Josh Hadley 6:16

Yeah, in one of our earlier podcast episodes, I shared this as one of my biggest mistakes that I’ve made in a business. And that is kind of creating me to products or looking at the market and saying, Well, they’re doing well with this type of product, so obviously, I should just introduce something similar, and I’m going to have similar results. What I have learned from launching over 1,300 different products at this point is that you need to bring something unique to the table. Creating the two products is never going to serve you in the long run. If if you do stumble upon something, and it works, it’s going to be a short term win, in my opinion. So one of the examples that I would give you is, you know, one of the products that we launched during COVID was educational posters, ok? So obviously, with homeschool, becoming more of a thing during COVID back in 2020, we our business had to pivot. We looked at you know, different homeschool supplies and different things that we could launch to cater to that market because it was such a it was an expanding market at the time, we looked at one of the most competitive niches on Amazon itself. And we saw educational posters as one of those, what we decided to do is we decided to throw our hat in the ring. But what we noticed is that nearly all of the competitors, and most of these competitors were overseas competitors. Right. So what we noticed, though, is they all look very, very similar. You know, Chad, I would argue that it those posters that you saw on Amazon, were probably the exact same posters that we grew up with in the classroom, you know, just kind of your standard, you know, vanilla educational poster, so to speak. And we’re talking about like, ABC to, you know, all the letters of the alphabet, counting from one to 100, things like that. So what my wife decided to do, though, is she, you know, she’s just so good at design. But she looked at what was trending on Etsy, what was trending on Pinterest, what was trending on Google. And what did she see on social media that teachers, how teachers were decorating their room, or how parents were decorating their homeschool room, so to speak. And after kind of gathering all of that information, she decided to design something that I don’t think anybody else has ever seen before. So number one, she has a very creative mind. But we went into an overlay, like, again, if most people would look at that niche, they’d say, that’s a saturated market, don’t go into it, there’s no way you’re going to make any money. And instead, what we did is we launched the product in August of 2020, we became the number two best seller in that entire product category within 30 days. And we’ve been able to maintain that position since then, and even became the number one seller and so that number one seller that was always beating us, I’m happy to say that this year, we are now consistently beating them and we’re ahead of them on all the positions and sales right now. But the lesson learned from that is that we can just look at that market like everybody else did and said, I’m gonna go create a me too product or, Hey, they all provide these 12 educational posters in their pack, so I should provide the exact same 12. No, like we took the time to study the market, even reach out to customers, get people’s ideas, and then bring something to the market that people are desiring and it was new. It was had brand new designs. It was a fresh idea. And cool quickly, Amazon noticed how receptive people were to that product. And it quickly shot up the ranks. And so product innovation doesn’t just, you know, it’s not just focused on product launches, either. I think the other key for other for businesses is to be looking at opportunities to provide upsells and serving the customer even further, right? So if I do have a set of educational posters, what other types of products can I offer this customer that are going to serve them in the end? And that’s what I consider product innovation, as well as how am I you know, getting these products to the customer, it starts getting into some sales and marketing here, but looking at related products, and ways that I can still continue to serve the customer. So with educational posters, you know, other people just want motivational kind of like signs in their classroom as well. So being able to offer matching or correlating designs that have inspirational quotes on them, right, so that the student feels inspired. While they’re in the classroom. We had standard educational posters, and then we also introduced math, educational posters. So being able to say, Hey, you, you’ve got the letters of the alphabet down now, here are, you know, the numbers, so to speak, and math, addition, subtraction, so at the end of the day, it’s how do I continue to serve those customers? If you understand their needs, you’ll be able to create those products that can serve them and be most beneficial to them.

Chad Franzen 11:38

Sounds good. Sounds great. Hey, let’s talk about number two people you’d like to bring, bring on smart people. And use them as your secret weapon?

Josh Hadley 11:46

That’s correct. So what I believe is people genuinely are any business’s secret weapon, they can either be your secret weapon for the, for a benefit, or they can be your stumbling block and actually be a secret weapon that is ultimately going to destroy your business. And I say that, you know, we we recently recorded the podcast episode on how I go and hire people. We have gone through, you know, multiple iterations over the last seven years of how we hire people, how do we identify, you know, a player, a players in the industry? And how do you actually recruit them to join your team. So I won’t, I won’t go through our entire hiring process in this email, or in this podcast. But I encourage guests to go back and find that episode, and listen to it here, the steps that we take, because it’s a very methodical approach to how we interview how we recruit these A players in the industry. So the reason why people are so important is because I think that I am a smart person. But what I want to do is hire even smarter people than myself. Ideally, I want to be the dumbest person in the room, so to speak, because I’ve hired people that could run circles around me in the areas that I’m obviously not good at. So a good example of that is we hired a supply chain, Matt, he’s currently our supply chain manager. But he started in product research and development for us. And what he was able to do is take an existing system that I had created, about how we go out and find products on the Amazon marketplace, that whether they are a good idea or a bad idea, and kind of assign scores, to those products to know if we should launch these products or not. Initially, that was all kind of like a gut feel from myself, it was, hey, I’m looking at the marketplace, this looks like a good opportunity. It feels right. So then I would tell my wife to go and let’s go create this product. Well, as soon as we brought on, you know, this r&d specialists that was going to help me he, you know, pushed me to say like, I need, like a mathematical way in an actual process to be able to determine whether or not this product is going to meet our criteria. So him and I worked for literally three months going back and forth, like going through and vetting all the criteria that we want to establish to determine, hey, is this a product that we want to launch? What’s the score that we want to assign to this product, so on and so forth? Now, one of my biggest weaknesses is Excel. I am by no means an Excel wizard. In fact, I dislike Excel, I don’t it’s something that just drains my energy. And on the opposite spectrum. This this team member loves Excel and has a vast you know, knowledge and wealth of knowledge and how to use Excel and different formulas V lookups, and macros all of that good stuff. What he was able to do, as we talked is he was able to actually put together a system of how we score different products, and ultimately spit out a overall number that would evaluate, hey, this, this product is an A opportunity, B, C, D, E, F, right? So we were able to go down that that list and say, Hey, here’s all the good opportunities, here’s the not so great opportunities. And that was, I feel like it was paramount for our business. Because as soon as we did that, our success rate of launching products shot through the roof. Okay. So obviously, my takeaway from that lesson is that people are extremely important. And if you hire really capable people, they’re able to take what you are doing. And I thought I was good at product research and development. Now I, I feel like this other team member is 10 times better than I am now, which to me is a huge win. It’s a huge win for the business. But I was always apprehensive and, and was always, you know, reluctant to hire out that role. Because I felt like, I’m the only one who knows this. And in hindsight, I should have done it much faster. Because look at the look of the results that we were able to produce, because somebody was able to improve the process, and continue to refine it. And then we moved him over to our supply chain role, where he’s currently out right now. And in the supply chain role he’s going through and again, I initially started it do I have, I had a supply chain management class back in school in college, but I’m by no means a supply chain management expert, this other team member actually had supply chain background experience. So he’s been able to move in and improve, you know, the way that we order products, the way that we’re able to, you know, determine when we need to place orders when we need to send inventory into Amazon, what to do with overstock products, like this guy’s got it down in one of his amazing spreadsheets that he’s created. And so for me, what I’ve learned is that people make all the difference in your business. And there’s other people that we’ve hired, I don’t, I’m not going to be so arrogant to say that we’ve never made a bad hire. And, you know, we’re just so amazing at finding great team players. Rather, we have a decent success rate, I would say 60% of the time we hire A-level talent, but what do we do with the other 40% of the time? Well, what we do is we make sure that we’re always having performance reviews, and conversations with our team members, their KPIs are laid out very clearly, so that each of our team members know when they’re winning, and when they’re losing, so to speak. And what we do is if people aren’t meeting their KPIs, and we’ve had conversations with them, then we free them up to the marketplace, right? We, we let them go, so to speak, because if they’re not succeeding in our business, we don’t want them to stunt their own career growth. They’re obviously kind people, we’ve enjoyed working with them. There’s a reason why I initially wanted to hire them, but for whatever reason, things just aren’t working out. And so we believe that we free them to the marketplace, so that they can go and find that opportunity, where they’re going to bloom where they’re going to, you know, grow into their, you know, full potential, so to speak. And so we don’t see it as though, hey, if I let this person go, they’re not gonna be able to feed their family or any of that stuff. That’s, that’s way too heavy to even think about, right. And I don’t think business owners need to take on all of that added pressure. But instead, you know, people make all the difference. So regular performance reviews, making a huge difference, exiting people at the right time, so that you’re not carrying, we’ll call it dead weight. Because if you notice that a team member is not meeting expectations, they’re not living by the culture that you’ve established in the business, it’s going to rub off on the other team members that have been around, and it’s going to start to bring your culture down. And so those are, those are the reasons why you need to have those performance reviews and those exit conversations when necessary. And then obviously, as you continue to go through the hiring process to weed out as many, you know, non eligible candidates as you possibly can, right that you know, are not going to be a A player’s at the end of the day. So those are some of my examples and stories and experience when it comes to people but they make all the difference in our business.

Chad Franzen 19:30

Yeah, it sounds like hey, a question about your the example that you provided about the guy that you hired for research and development. When he came to you. You said you were confident in your ability, your abilities to do that. And he came to you and had kind of this new idea for for doing it. Did he have to convince you that that was a good idea? Or did you know that you had already hired a smart guy and you were willing to just basically do whatever he said?

Josh Hadley 19:54

Yeah, so number one, that’s a fantastic question number one, I knew that he was a very smart and capable individual. Now, I didn’t know the full set of his skills at the time. But I did know that if our business were to continue to scale, I had to offload the process of finding new products, because I needed to start focusing on other areas of the business, such as product optimization operations, I needed to get those other things ironed out in the business. And if I just continued to spend all of my time in product, or product research, I would never be able to, you know, master those other facets of the business and, and hire people for those areas of the business as well. And so I number one was committed to the fact that like, we’ve got to, we’ve got to systematize this aspect of the business so that we can continue to scale. So I was already committed to that. So to answer your question, I was open to ideas, because I, myself and my mind have already made the decision, that that is an important lever in the business that needs to be solved. And if we can, you know, optimize that lever and say, Hey, we need more products, we can pull it and find successful products that we can launch. Does that answer your question?

Chad Franzen 21:11

Yeah, absolutely. Hey, number three is sales and marketing. So you’ve got product innovation, you got smart people, and now, sales and marketing. Tell me your thoughts on that.

Josh Hadley 21:20

Yeah, sales and marketing are what I would consider the lifeblood of any organization. So before you even get to people before or before you’re even hiring people, right? You’ve got to be selling. And, you know, I think the there’s a phrase right that people like to say, you know, sales cures, all right. And, to an extent that is true, because as a business, if you are not generating sales, and that’s not one of your biggest focuses in the business, everything else is for naught. Right? I could, I could optimize the operations of my business all day long, I could hire as many team members as I want. And I could hire really, really smart people. But at the end of the day, if I’m not bringing in any sales, there’s no money to pay those individuals, there’s no reason for me to even be in business to begin with. So it all comes back to sales and marketing. Now, I’ve got two examples here that I want to share with you. And and we’ll kind of dive into these. So feel free to ask questions chat as as we dive into here to make sure that we, I communicate the full story properly. When we first started our business, we were a custom wedding invitation business. Okay, so my wife had this idea, she wanted to do wedding invitations for friends, she started doing it that way, she received a few referrals. That was great. But it was by no means, you know, filling up her entire schedule, you know, just doing, you know, things on a referral basis was not going to lead her to, you know, six figures and beyond at that time, right? Because she was starting at zero, what I had to do, one of the first things that I did in that business was, we’ve got to figure out how we attract leads, and then how do we convert those leads in the business. So I created a whole like, sales funnel, that I was actually pretty proud of because I had automated at the end of two years after doing these wedding invitations. But basically what we did is we had to find people that were interested in wedding invitations that were that needed wedding invitations. And so one of the things that I did is I stumbled upon the Facebook groups, and saw how these Facebook groups were just full of these. Typically brides and women were asking questions, where, you know, where’s the best place to get wedding dresses? What’s the best, you know, wedding venue, and then these are all like geographically based locations, right? Or groups like Tennessee, you know, brides of Dallas, Fort Worth, etc. So I would join these groups and would kind of search through all of these comments or posts from people. And whenever I saw people say, Hey, I’m looking for, you know, wedding invitations, or where’s the best place to go to wet for wedding invitations, I immediately would send them a message, say, Hey, I just sent you, you know, a personal message via messenger. And then they would, you know, we would have a further conversation in Messenger. And that’s where I was able to generate leads. And then secondly, I was able to generate sales from those leads, by walking them a series of questions that we qualified the candidate, we, you know, got them interested in what our process was, showed them examples of things that were similar to what it is that they were looking for. And then ultimately, you know, getting a deposit and getting them scheduled on our our calendar so that we can design their wedding invitations for them. That was the core function of the business and that’s how we started to begin with was in these Facebook groups. But again, there was a limitation to you know how many people I could reach out to on a daily basis, right? There were 1000s of these wedding groups. And I was like, It’s literally impossible for me to comb through every single comment in every single one of these groups, how else can we kind of like systematize, this or on a, you know, automatic basis, bring in new leads to the business. And so what I was able to do is, I stumbled upon Facebook ads, right, so I stayed in the Facebook platform, because number one, it was working for us. And I knew that, you know, Facebook had, like the perfect audience targeting is like, people that were recently engaged, and their wedding day is, you know, a year out plus, and I was like, perfect, I was able to apply those filters for the audiences that we need, we tested a few different, you know, creatives for our ad. And very quickly, you know, I think I was also fortunate, but it was fairly quickly after a couple tests, I found one that worked, and then we just, I just kept throwing more money at it, and it was pumping out new leads for us on an automated basis. And then we were able to then, you know, create this process to, again, vet those leads to qualify them. And ultimately, you know, have them commit, pay a deposit get on our schedule. And so that was my first example of like, nothing else starts in the business, you know, I don’t need to work on shipping, I don’t need to work on, you know, hiring customer service, I don’t need to work on any of those other aspects of the business, Intel, I have dialed in sales and marketing. As soon as we dialed in our sales and marketing, and I was getting leads automatically, I had a process to where literally, I could cut and paste different snippets and say, Hey, we’re excited about your wedding. Tell me what it is that you’re looking for. And then blah, blah, blah, right? We went through a whole process, copy, paste, and ultimately sell those people. After I had done that. That’s when we made our first hire. And that first hire became the customer service person. And they helped with, you know, shipping and logistics, and they helped with invoicing clients, right? But it wasn’t until sales and marketing were streamlined. That I said, Okay, now we can start optimizing the rest of that business. So that’s my first example. Chad, do you have any questions about that before I move on to another story?

Chad Franzen 27:31

Sure. You know, you mentioned Facebook, and you kind of got into Facebook, and you started targeting all these specific groups or businesses or whatever. Did you test anything else? That, you know, Facebook, you your first approach to Facebook worked, but it wasn’t, you know, you had to kind of grow it? Did you try anything that just didn’t work? And how soon did you decide not to do it anymore?

Josh Hadley 27:53

Yeah, that’s a great question. So no, we didn’t really test out anything else. We never tested out Google Ads, right? We could have tested out Google Ads on Facebook. You know, Facebook allows you to advertise on Instagram. So we were essentially advertising on Facebook and Instagram. We, I guess we also did you know, we signed up for something like the wedding blogs, like there’s some big wedding blogs, like Wedding Wire, The Knot, those are places where we listed our you know, we would pay for promotions to be like, featured there. So yeah, we did branch out there for the majority of our marketing where we found the success was on Facebook. And so that’s where we essentially doubled down. Right. And and I think that’s the important thing about sales and marketing is you have no idea what’s going to hit. And I remember going back to this experience, there were these big wedding accounts, like on Instagram, and we’re like, Hey, I wonder if these big wedding accounts that have hundreds of 1000s of followers, if they give us a shout out? And you know, will that do anything for our business? And we tested it? I think we paid you know, a few 100 bucks for a promotion one time. And it was like nothing. It was crickets. And I was like, Okay, that didn’t work. You know, we paid for a promotion on the Wedding Wire, right. It was a big blog. And we actually got some traffic from it. Right. So that worked. We did that for The Knot. But with Facebook, we kept doubling down there. Because time and time again, we continued to find success. It continued to produce the type of clients I guess, that we were looking for. And so that, you know, I’ve talked about that as in one of the earlier podcasts, where I talk about those struggles that I’ve had and some of the mistakes that I’ve made. I made mistakes when we moved our business on to Amazon, because I should have doubled down faster on Amazon. Like I doubled down on Facebook ads for the wedding invitation business. Now Facebook ads have changed drastically. So I do agree that to an extent, it is important to like, make sure you’re generating leads and other places. Because if you’re 100%, platform dependent, it can be risky, for sure. But we doubled down on Facebook and it produced tremendous results for us. And we’ve we fully booked our calendar we had a, there was a waitlist to even get on Becca’s calendar. Like, that’s how many clients we were getting through that funnel. Wow, incredible. You said you had another example? Yeah. So my other example is, you know, finding sales and marketing and on Amazon. Okay. So how did we transition from this wedding invitation business into, you know, a, an entire stationery brand with 1300 Plus products, where most of our sales are on Amazon? Well, that really came about because, number one, my wife and I knew that we had kind of reached our limit, because there was a waitlist for the wedding invitation business, right? She couldn’t work more hours physically in a day. So then we’re like, how do we scale a business? And again, that’s I had learned and heard about Amazon. And so we tested out, you know, a few products on Amazon. And we found success there. So we doubled down on Amazon that first year. Not I’m not gonna say we didn’t double down on Amazon, the entire, you know, five years since we launched on that platform. But the first year we did, as soon as we found success with our first product, we said, we’re all in we actually I turned off Facebook ads. Okay, so we were no longer marketing, our wedding invitation side of the business, even though it was successful, even though it was a proven process. And we can generate sales from it, I saw that there was more opportunity to generate more revenue, while also working less, because if we create a product once, we’re able to hypothetically sell that that product indefinitely. And so we doubled down on Amazon that first year. And that’s when we hit you know, we crossed seven figures, we did a million dollars in sales our first year on Amazon, which was amazing. But then that’s when we started get distracted to say, hey, you know, let’s go try all these other channels. Right? We found success on Amazon. But Amazon is risky, right? What if Amazon suspends our account, let’s go start diversifying ASAP, right. And our business was too young for that. If we had hit maybe, you know, eight figures, we would be a little bit more mature. And it would be you know, maybe we could have branched out into other channels. But instead, we distracted ourselves, you know, we ended up spending a lot of time, you know, looking at getting onto Walmart, which, okay, we’re on Walmart today, it provides maybe 2% of our entire revenue. And, you know, we focused a lot on Etsy. And again, Etsy provides maybe 1% of our revenue. And so we continue to test out these different channels. While that’s all well and good. If something is working, my recommendation is that you double down on those channels. So first of all, you obviously are testing out multiple ideas. But as soon as you find something that works, just go all in on it. And in optimize that, that channel where you’re generating those sales, by no means had I optimized Amazon. Yeah, we were successful. We did a million dollars in revenue, that’s great. But by no means was I optimized on Amazon. And instead of saying, All right, let’s keep focusing on Amazon, let’s actually optimize let’s squeeze everything we can out of Amazon, before we start distracting ourselves with additional channels that I’ve got to learn them from scratch, right? I’ve already I already know, Amazon. So my my story in my example, there’s, as soon as you test out different ideas, and you find something that’s working, go and optimize that and squeeze all the juice out of it that you can. And then as your business continues to mature, then you can hire team members to go and explore those different channels. But don’t distract yourself when you’re a young business by feeling like you need to be in a million different places. Because you look at all the big brands and yeah, they’re in retail stores. Yes, they are on Walmart, yes, they are on Target.com. They’re on Amazon.com. They’re on all the sales channels. That’s because they’ve got a huge team that drives those results. And so that’s my biggest takeaway for anybody that’s starting, especially if you want to go from seven to eight figures and beyond, do things in a methodical approach. You don’t need to just look at all the big brands and say like, well, because they’re there, I need to be there to know they they went through their own growing and learning pains as well. You need to do the same for your sales and marketing.

Chad Franzen 34:46

So let me ask you this. How what, at what point do you decide that something is working? Like you’re not losing money? I think it’s only natural like Yeah, I think it’s only natural to think like well, maybe I could do better over here. Or maybe we could do better if we had you know two things rather than one How do you know like, Okay, this is working? I need to double down?

Josh Hadley 35:02

Yeah, that’s a fantastic question again, I knew it was working when it was profitable for us. Right? If I had to spend, you know, if I had to spend more money on Amazon ads, then the revenue I was making, or you know, minus my expenses, that to me, is that still not working? Right? Going back to the Instagram example that I shared with you, right, where we are doing wedding invitations, we paid a few $100. And for this, this ad, so to speak, right that this big wedding account was going to post about us and send us all this traffic right. Now did we get traffic? And did we get some results from it? Yes, it was very quiet. As I said, it was basically crickets. But did we get a lead from it? Yeah, I think we did. But it did not outweigh, or it wasn’t more. Like, there was no more revenue than what we paid for that particular placement. So to me, I was like, you know, what, what, why go down this rabbit hole and trying to say, Okay, well, I missed here, let’s keep refining it, let’s keep spending more money until we refine it, when I’ve already got something that is working on Facebook, Facebook ads, I was spending, like, literally $20 a day. And each day, I was converting people with average order values of $1,000. And more. Right, so I knew the ROI was was very high, especially for for that particular ad. But it was the same thing for Amazon, right? We would launch a product, we would promote it with ads. But the more we spent, the more money we kept making, and we were very profitable. So I guess, how do you determine if something successful? I would just say like, you evaluate the ROI on each of those different tests, right? And don’t just look at it, you know, revenue wise, like, what is the actual bottom line that this is bringing to your business? Because I think everybody loves to talk about like, oh, you know, seven figures in sales? That’s all well and good, but like, how much profit? Are you actually bringing home at the end of the day, because I know a lot of eight-figure brands that actually make very, very little money, if any, and they’re they’re just so full with overhead and expenses and all of this stuff. So I doubled down. As soon as I see something that’s producing, I don’t know, larger than normal, you know, return on investment, is what I would recommend there. But I don’t have like a specific metric.

Chad Franzen 37:35

Sure, sure. Hey, your your fourth core area of performance enhancement, is operations. Implementing an operating system. Tell me about that.

Josh Hadley 37:43

Yeah. So the reason why I have this one definitely last is because operations are extremely important. But you’re going to need to hire out a team. First, you’re going to need to have figured out your sales and marketing first. You obviously need to have products first, right? So implementing an operating system, though, is genuinely what I believe is going to take a seven figure brand, to eight figures and beyond, you know, it was easy enough for my wife, and I to build a brand and generate seven figures of revenue on Amazon by just ourselves. And we didn’t have a good operating system or processes. It was just literally her and I communicating with each other, I would look for product opportunities on Amazon, I would tell her, Hey, let’s go create these products. And she would go do it. And then we would launch it on Amazon. And that was the name of the game. Right. But that that’s not a formal operating system, obviously. But as our team matured, and we started to hire customer service representatives, and then we started to hire, you know, people to help in supply chain people to help in r&d. And then we also hired like a project manager, right? As we slowly built up our team. That is when we decided, hey, we actually need to have some type of operating system of how we’re communicating with one another. My sister was actually one of our first hires, and she’s been with us, you know, almost from the beginning. And she’s been awesome and a great addition to our business. But I genuinely did not set her up for success during her first year. We didn’t have an operating system. I didn’t know how to, you know, set regular weekly touch bases with her. I didn’t know how to communicate the priorities of the business. And so as soon as you start hiring team members, you need to implement an operating system, which is basically telling it, it’s basically a system whereby you are telling everybody on your team, the direction the business is going, what the priorities are in the business, and evaluating their performance to make sure that those team members are winning, right. Are they actually driving results for the business? So what we have decided to do in our business, we actually have spent lots of time and money investing into multiple programs. So the programs that we have participated in is Scalable. Okay, and that’s put on by Ryan Deiss, Roland Frasier. Ryan Deiss is actually going to be on the podcast coming up. And so for those of you that are listening to this in the past, definitely check out that episode with Ryan Deiss. Because he’ll be talking a lot about Scalable, which is great. They have a lot of experience in running companies. And then number two, Alex Charfen’s process. It’s called the Simple Operations process. Now, I believe they just rebranded that. But we learned that process and then EOS. So I think that’s a very popular, widely known operating system. But what we did is that we, as we looked at each of the operating systems that these people were teaching, we didn’t fill one of these were like, Oh, this is exactly what we need for our business. This fits us like a, you know, a glove. Instead, we’re like, Well, I like parts of this. I like parts of that. And so we ended up creating our own operating system ourselves. And so the importance of this operating system, and this is something we have worked on a lot this year for our business, this has provided produced tremendous results in allowing our team to be able to move faster, make better decisions, and enabling our managers in our business, to make decisions that are going to produce outsized returns, and the greatest impact on the business with the out me or Becca, needing to necessarily hold their hand every step along the way. And so what does this mean by when I talk about operating systems? So what are some of the things that we did, we established a weekly leadership meeting, we call it our Level 10 meeting. That’s taken from the EOS framework. And this is where we get together and on a weekly basis, we’re looking at our three annual objectives, our biggest priorities in the business, how what, what is our progress towards the goals annually, on a quarterly basis? And on a monthly basis? What are the issues that we’re facing in the business. And so we talk about this for 90 minutes, every single week. So everybody gets crystal clear with what the priorities are in the business, and what actions we are taking to keep driving those results. Then next, we have I call them our 4-1-1 meetings. And this is where our team members, this is our one-on-one meeting. I meet with each of my direct reports. On Monday, my entire Monday is just full of meetings in coordinating with our team members during these 4-1-1 meetings, that team member shares what their biggest win was for last week. And then also going through, what did they accomplish last week? What did they not accomplish last week, and why? And then what are their plans for this upcoming week. And these team members do all of that on their own, I don’t plan out their weeks, they come prepared to that meeting with their own plans. And then ultimately, we have monthly leadership meetings, we have quarterly leadership meetings. And then we subsequently have monthly all-hands meetings for all of our team members, and monthly and quarterly, all-hands meetings. This is the framework that we’ve been able to establish or implement in our business, so that everybody is running in the same direction, when our team members are sitting down and writing down their goals of this is what I’m going to accomplish this week. They know what to accomplish and write down this week, because we’ve already laid out what the monthly goals are, and what the quarterly goals are. So they’re able to say, hey, if I need to achieve this by the end of the month, what do I need to be doing during week two of this month? What do I need to be doing during week three of this month, so on and so forth. And that has allowed our business to continue to grow. And I would argue any brand that really wants to grow, you’ve got to hire out that team. You’ve got to create an operating system so that you can continue to move just as fast as you were and be as agile as you were when you were just a small, maybe one or or two person team, because it is that speed of implementation that makes all the difference.

Chad Franzen 44:28

Absolutely. Hey, I last question for you as we wrap things up here. You know, I’m sure a lot of people listening would say like, oh, yeah, I’d love to implement an operating operating system. And those all sound like great ideas, but I don’t even know where to start. Where How would you recommend just like getting getting that going?

Josh Hadley 44:44

Yep. Well, number one, I would listen to some of the podcast episodes that we have here on eComm Breakthrough because we are going to be interviewing a lot of people in the operation space. And ultimately, a lot of these people that we’ll be interviewing are going to have core nurses are going to be experts in that field. So subsequently, you know, I would, I would look into Scalable, right, I would look into the Charfen process. I would look into EOS. I would start reading those those books as well, because they all have books and learn more about what other people are doing. One of the best books I think is like to get a fundamental basis of like, an operating system and like getting yourself out of working in the business is called The E-Myth. Right. And I think that’s a very popular wide known, well known book. But if you haven’t read that book, that’s where I would actually start. And then start exploring some of those other operating system programs, see which one fits best for you and like what we’ve done, pick and choose what works for you your business and start implementing it. And finally, if people do have questions, then they want a fresh set of eyes to come in, take a look at their business, obviously, I’m willing to help and and take a look at people’s business. We do free audits all the time. So reach out to me at Josh@eCommBreakthrough.com as well.

Chad Franzen 46:05

Okay. Hey, Josh has been great to talk to you and look forward to doing another episode very soon.

Josh Hadley 46:09

Likewise, Chad. Thanks again.

Chad Franzen 46:11

So long, everybody.

Outro 46:13

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