Eli Lipshatz (AkA Lipi). Co-founder of Escala, and MultiplyMii. Today, Lipi will be discussing the most effective strategies for scaling an eCommerce business, focusing on optimizing personnel, streamlining processes, and leveraging technology to achieve growth.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Eli Lipshatz (Lipi), co-founder of Escala and MultiplyMii. They discuss strategies for scaling e-commerce businesses, focusing on the need for effective delegation, prioritizing needle-moving activities, and creating efficient systems. Lippy highlights common mistakes, such as not delegating tasks and the importance of systemizing processes to focus on strategic growth. The use of tools like Miro and ClickUp for documentation is emphasized, along with the significance of meeting cadence for organizational alignment. Lipi also offers insights on managing remote teams and recommends resources for continuous learning in the e-commerce space.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Action Item#1 The importance of delegation and freeing up time for impactful work.

Action Item#2 Identifying key levers for business growth.

Action Item#3 Creating a company wiki and SOP document to streamline operations.

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Josh Hadley (00:00:00) – Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael Gerber, author of The E-myth, and Matt Clark from ASM. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Eli Lipshatz, aka Lipi. He is the co-founder of Escala and MultiplyMii. And today, Lipi is going to be discussing the most effective strategies and intricate details for scaling e-commerce businesses, how to document your SOPs, and how to actually create something that is sustainable and scalable in order to grow. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. Listen, Lipi, I started my business back in 2015 and I grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years, but I made a lot of mistakes along the way. That made the path of getting to eight figures take a lot longer than it needed to. I made a lot of bad hiring decisions. I had to take money from my own personal bank account in order to go fund payroll because of cash flow constraints.

Josh Hadley (00:00:50) – There were times that when Covid happened, I watched our business drop by 90%, and I stressed about whether we were going to be able to survive. I remember wishing for a mentor who could help guide me through the maze of scaling up somebody who had been there, done that, and could share all the secrets to help me overcome those obstacles. And that’s why I’ve decided to offer that one-on-one coaching and consulting, where I helped share the nitty gritty cash flow frameworks, the sales strategies, and the operating systems that have helped me scale my own business. And because I believe in giving each entrepreneur my undivided attention. I only work with three clients at a time. But first, I want to make sure we’re a perfect fit. So, I offer a completely free, no strings attached strategy audit. And this is my way of showing you just how committed I am and the value that I can deliver. So, to our listeners, if this sounds like something that you’re interested in and up for, go ahead and send me an email at Josh@Ecommbreakthrough.com.

Josh Hadley (00:01:33) – That’s E-comm with two M’s. And in your subject line say I want to pick your brain. And then let’s jump on a call and see how we can scale up your brand. Today I am super excited to introduce you all to Lipi. He has dedicated the past three years to establishing and refining the operations of MultiplyMii and Escala. These service-oriented businesses specialize in assisting e-commerce brands in restructuring their personnel, their processes and technological infrastructure to facilitate growth and to prepare for acquisition. With that being said, welcome to the show, Lipi. Thank you very much for having me.

Eli Lipshatz (00:02:04) – Josh. I’m, I’m personally interested in your free consultant, in your one-on-one consulting, so I’ll have to talk to you about that after.

Josh Hadley (00:02:09) – There we go. We’re going to have to jump on the call. We’ll do a strategy audit after this.

Eli Lipshatz (00:02:13) – That’s great. Thanks.

Josh Hadley (00:02:15) – you come extremely highly recommended. It was just a couple episodes ago where we had Yoni Kozminski back on the podcast for the second time, because him and I, I think we could ramble on for, like, 3 to 4 to five hours at a time.

Josh Hadley (00:02:27) – but one key thing that he continued to bring up is he’s like, Lipi is the main operator. He’s the guy who he’s the guy you really want to be talking to as it relates to. Like, here’s how you actually implement an operating system in your business for an ecommerce brand to actually scale. So, I’m curious, like, why are you Yoni’s man there and kind of what’s your background?

Eli Lipshatz (00:02:46) – So I don’t know if your audience would be familiar with iOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. Traction is a really famous book. And in that book, they talk about the visionary and the integrator. So typically, we think of businesses as having a CEO, a CEO, etc., etc. in iOS, which is a framework that I think it’s adopted by over 2000 businesses in the US. They have a visionary and an integrator instead of that C-suite. And Yoni and I are kind of the quintessential visionary integrator. He has 100 ideas a day. He’s a big thinker. I hate that, you know, I’m saying no to most of his ideas.

Eli Lipshatz (00:03:18) – Like if he can get one thing that I say yes to in a month, that’s kind of a good month for him. But he is an amazing strategist. He’s an amazing relationships person, and he comes up with really fantastic ideas, and I kind of bring them down into something substantial and something tangible. And luckily, we brought on a third partner who is kind of a mix between us both, and he can kind of be the link between us. But Yoni does have a tendency to get on podcasts and just talk, talk me up. And there’s a lot of pressure. I want to actually come on the podcast, so I hope I don’t disappoint. but in terms of my background. So, Yoni was actually my boss at an e-commerce brand. We were kind of working on a typical Amazon private label business in 2018, just heading into the gold rush. we came into or I came into the business when it was very low, seven figures. And within two years we built it up to high seven figures and we exited that brand.

Eli Lipshatz (00:04:05) – It wasn’t my company. So, you know, I didn’t become an overnight millionaire or anything like that. But we were doing a couple of things really well, and we didn’t realize what we were doing was unique at all. So, we were hiring offshore Filipino talent that was really high quality. So not the typical Vas, and we were building systems to enable that. And when we exited the brand, we were thinking, what do we do next? And our default was let’s go back into building Amazon brands, because that’s what we know. But when we started attending the conferences and getting slightly involved in the community, we realized those two skills that we were doing were actually really unique. e-commerce. In ecommerce, people typically have trouble building systems, and because they have trouble building systems that have trouble building high quality remote teams, and that’s what led to MultiplyMii and then Escala and MultiplyMii is the hiring component. We focus on the Filipino market, and Escala is the system building component. So, we’ve built a lot of knowledge and specialization in those spaces.

Eli Lipshatz (00:04:52) – And it’s quite a unique proposition for ecommerce brands because almost no one else focuses on systems and very few people focus on. Filipino hiring. So, it’s an interesting space to be in.

Josh Hadley (00:05:02) – Yeah. No, I think you definitely have a huge niche in the market and so many business owners. That’s kind of their weakness, right? Like, how do I scale out my team? I’m really good at thinking of new product ideas. I’m really good at thinking of ways I can go sell those products. That’s why I’ve created a seven-figure business just on Amazon or TikTok or wherever that platform is. but then when it comes to building out a team, a lot of people have never led an organization, right? So, it becomes very challenging. So I’m really interested to hear from you, Lipi, when people reach out to you through either Escala or MultiplyMii and they’re interested in your services, what are some of the mistakes that you see those brand owners making in their own business, and how do you think that they can correct these things if they want to scale up their business to eight figures and beyond?

Eli Lipshatz (00:05:46) – Yeah, it’s a great question.

Eli Lipshatz (00:05:47) – Josh. e-commerce is a really unique industry because in most industries, when you start a business, you know, it’s either through venture or friends and family, there has to be some type of upfront investment, and then you get the operations that typically lead to revenue. So, you’re generally set up, you’ve set up some type of system or some type of you know, infrastructure, whether it’s building the restaurant or, you know, building the technology, if you’re a SaaS company or whatever it is. And then the revenue comes slowly in E-comm it’s almost the opposite. You start off with the revenue, sometimes even before you have the skills. You start off by putting that product on Amazon. You could have, you know, invested a couple of thousand dollars in it and, you know, some time, but you really haven’t thought through, what is this business going to be in five years? That’s not typically what an e-commerce brand owner thinks about when they start the business, but really quickly it can take off.

Eli Lipshatz (00:06:30) – And because of the scale factors in e-commerce, you can go from 0 to 1 million really quickly. You can go from 1 million to 10 million really quickly, and it’s just not comparable to other industries. So, what we find a lot of the time is because the revenue comes first and the operations come later, that a lot of people haven’t thought through the operational components of their business or the people component of their business in a very sophisticated way, even though they have very sophisticated businesses. So, 8 million people will come. Let’s just take like an $8 million brand we spoke to last week. This guy is running an $8 million brand, which is really impressive. And, you know, it’s doing almost $1 million of net profit a year. And this guy is answering customer support tickets on his weekends. And that’s not a rare case like that still happens very frequently. Even, you know, we’re into the second decade of e-commerce, and that’s a pretty common occurrence. And it’s because the mindset of an e-commerce founder often doesn’t evolve at the same pace as other places, because they’re still in that scrappy mindset.

Eli Lipshatz (00:07:22) – And a lot of the time, that scrappy mindset is actually what really serves them. But then it does get to a point where it no longer serves them, where they’ve got so many of these small tasks that they do that they think, why would I delegate this? I can still be the one doing it, you know, it only takes me 15 minutes a week or it only takes me ten minutes a day, like I just won’t delegate this. And that, I think, is a key mistake once you get to a certain level. And I would call that level. Obviously, there are exceptions, but I would call that level seven figures. So, once you get to $1 million, you really need to start thinking about what this business is going to be in five years and how can I actually make that happen? And let’s set some long-term targets. And every business owner has kind of different strategic value that they can bring to the business, but they need to start thinking about how to maximize their personal strategic value that they can bring, whether that’s through product development or hiring or, you know, setting, setting up systems for their business and not doing the things that you could train someone who is, you know, unskilled to do relatively quickly, whether that’s, you know, data entry work or whether it’s customer support.

Eli Lipshatz (00:08:14) – So I would say that that’s probably the key mistake that we see happen is people realizing that people are not delegating because they can still get by without realizing that they’re actually holding themselves back from taking their business to the next level.

Josh Hadley (00:08:26) – I love that. And, you know, one of the things that I think is that I highlight from what you just shared is that it’s those 15-minute tasks that you’re like, hey, this is super easy. This is, you know, I can do this really quick. It doesn’t take me a whole lot of time. The problem is the number of those tasks really starts to add up. and so even as I speak with people, that’s kind of what I see as well, is that they’re like, hey, while I’m doing this, I don’t have a customer service person because it’s so easy. Like, I’ve already got all these message templates and I can just plug them in and what ends up happening is like then they just get bottled down with all of these administrative tasks that yes, are relatively simple, but then it distracts them from really focusing on the most important things, which are like the big levers, in order to continue to grow and surpass what you’re currently doing.

Josh Hadley (00:09:07) – If you’re if you suffice with what you’re currently doing and you’re like, I don’t want to scale, I don’t want to do anything else, then you can not listen to the rest of this episode because then that’s fine. Just do everything yourself. But if you have ambitions to like, hey, I see so much more potential with my brand. I know we could cross eight figures. We could go even higher. Then you really need to get really good at identifying where my time is going. Yoni actually shared a really interesting insight on his podcast episode where he said, like, I color code everything on my calendar every single day. Like, this is what I’m doing. This is where I spend this time. And then that way you can look back and say, like, where is my time going? Am I actually focusing on needle moving tasks in my business, or am I caught in the thick of thin things, following up with emails, stuck in Facebook groups, messaging people like, what is it that you’re doing on the business? So, with that being said, Lipi, my question would be, all right, well, if I’m going to give up customer service, if I’m going to give up this simple.

Josh Hadley (00:10:00) – Task of creating a new campaign for my ads on Amazon or whatever that is. What should I be doing with my time instead?

Eli Lipshatz (00:10:08) – That’s a great question. And the honest answer is that it’s going to be different for every single person, depending mainly on their skill set, but also their business situation. So if you’re a person who came into econ because you love building products, that’s what you love to do, and you find yourself bogged down by optimizing PPC campaigns and answering customer support tickets and, you know, managing people sometimes, then it is your duty to the people in your business and, you know, to to this future success of your business, to find a way to maximize the amount of time that you’re spending deep in the weeds of thinking through a product. Now that is applicable if you’re the engineering type, it may be, you know, there’s a different founder who’s the total opposite of that. And what they love to do is build, you know, listing images. And they love listing optimization and thinking through how do I increase conversion rate, how do I increase click through rate.

Eli Lipshatz (00:10:55) – So I think it’s about for every founder finding their personal flair, their magic that they can bring to a business and maximizing the amount of time that they can do that. So, anyone who’s kind of going through these types of sufferings in their business, and I think everyone does at a certain stage and you never get out of them, you realize you get out of them, but then six months later, you’re back in them. So, I read a book that kind of changed, changed the way that I think about all of this called Deep Work by Cal Newport. He really simply kind of tells you how to figure out when you’re doing deep work versus when you’re doing shallow work, and some techniques for making sure that you’re maximizing the amount of time you do deep work because you could have an empty calendar, but still only do lots of shallow tasks. So, I would recommend reading that book. But one of the things he says is a way to quantify deep work is by saying, if I how long would it train me? Sorry, how long would it take me to train a university graduate to complete this task and think about that in months? So, if there’s a university graduate, how long would it take you to train them to optimize a PPC campaign? Versus how many months would it take them to learn how to build a beautiful product in whatever category that your brand is in? So that’s kind of a way to think about where you can maximize your effort in terms of setting up the business for future success.

Josh Hadley (00:12:02) – Makes sense. And I think that just to give people even more examples, one thing that I walk people through is like the taxonomy of valuation, right? Which basically means you’ve got endless levers that you can pull in your business, truly endless. You could optimize your Cogs; you could negotiate back and forth with your manufacturer to lower your cost of goods sold. Okay. You could also spend time trying to drive external traffic to an Amazon listing or create a sales funnel and focus on Shopify off of Amazon. You could also spend time creating new products. You could spend time optimizing existing products. You should spend time focusing on Google Ads going into Amazon and PPC. So, like the list goes on and on. So, there’s no shortage of what you can be doing in the business. But one thing you really need to focus on is like, which lever if I pull on, it will provide an outsized return based on the effort that I need to put into it, which basically means like, whatever is your core expertise, right? It’s something that brings you a lot of fulfillments.

Josh Hadley (00:13:00) – It brings you energy. You’re like, I can do this in my sleep now. Customer service may be something you can do in your sleep, but is that a needle moving activity? Is that going to ROI on the business and say, because you’re crushing it with customer service, your business is going to double? Probably not. But let’s discuss what are some of those things that could double your business? What if you focus on scaling out your sales channels, your distribution channels, right. Maybe that’s getting on to TikTok shop, or maybe that’s getting onto the Flip Shop app, or maybe that’s getting into, you know, TMU or Cheyenne or expanding getting into retail stores. Right? That’s one avenue that could really impact and have an ROI in the business coming out with new products. Right? We’re always one product away from the next home run that’s like, oh my goodness, this thing’s just off to the races, right? So, coming out with new products, what about marketing coming out with influencer campaigns.

Josh Hadley (00:13:47) – Right. And say if I can create a process to find influencers, then those guys can go out and they’re the ones driving the traffic to my listings. Can I create a process around that? So those are just some ideas and examples like, here are ways that you could really scale your brand, with needle moving activities. Let me know anything else you would add to those?

Eli Lipshatz (00:14:06) – Yeah, I’ll be honest with you. Just like our expertise is less on the income side. I speak the language, but I’ve been, you know, working very closely with e-commerce founders for a long time now. But where our specialty is, is let’s say you just come to us and you say, I want to focus on getting into TMU. but I don’t have enough time because I spend two days a week doing whatever it is, you know, PPC optimization or I spend two days a week managing my team through this very basic, like, product development workflow. How do I systemize that? And then that’s when we could come in and say, well, here’s how you systemize that within, you know, a month or two, you can empower your team to do this far more autonomously, and you can take that two hours down to two days down to, let’s say, one hour a week, and now you have an extra two days to go and focus on those bigger picture things.

Eli Lipshatz (00:14:49) – And, you know, if you had, if you were speaking to Yoni, he would have all those bigger picture ideas. For me, I think where I specialize is, building a really predictable system that minimizes the amount of time that you need of your involvement and of your most important people’s involvement, but doesn’t impact the quality because you’ve got a really strong foundational system that’s empowering the less. And I use quotation marks, important people in your business to operate at a really high level.

Josh Hadley (00:15:11) – Yeah. No, I love that. And I think you just brought it back home really well here. You know, you said earlier on that, you know, e-commerce brands, it’s almost like revenue first. Then we think about operations. Right. Whereas other businesses think about if you have a service-based business, like you can’t really scale your revenue until you have your operations figured out and you’ve got team members and things like that, right? So, with that being said, there definitely comes a point in time for an e-commerce brand where like focusing on operations truly is one of the biggest needle-moving levers, even though you’re not going to say like, oh, I implement the iOS operating system in my business this year, and I’m going to be three times bigger next year.

Josh Hadley (00:15:46) – Probably not. But what that does allow you to do is say, well, if I implement it this year, next year and I could focus on sales channels, we could focus on coming out with 100 new products instead of ten new products. Right? Because we’ve got a team in the system that can help me push even further. So, with that being said. Yeah. Lipi. Sorry. Yeah, go. Go ahead.

Eli Lipshatz (00:16:04) – I just wanted to give a good analogy for that, which is that we always say that running a business is like driving up a hill, but without a system. It’s riding a bicycle. And with a system, it’s driving a jeep. So, the. It’s not that the system is actually what gets you, you know, the system is not you’re not closer to the top of the hill by implementing the system, but you’ve got the vehicle that’s going to allow you to get there faster. So, that’s just kind of a way of thinking about it, that the system is not the value in and of itself, but the system is the vehicle.

Josh Hadley (00:16:31) – Yeah, I love it. I love that analogy. So, Lipi. All right, I’m sold. Let’s say I’m listening to this, and I’m sold on this idea. I need to have an operating system. I don’t even know where to begin. Oh, I don’t even know what you’re talking about when you’re talking about scaling up the book traction. You’re talking about EOS. What is this thing? So, Lipi, can you break down? What does this operating system mean? Talk about. And then let’s dive into the details of things like, what are the technology partners or the tech platforms that we should be installing into our business.

Eli Lipshatz (00:16:59) – Yeah. So.

Eli Lipshatz (00:17:01) – usually when I go on podcast, I make the mistake of diving straight into, here’s how we do it, because I think we really have built a great way for documenting systems, but not everyone is going to do it exactly the way we do it. So, I want to talk more. I want to start off by talking about what are the philosophies that you should abide by when documenting a system.

Eli Lipshatz (00:17:18) – And then after that, I’ll show you exactly how we do it. But if you would just go into a document on your own and you didn’t necessarily want to do it the way that I show you or even, you know, you do want to do it that way. You want to understand what’s the reason behind it. So, there’s a couple of things that are really important. Number one is you want everything to be incredibly searchable. So, our KPI when we work with clients is that anyone in the business could find out how to do anything within 15 seconds. So that means that they need to know before you even tell them what it is. They need to know where to look. So, let’s say I go to someone on my product development team, and I say the guy from customer support is sick today, so would you mind issuing this refund? There’s a customer that asks for it. We need to do it within the SLA. They’ve never issued a refund in their life, but they know where to go to figure out how to do it within 15 seconds.

Eli Lipshatz (00:18:00) – So it needs to be searchable. And that search, that search needs to be very intuitive. That’s the first thing. The second thing is you want to be able to have a zoom in, zoom out experience where people can look at the forest or they can look at the trees, but they can kind of track from the forest to the trees or from the trees to the forest. Now, that’s a very artistic way to speak about something that’s quite boring, like systems, but you don’t. One of the key mistakes that we often see in your question earlier was that people say, I need a document system. Let’s go. Give me a Google doc, and I’m going to document the most complicated thing in my business. And then in two weeks I’m going to document a different thing. And then in two months, we’re going to forget about all of this. And no one’s even going to know where to find it. So, it needs to be. You need to have a way that links the different documents together and allows you to zoom in all the way to, you know, how to adjust an image in a listing, but then all the way out to understand where does listing optimization fit into the greater business and who’s meant to be doing it and why? So? So that’s another kind of pillar of system documentation that I would say is really important.

Eli Lipshatz (00:18:57) – and when we talk about forest and trees, it’s also about levels of detail because you don’t want to bog someone down in the details unless that’s what they’re looking for. You want them to be able to understand the general flow without needing to go into the details, and only going into the details if it’s something that’s relevant for them. The final thing I’ll say is that there’s no use documenting a system unless you have confidence that you can maintain it. The worst thing you could do is spend months and months and months getting a system that’s, you know, up to date as of May 2024. But come January 2025, everything there is no longer relevant because you’ve let seven months go by without actually touching the system. So, it’s not worth investing your time to document unless, you know, unless you can already understand how you’re going to maintain it. So instead of thinking of the documentation as a finish line, which a lot of people do, they say, we’re going to go into a one month rampage and we’re going to document all of the processes in the business, and then we’re going to be at the finish line.

Eli Lipshatz (00:19:52) – So that’s the opposite of what you should think. You should think of it as the starting line. Currently you have no basis of documentation. Let’s just say maybe you have some scattered documents. We’re going to build a baseline where everything is documented. It’s in the same place, and it’s according to those pillars that I just said. But from there we’re going to build a system to maintain the system, which doesn’t have to be that complicated. You can basically just assign internal owners and say, you’re responsible, that every time we update a product development workflow, or every time Amazon updates their phase or whatever it is, and we need to make an impact on a need to make a change to a process, the other one accountable to do it. And here’s the process, here’s who needs to, here’s who needs to approve it in order for it to go live. And here’s how we’re going to do it. So those are probably the things that I will say are important for every business owner to think about if they want to start documenting systems.

Josh Hadley (00:20:31) – Yeah, I love it. So, it does. And it does take time. Right. And I think that that’s the important thing is sometimes I love the phrase like sometimes you need to slow down in order to speed up, right? Right. I do realize that this is like documenting things, figuring out how you’re going to organize them, you’re like, oh, that’s a waste of time. But I promise you, just like we talked about earlier, like if you install something like this into your business, the beautiful part is like, even if a key team member leaves, they don’t walk away with your entire business, right? Because it was all in their head. And that’s what I think is the core aspect of everything that you’re talking about is that it’s stored in one central place. It’s searchable. So, Lipi, talk to me like what tools are you using? And walk me through. Like what does step one look like? Because this is a lot to document all the systems and processes in an e-commerce business.

Eli Lipshatz (00:21:15) – Yeah. So, there’s two tools that we use. We use a tool called Miro, which is a diagramming tool, and we use a tool called Clickup, which is generally known as a project management tool. But it also has a wiki tool, which means that you can kind of have documents and sub documents, which is really perfect for what we need for documenting a system. So, I’ll share my screen if that’s okay with you.

Josh Hadley (00:21:33) – Yes, I would love to see it. So, to our listeners, if you’re listening to this right now, go check this episode out on YouTube. We publish every episode on YouTube. So, if you’re bored of listening to us, you could see our faces whether they’re pretty or not besides the point. But today you get to see some actionable insights here. And Lipi will be walking us through, like, literally how they’re documenting things and what it looks like in Miro and in Clickup.

Eli Lipshatz (00:21:56) – So this is what we call the master board in Miro.

Eli Lipshatz (00:22:01) – And what’s cool about this is you can go online and download it for free. I’ll send you the link afterwards. Josh, and you can put it in the show notes so you can download this for free and what it has. I know it’s super zoomed out right now, but what it has is an organizational chart which everyone is probably familiar with. It’s just two reports to who and an accountability chart, which is what are the different roles that exist within our business. So, an example of the difference between org and accountability chart is you can have one person with multiple accountabilities. So, I’m head of finance but I’m also head of operations. Just as an example. I won’t go into those in too much depth today because I think we want to focus more on the system documentation, but those are two important pillars of the master board. Then we have what we call the high-level process maps. And these are really just these are really just illustrated what are the core functions and processes that exist within our business. So, we’ve got an example here of an e-commerce brand where we’ve got research and development, supply chain brand management and customer support as example core functions for an e-commerce business.

Eli Lipshatz (00:22:55) – And then the processes within, let’s say, brand management would be product listing creation, product marketing strategies, marketing strategies, monitoring, product performance management. So, these are going to be different in every business of course. But these are essentially the different processes that exist within the business. And when you’re thinking of documenting this for yourself it’s really just brainstorming. There’s not a crazy science behind how we actually divide each of these? I mean, you could get into it, but really, it’s just brainstorming what are the high-level processes that exist within our business. But then what’s interesting is that we now start to create that zoom in, zoom out environment. So, let’s say product listing creation. That’s a universal process that everyone is going to go through. So, each one of those processes that I just showed you has its own what we call a level three process map. And this is a combination of tasks and decisions. And like I said, you can download these templates for free. So, you can kind of get the way that we’ve documented these process maps and just edit it to your own.

Eli Lipshatz (00:23:47) – But what we have in the level three process map is we’ve got swim lanes. So, a swim line is who are the people that are actually involved in these tasks, in the tasks that are that make up the process. So, in this case for listing creation we’ve got a graphic designer, we’ve got a listing specialist, a copywriter and a brand manager. then what we’ve got is different colors for different types of tasks. So, let’s just say a light blue is going to be a regular linear task where it’s step by step by step. But then an orange box is going to be a decision. So, review and approve creative assets and copy. That’s not necessarily something that you can document as step one. You do this. Step two: do this. Step three: do this. You need a document that is different because instead of documenting the task or the steps you’re actually documenting, what are the different factors that I should consider when making this decision. And that might link to things like, you know, blogs or YouTube videos or podcasts or here’s how to know whether you’ve got your listing images.

Eli Lipshatz (00:24:40) – Right. So, it’s less that it’s a different style of documentation, but we still want to have it all in the same place. and then a couple of other things to notice is we have these on page connectors that basically just make the process map slightly more readable. So, we don’t have arrows going everywhere as much as possible. We aim to go from left to right, top to down, so that the process map is kind of intuitive to read. So, in this instance we go from product sign off. So that connects us to the previous process map. And then you know everyone’s going to have different tasks at this point. But for this brand it was to create the listing images and upload them to Salsify. At the same time, the listing specialist performs keyword research and submits it to the copywriter. The copywriter prepares the listing and the enhanced brand content copy and uploads it to Clickup. So, this is going to be slightly different for everyone else. The way that we recommend doing this is not documenting how you would like the process to be, but documenting how the process actually is by interviewing your team or actually getting them to document it themselves so that you can kind of get this process mapping, just linking it to what I said before about not needing to get bogged too down into the details.

Eli Lipshatz (00:25:35) – If you just want to get a general sense for the process, this gives you a snapshot of how it works. Does it tell me where I need to click if I want to set the listing live? No, it doesn’t. Right? It’s not that level of detail, but it does kind of show me who does what and when and what’s the general chronology of the task. And let’s say I was onboarding a copywriter. I could come here and say, hey, you’re the new copywriter. look at all these process maps. You get a general sense of which tasks you’re involved in, like, hey, look, you’re here in the product listing creation process. You’re also in the packaging design process. You’re also in the instruction creation. So, it just gives everyone a general overview of who does what and when. And it’s a great way to actually have a sandbox environment that we create next to the live environment where if we’re thinking of moving some things around, we want to kind of free up someone like we were talking about before.

Eli Lipshatz (00:26:18) – We say, hey, instead of you being here, let’s just drag, let’s drag you down. So, you’re only at the approval stage and we’ll delegate this to someone else. So, it’s kind of when you get to that level, when you get to that baseline, it’s kind of cool that you can use this to actually like, you know, re-engineer your process maps. So, this is what we call level three, right. we then go a stage deeper where we’re no longer going to be using Miro. We’re now going to be using Clickup. So, if I click on this where it says perform keyword research and submit it to the copywriter, I’m going to open up Clickup. And this is going to link me directly to our wiki that we’ve built, which follows the exact same hierarchy as the process maps. So, if I look here, right, I’m just zooming in to the sidebar. It’s going to show me all of the SOP’s. So, create listing images and upload them to Salsify. That’s 3.1.1, 3.1.2 is creating the video content, 3.1.4 is before the keyword research.

Eli Lipshatz (00:27:05) – So it’s the exact same chronology, which is what enables us to have that zoom in, zoom out forest from the trees environment where I can go from the process maps to Clickup, and I can go from click up to the process maps really seamlessly. And this is where we actually document the SOPs. So, what we like with our SOPs, let me just zoom out, is that we want them to all follow the same template. So, what’s the purpose of this SOP? How frequently is it performed? Who is it performed by? So, in this case it’s the listing specialist. What input is required in order for this process to start and are there any other considerations or guidelines. And then what we like to personally do is have a combination of text and screenshots. Some people prefer to do zoom videos, and that’s totally okay as long as it’s all documented in the same place. One thing to consider about video is it’s a lot harder to edit if you just have to change one small thing, whereas text and screenshots are a lot easier.

Eli Lipshatz (00:27:55) – So here is where you get basically that those click here, click here. Details. We use GIFs to make it kind of more interactive, but I really would recommend, documenting the high level process maps first, then the process maps, and then getting to the SOPs, which is almost like coloring in the lines, because if you get it to this point and you build the structure for the wiki, you can then go to your actual team members and say, I now want you to document this process. And there are a lot of SOP documentation tools out there that allow you to actually capture a process, an SOP document, just by clicking on this Google Chrome extension and then performing the process. And it kind of captures all the different steps and puts it into an SOP. You generally have to edit it a tiny bit, but it enables all different members of your team to participate in this SOP documentation once you have the high-level structure of the process maps. So, they’re called Scribe and Tango. You know, there’s cool free versions out there to play around with.

Eli Lipshatz (00:28:42) – But I think I’ll pause there because I love to get really deep into the details. but I’ll pause there and, you know, get a temperature check of what you’re thinking.

Josh Hadley (00:28:50) – Yeah, this is absolutely brilliant. And I love the way you have things structured. And I’m already thinking about adjustments we need to make to our own processes, with our own team and how we’re documenting things. So, I’m curious, you mentioned, you know, things. Everything needs to be searchable and findable within 15 seconds. So that would be my next question for you, like from Miro and Clickup that you’ve shown us at this point. Let’s say I’m new to your team and you’re like, Josh, you got to cover customer service today. You got to refund some people. Where do I go?

Eli Lipshatz (00:29:17) – Yeah. So that’s a really great question. And that’s why the documentation needs to be as intuitive as possible. So, if I’m, let’s take that example, if I’m new to the team and I need to process a refund.

Eli Lipshatz (00:29:27) – So what I would do is go to the high-level process map. So that’s zoomed out as we go. and I would say where is it likely to be? It’s likely to be in customer support. Right. That’s an assessment that possibly everyone could zoom in a bit. What are the processes under the customer support? We’ve got 4.2 refunds and replacements. Then scroll down to 4.2 refunds and replacements. And I say you know, what are the 4.2.2 process return, refund or replacement? And then I could click on that SOP, and it would actually take me to the SOP, which we don’t have in our demo environment, unfortunately. But in a live environment we would have that you could click on that, and it would take you step by step of how to actually process the refund. So that’s the idea of it being intuitive. And I think that that would fit within 15 seconds. It’s just a real kind of natural way of zooming in and zooming out and realizing where this process is likely to be, and then zooming in until you find it.

Josh Hadley (00:30:12) – Yeah, I love that. So, my follow up question would then be, you know, this, you know, organizing all of this is certainly no small feat. Right. And so, my question would be what is your recommendation to brand owners? Do you recommend they are the ones that manually go through here? They’re setting up a Miro board. They’re setting up Clickup. They’re the ones manually creating these. And again, it’s hard looking at everything you’ve put together now. It’s very fleshed out. But this has been something that you guys have developed over years. Right. And so that’s not going to be something that, you know, you, you focus on in one week and you spit it out in the next month. That’s perfect by any means. Yeah. But my question is, who would be ripe? Let’s say you already have a team, right? Let’s say you already have. In my case, we have 30 team members, but we don’t have things as organized or structured in the way that you do.

Josh Hadley (00:30:56) – Let’s say I want my team to be structured like this. Who would you recommend being the right person to gather this, to organize it, and to actually implement it? Or is this like a new role that you would need to hire like a management consultant, you know?

Eli Lipshatz (00:31:09) – Yeah. It’s a great question. I believe that the first steps can be taken without any specialists coming into the business. So even the most creative, visionary, non-systems driven type of people can have a conversation about, illustrating the business on this high-level process map. Right? Because it’s not super in the weeds. So, if you were to sit down with, with your, you know, with your leadership team and you would have said, what are the core functions that exist within our business? And, you know, we have some free material out there for some questions, you can ask for some core functions, but really, it’s a question of like, what teams do we have or what functions do we have.

Eli Lipshatz (00:31:45) – You could probably list down those. You know, 1 to 6 or 1 to 8 or 1 to 4. And then if you were to say, okay, what are the key processes in each of these? I think you could probably do that as well. And, you know, just join them together using a free template with arrows and whatnot. So, I think that part definitely does not require a specialist. The part that I think might require a specialist is that next level. But that’s when you can start to prioritize and you say, you know what? Our customer support is actually nicely delegated. And we really don’t spend a lot of time there. Where I’m spending a lot of time is on supply chain management. So, I’m going to prioritize that first. Let’s only do that and set that as a goal that over the next quarter, we’re going to document all of our supply chain processes. And there’s a couple of options that you have. It is somewhat technical, but I think that anyone with a kind of a systems brain for it could really figure it out.

Eli Lipshatz (00:32:30) – So we have a kind of a course that people could take to help them understand how to process maps, but really, it’s, you know, you don’t need to do it the exact way we do it. The key things to focus on are who is involved in the process and when. What tools do they use? And that’s pretty much it. So, I think getting to this stage of the level three process map is the hardest stage. But then from that point on, actually documenting the SOPs is actually a bit easier because most of the processes are linear and most of the people do those processes every day. So actually, capturing it using one of those free SOP capture tools is not super complex. So, I think you can actually get further than you then most people give themselves credit for. There are a couple of complicated steps along the way. But if you don’t let progress, get, if you don’t get, let perfect get in the way of progress. I think you actually can make a lot of ground.

Eli Lipshatz (00:33:15) – and it doesn’t need to be as beautifully documented as this for it to add value to you. It just needs to focus on those pillars that we spoke about earlier.

Josh Hadley (00:33:21) – Yeah. No, I love that. Great, great words of wisdom. let me so my follow up question then would be to, you know, is that kind of the role that Escala plays? if I come to you and I’m like, hey, we’ve got a I need some help organizing things, is that basically what you guys do is help kind of lay that stuff out?

Eli Lipshatz (00:33:39) – Yeah. So that’s the first 50% of what a scholar does. So, you would come to us, and you’d say, my process is undocumented, or they’re partially documented, or they’re scattered, and we can do the documentation for you. Pretty much everything that I just showed you. We are then the second 50% that we take it to the next level and actually give you recommendations for how you can make those improvements. So instead of you needing to look at your business and say, I, I’m spending a day awake in this and I want to be spending an hour a week, we can actually make those recommendations for you.

Eli Lipshatz (00:34:06) – We give you recommendations on who to hire, how to restructure your organization so that it’s, you know, more, better organized to, to hit your goals. How do you, which technology can you implement in order to make you guys more efficient? How can we remove bottlenecks in your process? So, but the documentation is the main deliverable out of all of that, it’s just a future state documentation rather than a current state documentation.

Josh Hadley (00:34:27) – Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I love that. All right. Now, Lipi, in relation to this, an important aspect of an operating system is having some type of meeting cadence with your team. Right. It’s one thing to have things documented, but guess what? If the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and we’re all not going in the same direction with our goals. And I think most people all have annual goals, right? I think 90% of business owners would say, I’ve got an annual goal. The problem is, how do you actually implement and actually take strategy or take action towards those goals? And how do you make sure your entire team, we’re all rowing in the same direction, because it’s very easy to just start getting off course and veering off, especially if you have 30 team members like me.

Josh Hadley (00:35:07) – So, let’s see what the ideal meeting cadence looks like for an organization?

Eli Lipshatz (00:35:15) – It’s a great question, and I would be lying if I said that we don’t change this every single year. So, we haven’t come up with the perfect solution. But I think every year we optimize more and more. We started with iOS, which is that you have a weekly L10. It’s called, you know, a L10 is like a leader leadership, ten out of ten meeting or whatever it is. And it has a really clear structure. And we took the elements that we liked out of that structure into what we have today, which is a weekly 45-minute meeting. We have one with multiple times A and one with a Scala, where there are clear metrics that we go through every single week. So, we have someone prepare the deck for us, and the deck looks exactly the same every week with the updated metrics. Then after that we go through each department’s goals. So, we have them set goals that are outside of those metrics.

Eli Lipshatz (00:35:55) – we recently updated those goals to be six months. The cadence is that you set new goals every six months instead of three months, because we were finding that if you set goals every three months, we were finding we were spending too much time planning and then reviewing. It was kind of like a month on either end, or then you had a month to work in the middle. So, we extended that to six months every week. Every department had reports on whether their goals are on track, off track. It’s not a deep dive analysis. It’s just, am I on track? Is it at risk or is it off track? And if it’s off track then it becomes what we call an issue. So, we do the metrics, then the rocks, and then we give everyone the opportunity to raise issues. We used to have longer meetings and actually discuss the issues on the call. We’ve now evolved, and we just identified the issues on the call and set up the small task forces in order to, to solve those issues.

Eli Lipshatz (00:36:35) – So that’s one meeting that we have every single week. The other meetings are every, like I said, every six months, where we do a budget review and goal setting sessions. We also do something called a four hour review. So, Everyone in the organization has a four Rs job description. So that’s the role of responsibility , results and requirements. And we update that every six months because roles are always updating. And we want to make sure that the people in our organization have clarity as to what’s expected of them. But that might change next year. So don’t take my words as gospel. And then, of course, the one on ones that I have with my team, which I personally like to have frequent short one on ones rather than long, you know, once a week 1 a.m. I? So I’ll have three one-on-one sessions with the team members that I’m working with closely for 15 minutes three times a week. That’s personally just kind of the cadence that I like to keep. But everyone kind of needs to figure out what works best for themselves.

Josh Hadley (00:37:22) – Awesome. So if we were to kind of boil this down, you have a L10 meeting or just kind of like a leadership meeting once a week, this is where you’re reviewing like the core KPIs of the business. This is the scorecard. And here would be my advice and recommendation here. The KPIs that you should be measuring should be leading measures in the business. And they should not be your lagging metrics. A profit and loss statement is a lagging metric. It’s basically showing you, hey, whatever effort you put in over the last six months, this is your result. That’s your PNL. So looking at the PNL isn’t going to tell you a whole lot, but what are some of the leading measures, which would be like how many new product ideas have we generated this week? How many new products have we sourced this week? How many new products have we gotten quotes for this week? Right. Those are leading metrics that yeah, it’s not producing revenue now. But if we’re having zeros here, we know that’s going to lead to a worse PNL six months from now.

Josh Hadley (00:38:12) – So there’s my recommendations there. Make sure you have a scorecard that you’re tracking. Right. so you have your leadership meeting, you’re reviewing your goals with your leadership team, everything they’re managing and owning. And then you’re discussing issues, right? Issues. Why are we not making progress here or there? you could either do those on that same call or create a special task force like you’re talking about. Then you also mentioned having kind of like one on one meetings with each of your team members right now, whether you do that once at the beginning of each week for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, or you mentioned you space them out and maybe it’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday cadence, 15 minutes apiece just to kind of get a continuous rhythm going with that team member. I think the important I mean, that’s that the core meetings happen on a weekly basis, right? Do you have any core meetings that happen on a quarterly or semi-annual basis?

Eli Lipshatz (00:39:01) – Yeah. So semi-annually what we do is we take all the leadership out of the business for a week and separate out.

Eli Lipshatz (00:39:07) – But that’s a really interesting exercise because if you can do that, it’s kind of a sign that you’ve got a fairly systemized business. If you can totally remove the most important people and the business a lot of the time, for us, the business does actually really well in that way. So that’s kind of a sign to us that we should be taking more vacation. But, what we do during that week is we start off by reviewing the previous six months, and then we look at the budget essentially for the upcoming six months. So we set an annual budget. But if it’s essentially June where we’re previewing July to December, we kind of look at the budget and make any updates, who are going to be the key hires? Are there any key projects that we’re working on? There are many key investments. And then we set the goals. And I think we’ve gotten better at it. I’m trying as hard as possible to isolate the strategic planning, because the worst thing that can happen is you start working on a project and then you realize we weren’t actually strategically aligned, and now we need to spend a lot of time strategically aligning.

Eli Lipshatz (00:39:59) – Whereas if you are strategically aligned on what the goal is, then for the next six months you can be head down executing. And that’s kind of the environment that I think all business owners want their teams to be. And so we spend a few days setting those goals, making sure that we have a formula for how we write them, where the important components of that are that you want to describe the future. So Amazon has a PR FAQ where they kind of write a press release, kind of an FAQ section for something years in advance. And that’s kind of how they brainstorm, you know, launching a specific program or whatever it is. And we took we really I really liked that they were kind of manifesting the future in a way, and describing the future in such detail, instead of saying, we’re going to try to do between this and this, it’s like a press release on the day where you’ve succeeded, and that’s a cool way to. So we don’t do exactly that because we’re working in six month increments.

Eli Lipshatz (00:40:42) – But we describe the future once we’ve achieved this task. And what would be the impact to the business if that is achieved? And we word those goals really meticulously, and we spent a full day kind of spell checking and doing the rewording to make sure that it’s exactly right, so that when we start the next six month block, it’s execution time and not, not strategy time, which I think is a cool lever for our business to work faster.

Josh Hadley (00:41:04) – Yeah. Do you do annual planning then, or is it just semi-annual planning?

Eli Lipshatz (00:41:09) – So in terms of the goals, it’s semi-annual. The main thing that we do on an annual basis is, you know, approving the budget for the upcoming year. but I just want to emphasize, again, like, we’re a four year old business, and even though we do focus on systems, we’re always evolving these things. And, we haven’t got it down pat. I don’t think anyone ever does. You know, everyone is always improving. And if you’re a business owner listening out there, listening to this and saying, well, I’m just that’s so un-relatable to me because my business is a mess.

Eli Lipshatz (00:41:33) – Well, like, I’ll tell you the truth, like our business is, is a mess in some ways as well. And we’re the ones who focus on systems. So don’t I don’t want to discourage anyone, but I do want to give you kind of the insights. So that is why I’m speaking with confidence. But in reality I’m like, I hope this is still our process next year. And I’m not going to listen back to this and say, I gave everyone terrible advice.

Josh Hadley (00:41:50) – Yeah, well, I think that’s important. I mean, it’s the same thing for myself, right? You’re always learning and growing in your own business. You’re constantly making tweaks and refinements. Nobody has the perfect system. And if they do, you know, then they’re probably lying to you because everything’s evolving in the world. And the change, the rapid pace of change right now is only increasing. And needing to pivot on an ongoing basis is getting more and more vital to any business. My last question for you is do you have any monthly team meetings or anything like that?

Eli Lipshatz (00:42:20) – Nothing operational.

Eli Lipshatz (00:42:21) – We have cultural team meetings, so our team is almost entirely in the Philippines and they work from home in the Philippines. So we take that stuff really seriously. team building exercises, you know, kind of like employee of the month style awards. Just celebrating different, you know, birthdays, anniversaries, different things like that is really important for us to invest in. But the monthly cadence is, is pretty much just for that. And then I guess we do track some KPIs on a monthly basis, but that’s covered in the weekly meetings.

Josh Hadley (00:42:47) – Awesome, I love that. Now I know we’re coming up on time here, but any quick hitting wins that you could share with us for managing a remote team, knowing that the majority of your staff is in the Philippines?

Eli Lipshatz (00:42:57) – The number one thing is the systems. I think that the most underrated, the most underrated component of whether you’re going to succeed when onboarding remote teams is whether it’s predictability in your system. Because if you can’t swivel the chair, if you’re not in the same time zone and you can’t just easily talk to someone, you need to rely on something.

Eli Lipshatz (00:43:13) – And, you know, it takes time to build that trust. So the baseline is the system. So I think the system is probably the number one. but then number two I think and this is my personal preference, but I really prefer multiple short meetings rather than, you know, single long meetings where everyone kind of gets distracted really quickly. So I, we rank our weekly meetings at the end of each meeting, and we’ve got kind of a rubric. And one of the criteria is, engagement. And it’s kind of like a zero or 1 or 2, and a zero would be, you know, the team wasn’t engaged at all, but a one, which I think is sometimes more dangerous is I could stop paying attention for a 60s, and I wouldn’t feel like I’ve missed anything. And you don’t want to be having meetings like that so much, in a remote environment, because that’s when people start to feel the zoom drain. And there definitely is a trade off when it comes to remote teams.

Eli Lipshatz (00:43:58) – I’m not one of those people who think that in-office is like, all bad. You know, I think that you do miss out on a lot. So the way to replace that, I think, is by always trying to have as many of your engagements as possible to be super, quick and fun and intense, like replace that intensity, rather than just having everything kind of spread out and scattered and laid back.

Josh Hadley (00:44:17) – Yeah, I love that. Those are some great ideas, tips and recommendations. I would agree with all of that. Now, as we wrap things up, I love to leave each episode. I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So here are the three actionable takeaways that I’ve noted. Let me know if you think I’m missing something here. So action item number one. As a business owner, especially in e-commerce, you’ve probably already produced a lot of revenue, okay. But you probably don’t have that operating system in place or you’re trying to figure out, like, do I need to hire VAs or do I need to hire staff? How do I go about doing this? And the first recommendation is that love delegation.

Josh Hadley (00:44:54) – And we didn’t really dive into this too much. But here’s the rule of thumb. If somebody can do the task that you’re currently doing, even if it only takes you 15 minutes, if they can do it 80% as well as you can, it needs to be delegated. Okay, that’s action. Item number one is you’ve got to get very clear of like, how can I get a lot of the administrative, the things that are pulling me away from the big levers that are really going to move the needle in the business that needs to be delegated and pushed out to somebody else. So that’s action item number one, action item number two is you need to get very clear with what those key levers are in your business that can produce an outsized return for your business. And this is essential in order to actually create that process documentation that Lipi is talking about. And I think they kind of go hand in hand as you’re forced to think through. All right. How do we actually make money in the business? You’re going to then think through? Well, we’ve got to come out with products to begin with, and then you’re going to think through, well, we’ve got to get really good at PPC.

Josh Hadley (00:45:47) – We’ve got to get good. Maybe partnering with influencers or maybe scaling out in multiple sales channels or getting into retail, like you’re going to start going down through the list and be like, how do we make money in the business? And when you document those systems or those process flows, it’s going to highlight, wow, these are like these are some levers I could actually pull. What if I’m launching ten products a year right now and we’re doing well, we’re growing 50% year over year. What if I could double that? What if I could launch 20 products a year? How could I do that? Right. It’s identifying those things that are actually going to really, again, impact the business in terms of ROI and revenue growth and profit growth, those are the things that you, as the CEO, need to be focused on in the business. So that’s action. Item number two is clearly identifying those and laying out those process maps. And then action item number three is I would say creating that company wiki and SOP document and putting it all together.

Josh Hadley (00:46:37) – And that’s something that I’m taking away as an action item. We’ve got a lot of spreadsheets, and I’m not even sure. I know we have a lot of things documented, but oh my goodness, they’re all over the place, right? And I in general know where I could go to find them. But I love the way you laid it all out in Miro board to make it really simple to say, hey, here’s kind of the overall hierarchy of the process. Here’s where decisions are being made, because right now it’s just in Excel documents for product research and development. And here’s all the tasks. We’ve got lots of zoom videos. But I think the ease of organization allows that to be much more clear, so that if anybody leaves, even if it’s a key leadership team member, they leave, they’re not walking away with the business. And I think that’s always the risk that you have as a business owner, if you’re not documenting and implementing things like this. So let me.

Josh Hadley (00:47:20) – Those are my action items in order for somebody to help create scalable growth. What else do you think I’m missing here?

Eli Lipshatz (00:47:25) – I really couldn’t have said it better myself, I think. you did such a great job of kind of summarizing it, and you even added things that we didn’t talk about. So it’s kind of cool for us to hear it from people who are living this, you know, reality. And it sounds like you’ve got a great system, but everyone’s can be improved. And, and I think that you’ve, you’ve nailed it. And one thing that I really appreciated about what you said is none of this is really impactful unless you are able to figure out what it is that is so like, let’s say we free up 50% of your time. What do you then do with that time that’s going to have an impact on the business? and I think that that brings it all together really nicely if you’re freeing up your time. You’re empowering your team. But then what does that enable you to do? And business owners are really the only people who can answer that question for themselves.

Eli Lipshatz (00:48:09) – but if you have a compelling case of what you could be doing with that time, which I think almost everyone will, then this becomes a lot more urgent and a lot more important.

Josh Hadley (00:48:18) – Yeah, I love that. Lipi. Now we’ll move into my final three questions of the episode. I love to ask each guest. So question number one, what has been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Eli Lipshatz (00:48:27) – There’s a lot and we’ve spoken about them. I love to read. I didn’t actually go to college or anything. So, all of my education has been through reading books. We spoke about traction on this podcast. We spoke about deep work. One book that really stuck with me, which I’m sure a lot of your audience has heard of or is reading, is working backwards. that kind of meticulously works, walks you through the Amazon culture. And it’s I don’t think the right approach is to read it in order to implement it, because what works at Amazon is not necessarily going to work in your business but read it and understand the kind of the core elements that you liked so that you can get inspiration for how to improve your own system.

Eli Lipshatz (00:49:03) – and I just found it a really entertaining read as well as very educational and that there are different components that we’ve that we’ve implemented in our business. So that would be the number one for me. And I’ve actually read it twice. I really, really loved it.

Josh Hadley (00:49:15) – That’s awesome. I have not read that book, so I added it to my list. Great recommendation. Now Lipi, what are some productivity tools or software tools that you think our audience probably hasn’t learned about, or something that could be game changing for them?

Eli Lipshatz (00:49:27) – Yeah. So, we spoke about Describe and Tango, which are kind of those SOP capture Google Chrome extensions where you turn them on and they kind of capture your process in the background. There’s a really cool one, there’s another one that I personally love. so, you mentioned Yoni ‘s color codes, his calendar. I do that as well. And for each color kind of assigns it to a different it tags the activity essentially to a different category. And then what you can actually do if you go into Google Calendar on the right-hand column of your calendar, you’ll be able to see the breakdown.

Eli Lipshatz (00:49:58) – Or maybe it’s on the left. You’ll be able to say the breakdown of your week, where for me, it will say you spent 12 hours doing deep work. You spent four hours on travel, you spent four hours exercising because I put my exercise in there as well. You know, you spent like six hours on non-work events, which I put in that too. So, I really love that. I don’t look at it every single day. It’s the type of thing that I review, like once a month or even once a quarter. And I’ll say, you know, in February I actually got much more deep work done than in March. What is taking my time? What’s, you know, what are the detractors? So, it’s a cool, kind of self-help tool that you don’t even really need to think about. It doesn’t take that much effort to tag your events, and most of your events are probably recurring anyway, so you just tag them once, and then you realize at a macro level, where are you investing your time and what changes would you like to make?

Josh Hadley (00:50:45) – I love that, and you’re saying all of this works just within Google Calendar?

Eli Lipshatz (00:50:48) – Yeah, yeah.

Eli Lipshatz (00:50:50) – and it’s, you know, part of the free version, I think.

Josh Hadley (00:50:52) – Okay. Well, I’m going to look into that because I like the idea of being able to see like percentages there within Google Calendar. So that’s going to be another one of my tips because I’m a big fan of like everybody should be doing time study right on a regular basis, ideally quarterly to be like where is my time going? How do I offload tasks so I can focus on the most important things in the business?

Eli Lipshatz (00:51:09) – Absolutely.

Josh Hadley (00:51:10) – All right. Final question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following?

Eli Lipshatz (00:51:15) – And why so other than you? Of course. I am someone that I really love to follow. His name is Tyler Wallace. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him. No, I’m not. Tyler used to work at Amazon for a long time, and now he’s, He helps other people build their brands. and he releases amazing free tools. I mean, now Tyler’s a friend, but he had a podcast called Think Like Amazon, which was about the time where I read Working Backwards.

Eli Lipshatz (00:51:41) – so I was kind of loving this Amazon wave and wanting to go deeper and deep into how they operated internally. And he would interview different Smithsonian’s about a different, you know, pillar of the Amazon culture. And I just love that podcast. And now he writes a lot on LinkedIn. And you mentioned late in lag measures before, like he released a whole series of how to actually quantify your Amazon business in lead measures and lagging measures. So, he’s a great fellow, and I’m rooting for him to get his podcast back because I, I really missed it.

Josh Hadley (00:52:08) – I love that I have not heard of him before and I’m already excited to go follow the measures. Love it. Lipi. This has been amazing. Lots of actionable strategies that you shared today. Thank you for your time. If people want to learn more about you, they want to learn more about Escala MultiplyMii. Where can people go to reach out?

Eli Lipshatz (00:52:25) – So I’m very active on LinkedIn, so everyone calls me Lipi.

Eli Lipshatz (00:52:29) – But Ellie Lipschitz is what you should search on LinkedIn and shoot me a message on LinkedIn. And you know, I’d love to connect. If you want to learn more about Escala and MultiplyMii, you can speak to me, but probably the best way to do it is to just go through the website. And that way you’ll get to speak to someone who’s not the operations minded, but actually can sell you the dream, which is probably what you want to hear. but you can reach out to me for those things as well. And something that I will add is that we’ve released a Scala course too. So, we’ll set you up with a discount code. We’re celebrating a Scala’s fourth birthday, and we’re running kind of a promo around that as well. And that runs through literally everything step by step. I think it’s almost eight hours of me just talking into a microphone, with a lot of templates and kind of walking you through exactly how we do what we do. So, if you’re interested in giving it a crack by yourself, rather than working with the Scala to do it for you, it might be worth checking that out too.

Josh Hadley (00:53:17) – I love that Lipi. Thank you so much for your time and join us on the podcast today.

Eli Lipshatz (00:53:21) – Thank you very much. This was a lot of fun.