideline. So metric based decisions are huge. I would say another metric probably to add to the mix, going back to your annual planning even, is what's your budget looking like? You should know the labor percentage on, like, how much are you bringing in top line? And then once you pull through all of your anything south line, anything after cost of goods, whatever went into your product sales. Right? Anything south of that line, which labor should be a line item in that and leaves you with your net at the bottom of your profit and loss. What's the percentage of your labor? Like, how much hours does it take to do to do the deal? You know, once you kind of identified. This is the org chart, and these are the roles and responsibilities, and this is how much time everybody's giving to these specific duties. Ask yourself, okay, so how much is that costing me on a percentage level? Not necessarily on a dollar amount, because dollar amounts can get freaky. Right? We get really worried about dollars. Okay, so are you living somewhere, like, in the 17 to 22% labor? I think that's a pretty safe place to live. If you're an online business. You may be able to get it even lower than that, depending on how your business works and how much time you need. But if you get on there and labor is like 50% of what you're doing, then you have to really ask yourselves, like, is this. Is this business working the way that I expect it to? You know, I mean, does it feel really good to knock down big dollars? But when it come, when it comes to fulfilling, it's costing me way more than it should. And I want to be more profitable than this. And I think that there are some things from a metric perspective that you have to look at. And so I would say ask your financial professional if you want us to come take a look at your books. We'd love to take a look at your books. We look at the book all the time. We've got several finance experts on our team that do this kind of stuff all the time to give you an evaluation. Hey, it looks like from what I see. Or if you need us to clean up your books and then give you. We just finished a cleanup project for the first two quarters of 2025. And like, I. I have some uncomfortable conversations I need to have with the client on I've got some concerns, you know, like, this is what the evaluation is showing. So talk to somebody that you know and make sure that your metrics, your numbers, your finances in alignment, because otherwise you're just like grinding at the wheel without even looking back to see, are we making money or am I just working really, really hard for something that's actually not as profitable as it might seem because I'm only looking at the top line. Yes.
- [21:08]
C
Yes.
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A
Okay, Terence. So we covered the basics. We covered when is it fractional, when should I do full time? We talked about man metrically measuring. We talked about what's your vision and your goal. We talked about making sure that you understand your finances and aligning expectations. So I would just say to. To tie things off today, the biggest pain points we see. I mean, we're underneath dozens of clients every single month. You know, like, I think we. We're carrying 30 some clients right now, doing operations for each one of them. The biggest thing that see. That we see, I think is not having clear expectations that are communicated well. Hey, as a visionary, this is what I expect. As an operator, this is what's realistic from our vendors. What are you providing and then holding people to it. I mean, I would advocate for a level 10 meeting every single week to have those kind of conversations and just make sure that you're really honest with your scorecard, to make sure that the metrics are lining up with what your expectations are, and then have some really honest conversations about them. And don't allow any conflict to be a disruption to a point where you're cutting people off. Like, unless they're stealing from you, like, or doing something super crooked and corrupt, it's probably not the best decision to just cut them loose. Like, let's think about how can we scale them out, scale somebody else in so that we don't have some major disruption into the business that's really hard to rebound. And then we lose other players because they're like, hey, we're traveling with way too few people doing not enough. So, yeah, awesome. Taren, your hair looks amazing today. I want you to know that all of you listening, you can't tell those of you watching on YouTube, you can. I just want to say, excellent job on Ops Experts today on the hair, and thank you for your insights. Always very insightful.
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C
Awesome. These go on YouTube?
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A
They do. They do.
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C
That's so cool. So I didn't know I was a YouTube star.
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A
You are YouTube famous. That's how it works. Awesome, awesome. Ops experts, thanks for tuning in. We'll hang out with you guys again next week.
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B
Thank you for tuning in to the Ops Experts Club podcast. New episodes available every week on Spotify, 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 foundationscale.com.
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C
Youm.
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B
Can find the link in our bio and do your part to improve. As an OPS expert.