Josh Hadley 5:35

I love that. I love that, you know, from an early age, you’re always kind of like pulling things apart, trying to figure out alright, how do things work together, and already, like systems and processes were already on your mind at an early age. And similarly to myself, you know, I was the kid with the candy stand on the corner of the street growing up. And so I think it’s fascinating for all of us, you know, I love when everybody in the world really, when they step into their zone of genius, right, like doing what they were born to do, like using their God given talents and gifts. I love that and it sounds like you’re doing exactly that. Would you agree? Yeah,

Aaron Hovivian 6:12

I definitely enjoy what we do. I mean, obviously, you and I were talking about before we started right for you hit record, and we’re like, man, the craziness of life. Right. I think that’s the thing that you never take into consideration is as you continue to grow complexities, and and how do we minimize complexities? And how do we beat back some of the noise? And how do we streamline into No, no, this is my highest level of genius. I really do love that about EOS EOS is entrepreneurs operating system from the book traction by Gino Wickman, which is just how you’re running people like how is your operations running? And there’s a tool in there that he uses, that’s called delegate and elevate. And I love the whole exercise of how do I elevate people up to their highest level of brilliance? And how do we delegate down things that have become SOP level, right standard operating procedure? How can I just that doesn’t require your brilliance anymore. You don’t need to be doing that in the day to day anymore that can be tasked down as long as you’ve lined it out. So I think for all of us trying to ascend up into what’s our highest level of brilliance, I think it’s so fulfilling. And I definitely enjoy what we do at The Collab Team, for sure.

Josh Hadley 6:41

I love that. So Aaron, you’ve got a lot of experience, introducing and integrating operating systems into entrepreneurial businesses helping them really get established, helping them scale to the next level, I want to ask you this question. With our audience being, you know, seven-figure sellers that want to grow to eight figures and beyond, they see a bright future for their business. But maybe they’ve got to this point with just a very small team, maybe it’s them and a couple assistants, or maybe it’s just them and one other person or maybe it’s just themselves. Why are operations so important? If you do want to scale a business?

Aaron Hovivian 7:43

I would say first of all, I think you have to identify like, what kind of person are you seeing? I mean, like, let’s just be honest, but most entrepreneurial people are visionaries, you know that they’re not the ones that carry details? Well, I mean, like, they’re the ones that are out there pushing the limits on the brand. They’re the ones that are out there taking new levels, they’re the ones making connections, they’re the you know, like all these different things, knocking down business for the company, that that’s most typical visionaries that I work with. But when it comes to operations, they saw they’re like, Please, dear God, somebody jump in and help me, you know, because they know what they’re good at. Or they haven’t come to that realization yet. And they’re so dang frustrated with it, because they’re literally they’re a screwdriver trying to hammer in nails, right? Like, yeah, you can get that job done. But that’s not what the tool was designed for. Right? So the nails frustrated, the job is frustrating. The tool is frustrated that that’s not your that’s not your elevated genius, like we talked about, you know, so I think identifying first of all, what kind of person are you some entrepreneurs that out there maybe you’re very operationally minded, like Josh, I’ve been really impressed the vegetables, I feel like you’re super like, operations minded. But that’s not the that’s not the majority of entrepreneurs out there. Most entrepreneurs out there are like alive pews, right, they’re like, so full of passion, well, full of visions, so full of direction, they know where they want the brand to go, but actually lining out how to get there, that can be a really frustrating process for him. So what I’ve seen as longtime people desperately grab on to people they know starts with their you know, their friends and family first, right? And then raving fans, like, who can I grab and pull into the seat, but then oftentimes, they can trust too much trust to that person right out of the gates, or like they just dump on that person. And then it becomes a choking point. And then it actually becomes an even more frustrating experience. Because visionary already knows they’re not good at this, they brought in this person hoping they’re going to be the Savior of the world for everything that felt too overwhelming for them. And now this person starts choking and there’s friction between the two of them and and a lot of times, it just comes down to team allocation and who’s doing what and what’s the standard operating procedure of lining things out and what are the workflows and and what should belong within that person’s job description versus this person’s job description. And I think that just some intentionality of thinking from the end to the beginning. Like where do I want this thing to end up? And then how can I plot it backwards? Really does a lot for rooming moving daily frustrations. None of us want to live frustrated every day, none of us want to live like overwhelmed. But a lot of us don’t take in consideration we get lost in the forest for the trees for what can I take out of the mix that would remove that frustration on a systemic level? And I think operations can be a big answer to that. Yeah,

Josh Hadley 10:14

I agree 100% With that, I’m a big believer that operations are like the lifeblood of a company. Now sales are important, obviously, and having an entrepreneurial vision for where the business is going is are definitely critical as well. But it’s kind of like a three legged stool, right? Where if you don’t have sales, you obviously don’t have a business. If you don’t have a vision of where you’re going, and what makes you unique, and how you can continue to grow the business, then you’re going to fail as a business. But also that other third leg is operations. If you if you have a lot of ideas, but then can’t get them implemented or can’t get them implement implemented properly, then you still don’t have a business. You know, you mentioned you know, Beck and I have a have a decent, you know, understanding of operations. And we have spent a lot of time on our operations. That was actually one of our biggest goals for 2022 was implementing an operating system into our business. And we used a lot of the frameworks that we learned from EOS, we learned about scalable from Ryan Deiss, and Roland Frasier, and then also with Alec scharffen. But what’s interesting, though, is to your point, most entrepreneurs don’t have the time or patience or love operations in the least bit. What’s funny as Michael the assessment, right, you familiar with the Kobe? I used Kobe all the time assessment? Yes. So with the Kobe, I’m a high Quickstart, like, I’m a nine on the Quickstart. Right. And then I’m a five with the follow through, which means, you know, I can handle some operations, I understand they’re important, I can go, you know, one way or the other. And then I’m really low. On the data side. It’s like, no, no, I don’t want to get into the weeds with a bunch of Excel spreadsheets and whatnot. But I feel like the it’s it’s more unique that way, there’s not many entrepreneurs that have a high follow through if they have a really high on Quickstart. No, I think that’s, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Aaron Hovivian 12:16

No, do we have some load times sorry, if my later that’s like, sometimes gives me some internet issues. I will say I love Kobe for how metric it makes it. You know, I think that I love you know, hey, let’s take, that’s how we do a lot of our hiring, we do a lot of recruiting within kolab team and helping our high level retainer clients find source good team. And after we’ve done all of our interviews will always run through a Colby at the end. And it’s usually matched up to whoever we’re hiring against, right? It’s like Kobe a versus Kobe C, you know, I’m like, how are these two going to match up like, this person is going to oversee this person, they better complement each other. Because if they’re both quickstarts, we’re gonna have a problem. I mean, like, if neither of them are good at detail, that’s going to be an issue. Like if none of them like to dig into the data, if none of them have good follow through like that. And a lot of times I’ve noticed is visionaries, pick people like them, they’d like people like them, they’re like, I love that guy. That guy’s the best that’s hiring man, and but not realizing, ah, that guy’s just like you that’s gonna be a problem downstream, you know, like, we need to find something that’s gonna complement. Anyway, I think Kobe is great for the sake of just what you said, let’s, let’s make a real metric. Let’s take the energy out of the real estate that the feelings out of the room, super just let’s get down to numbers, how to answer the questions. And what are their met with the score come back to? And is it going to be a good fit, because they could be a great person, go and have beers with that guy every day, I couldn’t care less. But if you bring him into your operations, and he’s the same problem that you are, all we did is just magnify the problem for more money, you know, so like, let’s, let’s make sure I’m in the right people. For

Josh Hadley 13:39

sure. I think that’s good advice. So one of the mistakes that I made, and I recorded this in a previous podcast episode, it’s the top five mistakes that I’ve made in my journey is initially before back end, I spent a lot of time on our operations. If we’re going back to 2019, for our business, one of the things that we were struggling with, or we thought at the time was like marketing, we just need to drive more external traffic, and we’ll have just this large amount of success. If I were to go back and look at it, like the first hire, we should have had was a project manager to get our crap in place. And it allowed me to stop focusing on running the day to day operations. But that’s beside the point. I think you mentioned this a little bit earlier. Aaron. Yeah, the importance of not just running away from a problem, right? And I want to get your input on if entrepreneurs are struggling with maybe it’s marketing, right? Or maybe it’s finance, they don’t understand their numbers, or, you know, it’s project management, that they’re struggling with the operations. How do you go about like hiring somebody, instead of just saying, I just need a marketing person, I don’t know what to do. I’m gonna go hire what I think is a marketing manager and then just throw them at this problem. Is that the best approach or does the entrepreneur kind of need to understand a little bit more and dip their toes in the marketing Well, waters so to speak first and maybe help facilitate some SOP creation. Before they do that, why don’t you break us down? Like, what does that process look like for an entrepreneur?

Aaron Hovivian 15:10

That’s a obviously we started out talking about, know yourself, right? Socrates or whoever, like know yourself, like what? Whatever it is like, just be clear on what you’re good at and get clear there. I think what you had addressed at the beginning, I found is very common for all of us. And that’s impostor syndrome, you’re like, Well, I think I’m this but I’m not maybe I’m not an eight figure earner yet. But I think I could be or whatever it is, I think that we all deal with battling that inner voice of, of negative self talk sometimes No, but like, Get clear on which seat of the bus you’re going to be sitting on right and then identify, where am I not so good. And then I would always advocate for finding professionals that you can pay for a scope, measured pay structure, and I mean, so hey, you’re gonna do this for me for X amount of dollars. That’s why it’s really budgeted sometimes, where I think all of us can get tempted to hire staff, but but staff dollars, like translate into, like, your liabilities, bringing your profitability down, you know, so like, Okay, how much would this person tried to come up with my marketing this outside vendor? What’s their scope? What would they charge? What have they done for other people? And then pay attention? Like, what are they doing, and begin to line out some of those things they’re doing so that when you do go to make that hire, you’ve already got some proven process that you can plug them into, but you’ve leaned into somebody else’s brilliance, I would always advocate for leaning into a contractor’s brilliance for a while getting some brilliance from them. And then on the flip side of that, making it your own, like, Don’t Don’t feel bad about r&d, right? Like did like let’s go figure out what are they doing? And then let’s duplicate it in our business. And then when I hire somebody, and we have some SOPs, and you’ve gotten some education from it, so Steven Diaz from rainmakers is one of my high level retainer clients he’s Namath, he’s an Amazon seller teaches moms how to create side hustle using Amazon while kids are down for an app. So he and his wife Chelsea, they’ve got a great brand rademakers Academy Rainmaker family, they’re an amazing couple of people in their eight figure earners using Amazon. They’re amazing. But I think that one of the things that I’ve really loved about Steven is he’s so curious, like, and he’s willing to jump into the weeds for a time to understand something realizing he’s gonna live in the weeds, but you don’t want to just give the keys to the kingdom over to somebody that you don’t really know. Like, and you’re just trusting. That’s a Hail Mary, you can what how many interviews did you get with the person? How much have you seen what they really know how to do, and the danger with marketing and salespeople a lot of times is their narrative based, right, they’re paid manipulators like that’s what they do. They’re trying to manipulate sales, you know, like in the best sense of the word, not not nefarious, but like, they’re going to be able to spin a story. And it’s really good to be able to see some track record, you know, so pays more visa client of mine, and we just hired on a marketing team to help him elevate his brand was some of the things they’re doing with product development. And, you know, as I was talking to Cody Barton, which is his CEO, they’re partners in this business venture. He said, Hey, what do you think about this marketing firm we brought on, I think they’re pretty great, but I’m not sure. And I said, Hey, listen, the proofs in the pudding, give them some leash and see how they show up, like, give yourself a budget, let them show up powerfully or not. And if not, they’re not the only ones out there. But I think that that’s the nice thing when you can like a gauge scope for a fixed price. So it’s not going to break my budget, let’s see how they perform. And then we’ll give them more and then, you know, possibly stripping out some key points they’re doing for you. And then hiring based on those key points. That’s whether we’re talking operations, whether we’re talking to sales where they’re talking marketing, I’d say that that’s the way I would approach.

Josh Hadley 18:33

Yeah, I think that’s a great summary of how entrepreneurs should approach this and to kind of something summit things up the way you kind of talked about them. Them, Aaron, I think number one is identifying what your core strengths are right? Like, what is the entrepreneur bringing to the business? What’s your zone of genius, and then being able to identify, you know, I kind of like going through a time study, right? The entrepreneur should go through and diligently do their time study. Like I’m talking like 15 minute increments, like you’re jotting down on a piece of paper, what did you do last 15 minutes, every 15 minutes for two weeks. I know that sounds painful, and it is, but you will then be able to step away at the end of those two weeks and take a look at that sheet of paper and say Holy smokes, look how many XYZ tasks I’m doing. It might be operational related. It might be finance related, it could be you know, marketing related, then right? You you then go hire out what is going to take the most off of your plate that would then free you up to go again, continue living in your zone of genius, and continue to expand there. Would you agree with that?

Aaron Hovivian 19:46

Yeah, I actually I built a whole app around that exactly what you just said so gap analyzer.com If you go check that out there it’s 297 bucks for the tool or you can pay my team to take you through it. I think 1497 or something like that for the team, my team to take you through it but And it does that exact thing addresses the issue of time, how are you using time, and we break it down the daily, the weekly and the monthly, and then allocate that to certain parts of your business, you know, is it you putting that towards customer experience you putting that towards marketing, you put it towards sales, you put it towards operations, the four areas of business, then if you have team, putting them through the tool as well, and then it rolls the whole thing up and says, Hey, here’s the gaps in your business. This is where you’re not focusing enough attention. Here’s the large swath of where your time is going, do you want all that time go in there, and then you click on the tool, and it shows you a lot of people it’s operations, were chewing through operations at 65% of total team bandwidth. We’ll click on that. And it shows you all the different team and shows you how many hours each person is putting into operations based style work. And you can say what? Why is Shelly putting that much time into it? No, no, that’s pushed that over to Rob or whoever works. And it helps you with job allocation of what roles or responsibilities should each person be doing. Because for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially as you begin to grow team, you can start feeling like, what is everybody doing with all their time, like we’ve cut, and especially a lot of times it’s around their next vision, they want to do some big thing and teams like we don’t have time, we don’t have time, and the visionaries like what the heck are you doing with time? So I had been doing it for years. You know, just like you said, like allocating time diagnosing time doing a time study? And then I thought, no, no, it’s time for me to lean into developing my own app. And so I invested in, you know, a good amount of money into creating this app for the sake of it all being contained in one spot. And it also gives your people the opportunity to express like, what’s your greatest pain point? You know, what, what would be the best successes in the company if this were to change? And so in one spot, it shows you time, and it shows you their best, you know, like their feedback on what’s their pain point in their job? What’s the pain point in the business? What’s their solution, right? Because doctors don’t complain that you like, solve it for me, what’s the what’s the biggest win if we could solve it? And then in one spot, you got it all. So I would definitely advocate for what you just said, the conversation about time is huge, you know, and even if it’s not perfect, like you said exactly perfect. But let’s at least start having a conversation about what is overwhelmingly what is eating up your time and be honest, does that have to be you doing those things? Or could we test those down? And how do you test those down? Do you test those down is identifying this the pain point. SOP’ing it out so that it’s workable SOP that as you hand it off? You’re not just handing handing off just a pile of crap, you know, you’re just like, hey, that was broken. When I got it broken out, I handed off. No, I’m gonna make it better. Here’s the system, go live from it, come back and ask me questions. But the hope is that we’re going to give you some breathing room some bandwidth.

Josh Hadley 22:21

Yeah, yeah, no, I love that. And I think it important thing that you mentioned it. And you mentioned this earlier in some of your examples is that the entrepreneur does need to make a little sacrifice. Even if operations isn’t their strong suit, and they don’t love it, you’ve got to at least pay attention enough in that particular area that you’re trying to hire out, whether it be marketing or operations, you’ve got to be able to take the time, slow down and document the process, even though it might not be perfect, at least document what you’re doing today and recording loom videos, right? That’s one of my favorite software tools using loom. And then I can literally I’ll record my voice, right? And I can show people Hey, so when I go on to Amazon, this is what I’m looking for. And I they can follow along with like, okay, he’s clicking here. He’s looking at this data, he’s looking at that. Yep. And I can talk through the process, right? I hate writing things down. So for me to like just record loom videos, that that gets the ball rolling just enough that it gives people enough context to then really lay out the SOPs in further detail. Once I bring on that team member. Aaron, I think that’s exciting

Aaron Hovivian 23:35

Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off. I do that all the time, Loom it out, and then ask somebody to document your steps. I mean, what I’ll do is, hey, create a Loom that type push out the project, don’t give them an end date, hey, here’s the project. Here’s the assets you need. But this is the end date of when it’s due. And will you do me a favor? Will you drop that into Asana for me and make it a step by step process and then push it back over to me? Let me put my eyes on it. Let me critique a little bit. And then the beauty is you have templates there that you can hand off that that way doesn’t just live with one person, right? Create some redundancies? It’s great when it’s like this person is going on maternity leave. Holy cow, what are we going to do when she has her baby? Like nobody wants that kind of anxiety? The way you do that as create redundancies, the way you create redundancies is SOPs that can be executed, and then let the person shadow the person like, have some forethought. Don’t let it hit you. There’s enough in life that hits you like a hurricane, you know, like, I always say us really big on 80/20. Like 80%, we’re gonna cut firebreaks and 20%, we’re gonna be doing firefighting. And I mean, but like a lot of people have that flipped. They live in a lot of chaos, that it’s firefight. 80% of the time, cut firebreaks 20% of the time, and it’s just a painful way to live. How can you get out in front of that? Very, very easy record some Looms, ask people to document your process and start putting away a cache of SOPs that you can begin to live from, from the most important things that you don’t want to do any more. Like start with those ones, and then work your way down from there.

Josh Hadley 24:51

Yeah, I love that. That’s great words of wisdom. Aaron. The other thing I think you mentioned earlier, too, is that when you bring on a team member. Yeah, it’s a cost center to begin with, right, you’re going to have to pay this person and their salary. So it’s adding overhead to the business. Now, I think as I’ve met a lot of different entrepreneurs, I think sometimes, you know, people that crossed into that seven-figure range, and they’ve done it all by themselves, and maybe one or two VAs that have been helping them along the way, they almost wear it as though a badge of honor that look at all this money that I’m generating, just by myself and a couple people, I’m not going to go hire people out, because that’s only going to steal away from my profitability. But when I talked to them, the word of caution is like, okay, but if you want to take your business to the next level, what got you here is not going to be what gets you there, what’s going to have to, you know, actually implement some systems and processes, which would be hiring an actual, like, project manager or operations manager. So, Aaron, I want to ask you, why should somebody be willing to invest money into, you know, essentially, it’s just going to be an overhead cost for the business? What’s the justification for adding cost to the business, but you’re going to have, you know, project managers and operations managers now?

Aaron Hovivian 26:13

I would say, first, ask yourself, how big do we want to go, so let’s just identify that, like, if you’re happy not getting any bigger than you are, then God bless you ride it, ride that train, as long as you want to ride it, you know, for most people, they’re wanting to work themselves out of how the frenetic energy it took to get him to this point, you know, and what you said, I feel like, that’s exactly the took the words right out of my mouth, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, you know, most of the time, like, you know, when I started with Pete Vargas from advanced to reach, and it was the same thing, when I started with Pedro Adao with 100X Academy is the you know, they were this this thriving, you know, they were, they were already at seven figures, and they were wanting to climb, just like you said, on the show have climbed eight and figures and beyond. And they both have done that. And they both are amazing, like, incredible, incredible, guys. But what they realized was they wanted to scale beyond they were on that hockey stick growth. And they were realizing we’re not going to be able to keep up with this. And the way that normally you can identify that is by realizing our systems are breaking are people aren’t, don’t have the experience, we’re not able to keep carrying this load, let alone anything beyond that, like, we’re already feeling the stress cracks. And the worst thing you can do is keep pouring on the gas, if you are recognizing your systems are broken, or your people aren’t gonna be able to bear it. So I would always say, Do you want to scale? If you do want to scale ask yourselves? Can my current team and systems now bear much more? You know, and if so, how much more incremental can they bear and maybe you push the envelope a little bit if you want to do that, but be careful because you don’t want to break your people. You don’t want to break your systems and then all the work you put into it all the way up to this point starts falling apart and then who gets to get stuck back underneath it you because you’re the one that like learned together and didn’t want to bring on any more overhead so I always hear that from visionaries is operations isn’t sexy operations cost so much money so I I just did this free masterclass, you can check it out, if you want to check it out. It’s called FoundationsThatScale.com. free masterclass. It’s on our Facebook page and our YouTube channel if you want to check it out there as well. But what I addressed in that was this is I think that people need to rethink through the way that they talk about operations. Because really, we start with automations. Like, like, let’s look at your automations How can we get the robots to lift for you, right? Like, and I think, obviously, Amazon business, you’re already in that spot anyway. But like, how can we get automations to work for you customer journey? How can we really maximize sales through automations? But that’s operations, right? Like, that’s not that’s not a sales function. That’s an operations function that’s maximizing sales, you know? And then how can we manage your sales? By customer experience? Most people think to themselves, I don’t want to hire more customer experience people because that chews into my profitability, but no, no, what if they’re actually helping your people ascend to a higher journey with you? What if they’re able to take new steps into higher price points with you based upon just a little bit of customer journey, and then actually, operations becomes managing your sales engine and getting people to take higher ascension? You know, how is your team monitoring sales? Like how are they? Do you have good monitoring? Like, are you keeping a good eye on it? And then finally, the thing we round up and I deal with all four of these areas and foundations that scale? The final one is finance and sales, like, how profitable Are you? Like, let’s just be honest, you cannot gauge that by top line. Like you have to be watching bottom line. And being really honest with even lines of business. Some of your lines of business are probably more profitable than others. And you say, No, that’s dumb. Everybody knows that. You would be surprised how many the co op team has been under the hoods of dozens of some of the top entrepreneurs in the space right now. You would be surprised how few people understand profitability by line item, like by line of business. There are some times where it’s like a gut feeling from an entrepreneur of I know, this is my most profitable line item. Have you done the math though? Have we truly honestly looked at the numbers, how much team time, how much tech time? How much energy are you putting into that? Is that still as profitable? Because just because it’s a high ticket, doesn’t mean it’s high profitability, and you need to analyze some of those things. So Think working yourself through a system like that where you realize that operations isn’t just a money suck. It’s not just like dumping money down the drain. It’s tuned into my profitability. No, no, you’re setting foundations to scale. Like, make sure your foundation is solid, because skyscrapers come down when the foundation isn’t built solid. So make sure before you start scaling that once you’ve got on the ground is going to support the build.

Josh Hadley 30:22

I love that I love that you shared you know, a free masterclass that you’ve already taught their foundations of scale.com. Aaron, tell us more about what are these four foundations that scale that you’re teaching?

Aaron Hovivian 30:36

Yeah. So what I’ll usually lead people into is that’s first bringing more money in right. So we’ll always start with marketing automations and integrations, how can we get the robots to lift for you, you know, so lean heavy into how can we bring in more sales through your marketing automations and integrations. So we spend a whole day on that day one for foundations that scale masterclass, addresses that. But then once you’ve caused your sales to really spike, the next thing you need to really look at is your customer experience. So that’s what we deal on day two is customer experience and how you’re nurturing those sales, right? Because if you catch the fish, and you bring them in the boat, and then they just get out the next there’s a hole in the net, like you’ve lost this opportunity to really keep sales through, you know, disputes or through refund requests. And so let’s lean into customer experience journey, the team that you’re assigning the tools that you’re using for ticketing systems, how you’re handling the customer experience, journey, macros, they’re both getting the same answers over and over again, simple stuff. And then we move to team or after, and how you’re using team and workflows and who is fitting with who, where and whose job does this belong to. And that way, you’re not over collateralizing, the same team, right? Wait a minute, we’ve got Why are you guys both working on that, like, let’s try and cut down the confusion by working through the org chart, we’re going through the job descriptions, working through the workflows, and making sure everybody’s in their lane and operating to their KPIs. And then we move finally, to sales and finance, where we’re really looking at profitability of not just the whole company, most most people have some idea of their profitability if they’ve got QuickBooks working for him or some financial software. But what they don’t always analyze is line of business profitability. And I think sometimes there can be mis assumptions that just because the high ticket, you know, we’re making so much money, I can’t believe how many we sold. Yeah, but how much did it cost us to fulfill on that? And then is it as profitable as you think it is? And so really diving into the finance and pulling apart profitability by line of business, and then also working into sales? Like how are we handling sales? Like how are we, for us? A lot of times it’s leading people into that next step of, are we going to implement centers and closers like how what what can we do within this brand to elevate by a lot of times it’s education and teaching people what we know, and how do we teach people what we know. But that’s a higher ticket. And that’s probably not something we’re gonna be able to just get people to click on. So how can we get them on with a setter, and with a closer and then bring them into our ecosystem? So those are the four different areas, the four days of foundation, the scale automations customer experience, org chart and team and then finance and sales?

Josh Hadley 32:59

Not that we could spend hours upon hours on each of those. That’s why you already recorded that separate masterclass. So, invite everybody to go check that out. Aaron, why don’t you give us a quick case study, as you’ve been working with Pedro, some of these big guys that you’ve been able to take to eight figures and beyond?

Aaron Hovivian 33:14

Yeah, so I would say all of these guys started as like this budding solopreneur with just a couple of raving fans on their team, but not necessarily the expertise to how do we get to that next level. So that’s usually when people knock on our door. And usually it’s all through, I would say, 99% of our work is referral based work. You know, where this guy has a friend, brand sees how successful this guy is. And he’s like, Hey, what’s the secret of your success? And he’s like, Have you ever met Aaron, let me introduce to Aaron and the kolab team, and then we’re able to take them to next level. And then really, we just diagnostically work through that system. I start them on the gap analyzer, take an inventory of what’s on the field, how many? What are your players doing, what other platforms you’re using? And then I poke some holes in that and I’m like, Hey, so have you had these problems with those platforms? Yeah, so many problems like that. And it’s like, I’m reading their mail. But once you’re under the hood, of all these entrepreneurs, you start seeing very similar knee jerk reactions that they’ve all engaged in at the front, like you said that what got them here isn’t going to get them there. And so we can make very educated suggestions based upon true case studies of hey, we were able to help Pete with this. We have Pedro with this, and then on, you know, Keith Yackey, with this and Jon Acuff with this, and all these different guys that have been clients through the years that are still clients to this day, elevate their brand by just working through, how are they dealing with time, tack and team like, how are they dealing with these different wheels of the business, and then making suggestions and then what the kolab team is, we’re not just a consultant, but we actually get in and help with the lifts our high level retainers, it’s a let us help diagnose your business. And then I’ve got a team of 13 Let me put some people into your team within this retainer that you paid for. And let us hold the space once you’ve identified the gaps. Let us hold the space SOP out the processes. And then let us go and find key players on your team right it’s always gonna be cheaper to have an employee over time once you have the process lined out that it’s gonna help you recruit people in bring You can onboard those folks, and then exit and be the resident expert that we can help them, you know, ascend to so I always tell entrepreneurs and it was true with Pete and Pedro, both they both started with small teams, they both started, I think it was one or two people on his team page was a two or three, and just didn’t have the expertise to take it to that next level. And I know for Pedro especially, we rolled in, and the guy was growing so fast, and I had to throw eight people on my team into the mix just to be just to keep the thing rolling. But the beauty is now Pedro has had like 30 people on his team, you know, he’s, you know, I mean, literally 10x, his number based upon growth, and I was at his Christmas party this past year, with all of his employees. And he had brought me out and it was in Lake Tahoe. And I was super kind, just happy to be there with him. And he stood me up in front of all the people. And he just said, Hey, I just want to acknowledge here in front of everybody that I recognize, we couldn’t have done, what we’ve done. If you in The Collab Team hadn’t showed up the way you did, you know, with your suggestions on tech, with your suggestions on team with holding space, with helping us grow and flex into these new spaces that were so overwhelming for my team. And, you know, now I’m in this room of 20 or 30 people that are all his employees, you know, and it was just such a gratifying feeling of we contributed to this, like Pedro was an amazing Pedro Adao It was incredible 100x Academy, they’re doing a live event in Southern California this week, collab team is supporting the live event, I’ve got four or five players helping support the live event. But man, it’s such a powerful visionary, but he needs team. And up to that point, the ladies he had on the team were amazing people, whatever it takes, you would say their WIT is the whatever it takes. And I think that’s great, but WIT only gets you so far in the system. So I feel like all of his team are beautiful people, we work with all of them very closely. And it’s been a great journey.

Josh Hadley 36:43

That’s fantastic. Aaron, that’s a great case study. Now as we wrap things up here today, and what I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. So here are the three takeaways that I noted Aaron, let me know if I’m missing something. So number one, all every entrepreneur needs to first identify what their goal is, do you genuinely want to scale to eight figures and beyond? Or are you content with the success that you’ve experienced thus far, and the team that you’ve built thus far in yours, your content where you’re at, so if you first identify your goal, then you can spend the time you’re like, hey, I do want to grow it, then we can move on to step number two, right? Action Item Number two would be to then do a time study slash gap analyzer that you mentioned, and you have a great tool that people are able to use to actually do this time study, understand, where are they spending most of their time? What type of projects are they working on, and then for their understanding, hey, imagine if I could, you know, remove this large load off my plate, then look at all this stuff I’d be able to do in my own zone of genius. And then step number three, or action. Step number three here is then documenting some SOPs around those projects, or those tasks that you want to offload off your plate. And even just recording super simple Loom videos. You don’t have to get into the weeds, but give people enough to get started. Then when you make that hire, you can have them document that SOP. And you can refine that even further. And they can get into the nitty gritty details there for you, Aaron, anything else you would add that I’ve missed here to those three actionable takeaways?

Aaron Hovivian 38:28

I think anytime I start with clients, I always ask them what’s the highest burn? Like what do you feel the most burn the most heartburn, the team’s feeling burned? You’re close to burnout, like, what’s the highest burn attack that first like, don’t make this more complex than this? You’re like, I’ve got all these things I’ve got to work on. That’s the that’s the entrepreneurs biggest Achilles going in, like what’s the highest burn what where you get the most ROI? You know, what, if you invested your time into, we could really move the needle on this and it would not be a future pain point. So if you’re overwhelmed today, if talking about scaling makes you overwhelm because you’re like, Aaron, I’m just overwhelmed with what I’m lifting. I would encourage with this deep breath, maybe go take a walk, sit down someplace in the sunshine, and think through what would be the best relief that I could receive. What’s the thing that I hate the most? That’s literally draining the lifeblood out of my system every time I do it, start with that sop it out, get it off your plate, and then move on to the next thing. That’s the best advice I can give you is identify the top thing and then like bite, how do you eat an elephant? It’s one bite at a time. Like just identify what’s the first bite? Where are we gonna go with this first?

Josh Hadley 39:28

I love that. Fantastic advice would 100% echo what you just said there? Aaron, I know you have a special gift for our audience. Why don’t you tell? Tell everybody a little bit more about that?

Aaron Hovivian 39:39

Sure. So, Ops Experts Club is something that we’ve been building this past year. And it’s essentially something that you can ask your operations people just to consume and go through. It’s just a resource for operations is what it is. It’s 35 hours worth of content. And it’s built in level one, level two, level three ascension where people can just go through the content when it comes to all things talked about today, your tech, your team, your time, all those different pieces. It’s called the URL is OpsExpertsClub.com. But as a free gift for Josh, and for those of you here on the eComm Breakthrough, we wanted to give you a free your first month free, and a sneak peek into it. And this is probably more than I intended to give. But it’s great I love I love free and I love being generous. The Gap Gnalyzer is one of the free tools we give every every division of level time, we give you a free tool and the gap analyzer is actually tucked into it. So you get a twofer out of this deal. So I just told you to capitalize your.com, that is $297, that you’re actually going to free with this. So if you go to OpsExpertsClub.com/eComm. It’s going to give you a free access. And so all you have to do is opt in there, that’ll kick off membership area, you’ll see your 35 weeks of content. And then it’s not just content, though it’s also every week we’re interviewing top entrepreneurs in the space the people that run their operations. So asking them like key things of insights like what are you doing now? What are like pitfalls, you fallen into all the different pieces? And then we do some live question answer. If you’ve got questions answered, we give you a private Facebook group where you can come in and ask, Hey, I’m dealing with this, I’m dealing with this. And it’s just ops people just dealing with pain points. For big companies out there like bro, rev and prime Corporate Services, and Pete Vargas has advanced to reach 100x, all those guys are all in there. And it’s just nice to be able to crowdsource knowledge base. So I’d love to give that as a gift. Josh, I really, really appreciate you having me on today. I really love you and Becca a lot. I love what you guys are doing. And so I’d love to give that so ops experts club.com forward slash e comm gets you a month for free. And you can just take advantage the gap analyzer, it’s in there on month one, so

Josh Hadley 41:44

Awesome there and you’ve been very generous, you’ve dropped some knowledge bombs with all of us. I hope many of the entrepreneur entrepreneurs have had some good mindset shifts, as well as to why, you know, operations are so important in seeing it as though hey, look how much you know, I could take off my plate, look how freeing it would be if I could have somebody focusing on operations. So Aaron, you’re the man when it comes to operations. So I appreciate this. And you’ve you’ve given us some fantastic links, that Ops Experts Club I think is amazing. I think I’m gonna have my ops guy that we just hired come join that because what you’re doing and sharing knowledge across across separate industries is invaluable in having an ops team be able to go in and learn those strategies, then come back and implement them in our business would be invaluable. So thank you so much for your time. Aaron. I appreciate you coming on.

Aaron Hovivian 42:38

Yeah, man. Thanks so much, Josh. I hope you have a great rest of the day and I hope man just blessing on all you guys in eCommBreakthrough men. Take Josh’s advice. This is a guy that’s a quality dude, goodhearted guy that has experienced the success himself and he’s given you the insight to the kingdom. So, man. Thanks, Josh. Hope you have a great rest of your day.

Josh Hadley 42:54

Thanks, Aaron.

Outro 42:56

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