Josh Hadley 7:11

I love it. Dave, what were some of your biggest questions coming into the strategy audit?

David Hunt 7:17

Yeah, I think people was definitely, for me, the biggest thing I’m beyond, like Andrew said, the right people, the right seats. I find we’ve struggled with timing, right? How long do you give someone to fit that role? And one of the biggest takeaways I took was, you know, Josh, you’re saying every four months, we’re reviewing these things. And previously, we were almost looking at it, I want to say on a yearly basis. We did yearly reviews. And now looking back on it, it makes sense. Why would that work? Because if you wait a year to evaluate whether somebody’s in the right seat, if they’re meant for the company, if they aligned with not only our core goals, but our overall strategy, you’re too late. And we’ve had that bite us before. So looking at that I like the idea of, you know, quarterly or four month periods where we’re really taking a deep dive into the alignment and making sure that right person, right, see, right time for them to be with us.

Josh Hadley 8:19

Yeah, I think that that is every business leaders like struggle is how do you get the right people sitting in the right seat, right. And that is much easier said than done. But there’s logic in how you approach these situations. And I know you guys have heard my podcast, and even my presentations, where I talk about how the process I use to go find and attract a level talent into your business. But then the rubber really meets the road when you bring this person onto your team. And yes, the traditional like, Hey, we’re gonna do an annual performance review is they’re simply ineffective, as most of us I think, could attest, because you walk away and you’re like, Okay, I was maybe falling short here. And guess what, we’re probably never going to talk about this again. We’ll see a next year, right. So that what I shared with Andrew and Dave is as a document, we call it like our plan of alignment and growth. Okay, so what happens and we balanced initially, we were considering doing it every other month. And then when we started that, that was like, way too much. Then we went every quarter and was like, ah, that still feels like we’re meeting too regularly. Every four months has been the right cadence for us. Because it needs to be done definitely more than once a year and arguably even more than twice a year. So four times or three times in the year every four months has worked out perfectly for us. So let’s talk about the details and share with the audience like kind of what it is that we discussed and how you would set this up. You need to evaluate your team members on a regular basis and here’s the exercise that I asked Andrew and Dave to do on the spot, right. And I just kind of sat as a fly on the wall watching them, I said, Hey, evaluate your team members on three different metrics, their effectiveness with how they’re getting their job done their performance, are they meeting their KPIs? And then three, you know, do they meet the team culture. And then as they kind of talked about each of their team members, you know, they had different opinions and perspectives of you know what culture meant. And Dave’s five was not Andrews, five to Andrews, one was not Dave’s three, right. And so what I help them realize is that, if you create a, I guess, a rubric, that’s one of the first things that you need to establish is a rubric that whoever is conducting these assessments, whether it’s a manager or yourself, everybody’s on the same page, one of the unique aspects that we do with these performance reviews, is that we ask each of the team members to actually rate themselves first. And so they get to share their honest feedback of how they feel like they’re performing. And then the manager goes in and adds their scores as well. And then they end up meeting together to discuss, Hey, I see you scored yourself here, this is where I scored you, here’s where there might be a gap in our in our alignment, right? And then from there, those are the action items that you could have them work on over those next four months. So the way you kind of set this up is that you evaluate them first on the culture fit for the organization. So how do you determine you know, if they fit your culture, hopefully, you’ve already documented your core values, right? If you have your core values in place, we have seven within our brand, then I can list out those seven core values, have a paragraph description about what those core values mean, and how they apply. And then have a scoring rubric. This is sometimes often never and specific examples of how those would apply, and then allow each person to be able to score themselves. Now we’re all on the same page, when we score ourselves, then when we get together, we can identify where those gaps are. So cultures first, then the second part is kind of the results or the overall effectiveness of that team member. And so we evaluate them on three different aspects. Number one, is their problem solving skills. So how often are they coming to their manager with just problems and relying on their manager to resolve them for them? Or number two, they’re coming or sorry, on that know of problem solving. They’re presenting the ideas in the solutions to the manager, right? That’s a very different type of team member, one that’s just bringing problems and somebody that’s bringing solutions to the table, then secondly, we evaluate them on their kind of overall performance and effectiveness, are they getting their tasks done on time? Are they you know, doing it in an efficient manner of time. And then last, but not least, we evaluate their results, which is their KPIs. So in order to do this, obviously, you’ve got to have KPIs established for every single role, something that’s measurable, you have to define for them, what the core values are. So you can see there’s a lot of upfront work. And the great news is Andrew and Dave, you guys had already done a lot of that upfront work. So all you need to do is kind of pivot and kind of reframe this, to have these conversations, every four months have each team member evaluate themselves and their manager, then you identify wherever those gaps are, and you create a plan of alignment document that you then use to help that team member set up their goals. For the next four months. Here are the areas that I need to improve. It’s clear as day for them. And then at four months from now, when you come back, there’s issues when you begin to have those conversations like Are you a right fit, because we talked about this and we’re not seeing the progress. So I went into the weeds there and sharing those details, because I wanted to give the context and the value. But Andrew and Dave, what were your kind of some of your biggest aha moments at process.

Andrew Gilliland 14:14

So I had, yeah, please. The biggest aha moment was we are currently way overcomplicating our review process. It’s like seven different tabs. And because of that it’s confusing for both our employees and for Dave and I as managers. So one of my biggest takeaways is to actually use the document that you shared and remove the complexity so that it’s as simple as possible to implement into the organization.

Josh Hadley 14:55

I love it. Simplicity is key. What about you, Dave?

David Hunt 15:00

Simplicity is, you know, I agree with that, you know, the complexity piece definitely was an aha moment like Andrew was saying. The other one. Josh, I’d love to ask you this question that I didn’t get to. But it’s sort of the aha moment for me as we are not doing the people who work for us a favor right now. And the KPIs we set for them, especially on my side, because I run the marketing piece of everything. And it’s almost a challenge to say, I want to measure you on a creative piece. Because is the KPI we’re doing X amount of creatives is it generating revenue. So I would love your take, because that was an aha moment for me. It’s like, okay, we gotta get back into the KPI game, like, how do you measure something that doesn’t directly bring in, let’s say, a percentage or a number, which has definitely been a challenge for me with the people who work for me?

Josh Hadley 15:52

Yeah, that’s a really good question. So let’s dive into that. First and foremost, you need to define measurable activities that you could assign a metric to, regardless of whatever that position is, okay? So even with customer service, right, it’s like, I just want you to respond to all of my customer messages, right? One of our metrics is like, we want a five minutes or less response time for all of our messages. And here’s how we track that. Right? These are the hours. And then we also have kind of like an upsell process that we use. And we say, hey, we want to generate X amount of revenue from this process, right? So it allows us to see like, is this person winning, succeeding? Are they executing in this? So let’s talk about your example for like a creative, like a graphic designer? Yeah, in this case. So number one, you should have a reason as to what like, what purpose is this graphic designer doing? So in this scenario, Dave, what’s your graphic designer creating and doing for you?

David Hunt 16:58

It would be Amazon builds. So all the assets that go into Amazon would be all of the emails that we send for all of our brands, it would be PPC ads, anything that’s going on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and then web outside of that.

Josh Hadley 17:19

So you should already have, and this should be part of your kind of like your monthly and quarterly and annual planning, you know, in general, how many different Amazon listings? Or are you needing done every month? Right? And what are all those assets that are required? And then how many different you know, Amazon advertising images do you need in a given month, right? So if you go back in time, you’re like, hey, we launched this number of products. And these are typically what’s required of them, you could start to map out like, actual numbers that you will need Correct. Same thing on the marketing side, like, if you know, Amazon posts and social media posts are like, super important to you guys. Right? Then maybe it’s like, every single week, I need 20, new creative pieces that we could then schedule and post on Amazon, right? Those become your KPIs. And so at the end of the day, you need to go back and first and foremost, understand what value is this team member providing to the business? Okay? Because sometimes what you’ll discover in this process, if you don’t already have KPIs established, sometimes they’re just working on pet projects. And you’re like, Oh, my goodness, they’re really like, they’re really not generating much revenue for the business. And then you’d need to make the call of like, is this an actual role that we need? And is this the right person for this role? Do we need a full time team member? Or, you know, maybe I just need somebody on Fiverr once every so often, right? Because this is identified, like the specific things that they need to create that does produce revenue, right? So Amazon posts, can you attribute revenue to those graphics? And can you measure and determine like, if those media graphics get better? If they’re different lifestyle shots? Do they? Are they better? Do they get a higher click through rate? Same thing with your Amazon ads? Right? You could test them and say like, yes, this drives significant revenue for us, as we level up our brand, right? You could argue a plus content as well. So there’s definitely ways like as I showed you, it’s not always easy, but there are ways to create defined KPIs for any given role in a business. What are your thoughts, Dave, like what comes to your mind?

David Hunt 19:47

What comes to my mind is I’m doing my my team a disservice by not stopping and taking the time to do this, and I absolutely see that even in this conversation. So I think by defining that, one, we will find I think that these rules are very beneficial to our brands. But two, I think that beyond anything else, our team members will feel a little bit more satisfied, because they’ll be able to go back and look and say, like, Wow, I did all of this stuff, not necessarily the reverse. But it also will put a little bit of a spotlight on cracks in our system.

Andrew Gilliland 20:17

If I could add in here, guys, an additional level of problem we’ve had is we’ve tracked social media posts, how many social media posts are coming out, we’ve tracked the number of projects that our graphic designers are producing. Dave, we’ve done both of those things, right. So I think it’s less of a matter of our ability to implement the KPIs but more of a matter of our ability to implement them in a way that our team sees value in. Because correct me if I’m wrong, David, but I believe measuring posts generated and graphics created was fairly demotivating. For the team members doing those activities. What was your experience with that?

David Hunt 21:06

It also depends on the right person, the right seat. But yes, we have found that for some people just being like, hey, we want 40 posts this month, didn’t necessarily mean much to them, because they were like, Okay, I’m just gonna rush through 40 posts to get them out.

Andrew Gilliland 21:23

So how do we solve that, Josh?

Josh Hadley 21:25

Yeah. So the way that you need to do this, and this is where an A-level like player is going to get excited and want to join your team, even from like a creative graphic designer standpoint. You say, I need 40 different pieces of social media content on a monthly basis. And each of these need to have a click through rate that is higher than whatever your average is now, right? That’s my minimum. Because now what your graphic designer is going to do is like, Ooh, this is a game, this is a game now. Because I’m going to be able to evaluate and say, like, this content worked great, this content didn’t do well. And it allows you as the business owner, to not have to like that that onus is not on you now. Right? It’s now on the graphic designer to say like, you’ve got to create really good content, that’s going to have this amount of click through rate or this amount of increase in the conversion rate for a product listing. And if it’s not there, then we got to go back to the drawing board. And it’s going to be some something you talk about in your plan of alignment on a regular basis. I think the key part here, for A-level talent, they like to have a scoreboard. How fun is it? Who would go watch an NBA basketball game, if no score was kept? A bunch of dudes out playing shooting the ball? Right? It’s like no, not very exciting, right? It becomes fun when somebody’s keeping score, and you’ve got something to achieve or exceed, right. So that same mentality for your team members, they want to see that, hey, it’s it’s not just 40 pieces of content, 40 pieces of content that produce this revenue, and I can tie that revenue directly back to it. Does that make sense? What do you think, Andrew?

Andrew Gilliland 23:10

I think that you’re speaking my mind, in the sense of that’s how my mind works, too. We have had trouble implementing that approach with our creative team members. But the solution that you’re presenting here is, if they’re not about that, they’re probably not A-players. And, Dave, I think that’s something for us to chew on a little bit.

David Hunt 23:37

Yeah, I would agree with that. And I also think what Josh, you did that we tend to overdo you kept it simple, though, because like you, you picked to say two KPIs, you were like 40 and a conversion rate. Whereas before, I feel like we’d be like, we want 40 with a conversion rate, and has to be seen by this many people. And we want this many followers. And then it’s just like, Now, instead of me keeping score, I’m juggling, and I don’t know which which is most important to you.

Josh Hadley 24:04

Yeah. And you’ve got to, you’ve got to get very clear. So typically, you won’t, you want to have like a max of like, three to five KPIs for any given role. And then they need to be something that they can actually control. Right? Look, if if their job is for posting social media, or sorry, if their job is just creating social media content, they have no influence over the number of followers they’re going to get. They have no way like, yeah, you know, good content can lead to followers. But you’ve got to have a social media strategist that’s actively pursuing a strategy to get more followers, right. That’s a that’s somebody else’s role. So you need to be careful with like creating these KPIs. And when I talked about a scoreboard needs to be something that they can actually influence and with social media posts or like specially Amazon posts, it will show you the click through rate, right and then number of people that click on it and the impressions that it can get. And on average, a better image is going to produce a better click through rate. Right? That’s something they could control.

Andrew Gilliland 25:10

Love it, Josh. Thank you.

Josh Hadley 25:12

Alright, let’s move into kind of some of the next things you guys took away from this. Andrew, what else did you take away?

Andrew Gilliland 25:19

Well, I have, I have about four pages of really high quality takeaways. But I’ll focus in on just just a couple here. So let me find a bigger takeaway, then some of this stuff with with people was really around an overall mindset shift of our thinking about the management of our portfolio brands, and overall holds go, Dave, and I have, we were both specialists or backgrounds for over a decade is in specific areas of execution. And so we still get stuck in the weeds, we need to shift our entire mindset. And one of the key takeaways is that David and myself, we create processes, and we create templates. And we do a lot of that now, however, I think we have to get to that next level and really make all of our efforts and energy focus on creating a template, writing a process, and then delegating that to the team member who’s responsible for executing it. And hopefully, they do an even better job than we would if if we were doing it ourselves.

Josh Hadley 26:34

Yeah. And I think that that kind of takeaway came to you from the question of like, there are so many different things you can be doing in your business, like, I don’t have enough time in the day to do all of these things like, how do you do this? Right? And how do you grow your brand? How do you know what to focus on? Well, a lot of it comes down to you being able to understand where the value is that you bring to the business, because you each have different strengths that you provide, right, and there’s unique talents that you have. So you need to conduct those time studies, right on a regular basis and identify where are you spending most of your time. And this is something that we talked a lot about that it’s like, once you do your time study, and you then take a look at what you’ve been doing over the last two weeks, you then could start bucketing your time and saying like, Oh, my goodness, I spent a lot of time and just kind of general administration tasks for the business, or a lot of it was spent in HR spent most of my time, you know, on interviews, and creating job posts and communicating back and forth with people on Upwork, etc. Or whatever it is that you’re focused on, then you could say, You know what, I could actually create a process around each of these items. And then if I was taking 20, if 20% of my time was being taken up by these HR related activities, I could go give that to somebody, and then bam, I now have 20 extra percent of my time is now free for me to have better clarity of mind and thinking and to focus on more high value leverage activities in the business. As an entrepreneur, that’s what you are constantly doing. When you start something from scratch, you are constantly building, that the trap that people get caught up in, is sometimes hiring for something that they’re not really sure about, they just kind of have this pie in the sky vision, which I’ve made this mistake of, I just need to increase my revenue. So I need to hire a marketing manager, not really sure how they’re going to do it. But I just I think that’s the right person to hire. The best and easiest way, if you’re starting from scratch, is to simply document your time, identify where most of your time is going and hire people that can release your time, one at a time. Because as you start taking on more tasks, when you start working on more high priority tasks for the business, then you’ll start to need to have more high level team members, more management level staff that, again, it’s this constant evolution of documenting your process, and then teaching and inspiring your team members to be able to make the same decisions or better decisions than you would have to adequately fair assessment.

Andrew Gilliland 29:20

Yeah, and, and two other key takeaways are, you know, we spent 15 or 20 minutes discussing the taxonomy of value and the time study. Those are two things that we’re going to put under a magnifying glass within our company to ensure that we really understand what the value levers are. And a lot of this stuff we kind of do now, but you put you articulated ideas that we can take and formally do and understanding the value creation and conducting a times study to find opportunities to offload lower value activities. We talk all about this internally. But now we can actually go and follow your process for doing that.

Josh Hadley 30:13

Awesome as a great takeaway, and we get dive into the taxonomy of value. And that would take us into a whole nother hour of conversation. But the gist of it is, you’ve got to identify the area, within your business, you could be working on supply chain, you could be working on optimizing, you know, your hiring processes, or external traffic or, you know, creating wholesale partnerships, influencer relationships, excetera of all of those different things you can be doing, which of them if you focus your time on will provide which lever will provide an outsized return greater than the others. That’s where you start to focus your time. That’s why for our business, it’s all about new products, new product launches, that’s where we’ve identified the lever, like, we touch that one, and bam, like massive growth can happen, and it can unlock new opportunities that we never would have experienced. Had we just been so caught up, and well, we’ve got to shave down a couple of percentage points off of our cost of goods sold. That’s well, good. And that could save us a few 100,000. That’s great. But a new new product line generate millions in revenue. So Dave, is there anything else that you took away?

David Hunt 31:29

Delegation, right, like every minute spent on a daily task that isn’t generating for us, then it’s time away from us growing the business? So I would just, I would just again, second Andrew’s point?

Josh Hadley 31:42

I love it. Time studies, time studies, time studies, it’s much easier said than done. But understanding where your time is going, is super crucial. So check out one more, well, go ahead. Let’s hear it.

Andrew Gilliland 31:55

So we have some work to do on this still. But we talked a bit about project managers and executive assistants, as it relates to administrative tasks. And organization, I believe this to be one of the biggest opportunities in Action Holdings right now is identifying if it’s the right time to bring someone in for that. So we’re gonna go on and really look at that under a magnifying glass to and determine if that’s a lever that will allow us to spend time on higher value activities.

Josh Hadley 32:29

So yeah, my follow up question to that is, how will you know if it is appropriate to hire a project manager or an executive assistant? Or any other role for that matter?

Andrew Gilliland 32:41

Yeah, really, really good follow up question. The way that we do most things is an ROI analysis. So we’ll look at the cost of bringing someone in versus the value of the new activities we can do through not spending time on the things that we’re offloading. So we’ll do an ROI assessment. And handle it that way.

Josh Hadley 33:07

Yep. Go back to that time study, right? Value. Yes. And what you could do instead, with those extra 20 hours a week, right, right, and what you could do is assign a value.

Andrew Gilliland 33:19

And if I can add, you know, Josh, we we met at CampEcom, at the beginning of the year, and what stood out to me about you was, first your public speaking abilities. But then, as I was talking to you, you’re explaining your processes and how you built your team. And I immediately knew that what you figured out is the next step in the pathway for our journey with Action Holdings. And I just really appreciate the way that you approach things. And it’s it’s opened up a way of thinking for me and what I can bring to Action Holdings that I certainly did not have, prior to this three hours that we’ve been able to spend together.

Josh Hadley 34:05

Well, I appreciate those. Those kind words there, Andrew. So long story short, and then Dave will ask you the same thing. But, you know, Andrew, was the last, you know, few hours of your time going through and digging into the strategies of your business. Was it worth it? And why?

Andrew Gilliland 34:26

In one word, yes. In in more words. A year from now, I will not be surprised if through just the key items that we’ve discussed here. It adds five or $10 million in revenues to our business, already off the ground and rolling and what we need is someone that’s in that seat that we’re moving towards, and that’s what this did. So, absolutely. I would have loved to get into even more details on a few things, but we’re self implementers mainly, so we’re able to take it and run with it.

Josh Hadley 35:03

I love it. What about you, Dave? Was the last few hours worth your time?

David Hunt 35:07

Yes. I mean, it’s a second everything Andrew just said yes. And I think it shed a lot of light on how we overcomplicate things. So I’m very much looking forward to hitting the ground running, starting as soon as this ends with trying to implement some of the things that we discussed today.

Josh Hadley 35:29

I love it. I love it. Well, gentlemen, this has been super fun. I appreciate you guys reaching out and having me do a strategy on it for you guys. And that’s just a friendly reminder to our listeners, like you could be in these guys’s seats, they said it was worth their time. Again, it takes a few hours. And we just talked about how valuable your time can be. But experiencing a mindset shift and and getting out of the weeds. And sometimes poking your head up once in a while can breathe a breath of fresh air into your business that you never otherwise would have been able to consider or thought of. So as we wrap things up here, Andrew, what is your favorite book, or most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Andrew Gilliland 36:15

My most influential book right now, which is because I go through different cycles. But I recently read the book, The Heart of Business by the former CEO of BestBuy, Hubert Joly, not sure how to pronounce his last name. But I’m naturally very much a human-first leader and his story and experience demonstrates how you can really use that approach to build a massive, successful business. So that’s my current, most influential.

Josh Hadley 36:53

I love it. Dave, what about you?

David Hunt 36:55

So I’m gonna give all the credit to my wife, Katie for this one, Atomic Habits by James Clear. I’m halfway through it right now. But it even that you talk about time habits. So I will definitely give a shout out to Atomic Habits.

Josh Hadley 37:12

Those are both fantastic book recommendations. Alright. Last question here is, what is it your favorite productivity tool or software tool that you’ve recently discovered? Possibly that you think is going to be a game changer?

Andrew Gilliland 37:26

Dave, you want to go first?

David Hunt 37:28

I’m gonna go with Asana. And I know that it’s it’s probably, you know, everybody’s like, Oh, Asana. But um, we recently started, I feel like using Asana to them, like the maximum robots ability it takes came with a lot of training. And it came with a lot of practice. But I am extremely happy with the way that our team uses Asana on that today.

Josh Hadley 37:52

I love it. What about you, Andrew?

Andrew Gilliland 37:54

Yeah, I have to say, you know, we’re always looking at all the new stuff, but we keep it pretty practical in terms of what we implement. So I’m going to go with Miro. And that’s been game changing for me in the company, because it allows you to visualize your processes in a way that is much more engaging than, say, a Google document. So Miro has been game changing. We put like our Amazon optimization system in there so that we can show and improve our processes for various things. And David actually introduced me to that, I believe, mid last year, and now I’m in there every single day.

Josh Hadley 38:37

I love it. That is a great recommendation. It’s all about those SOPs that we talked about, you want to talk about, you know, one of the value levers that you can pull in the business, your core capabilities, and the intellectual property that you create internally is one of the most valuable things, right. Because if you want to eventually exit, and you want a professional acquirer, like private equity firm to acquire you, they are not going to acquire you to work in your job. So if you can work yourself out of the job where you’re no longer working in the business, because you’ve documented your processes, that’s where your multiples will explode, and the value of your business shoots through the roof. So those are both some excellent recommendations. David, Andrew, any last words you guys would like to communicate to the audience?

Andrew Gilliland 39:25

David, do you have anything?

David Hunt 39:27

I’m just gonna say? Get Josh on your calendar? I can fully attest.

Andrew Gilliland 39:33

I’ll go with that one. And the other thing is just I encourage everyone listening to go and continue putting yourself out there and taking risks. Because I’ve learned that there’s a lot of things that we perceive to be risky that are actually more risky not to do so I just always like to keep people thinking big and anchor urge you to go out and do that thing that you may be afraid to do.

Josh Hadley 40:05

I love it. Great words of wisdom. Well, thank you both for your time today, and I look forward to seeing your brand 10x over the next few years. So thanks again for your time.

David Hunt 40:16

Josh. Appreciate it.

Outro 40:20

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