In this Throwback episode, Chad Franzen interviews business leader Josh, who shares his proven framework for rapidly enhancing business performance. Josh outlines four key drivers of growth: product innovation, hiring talented people, sales and marketing, and implementing effective operational systems. Drawing from his own entrepreneurial journey, Josh provides practical examples and actionable advice for each area. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on these core levers to achieve quick, sustainable results. The episode offers valuable insights and resources for entrepreneurs looking to improve their businesses, with Josh inviting listeners to connect for further guidance.
Chapters:
Introduction and Framework Overview (00:00:00)
Josh introduces Chad as the interviewer and outlines his four-part framework for enhancing business performance.
Product Innovation (00:01:50)
Josh discusses the importance of unique product innovation, sharing an example of educational posters during COVID-19.
Hiring Smart People (00:05:29)
Josh explains why hiring talented people is crucial, with examples of improving processes through expert team members.
Sales and Marketing (00:10:54)
Josh emphasizes sales and marketing as the lifeblood of any business, necessary before scaling other areas.
Operations and Implementing an Operating System (00:11:59)
Josh details the importance of operational systems for scaling, describing their meeting structure and management processes.
Getting Started with Operating Systems (00:15:47)
Josh gives advice on how to begin implementing an operating system, recommending resources and offering help.
Conclusion and Farewell (00:17:23)
Chad and Josh wrap up the episode and say goodbye to listeners.
Links and Mentions:
Meetings and Frameworks
L10 Meeting
4-1-1 Meetings
EOS Framework
Websites
Ecomm Breakthrough
Rise25
Books
The E-Myth
Transcript:
Josh 00:00:00 I have Chad Franzen here of rise 25, who has done hundreds of interviews with successful entrepreneurs and CEOs. We have flipped the script and he’s going to be interviewing me today. Welcome, Chad.
Chad 00:00:12 Hey, Josh, thanks. It’s great to be here. today, I would love to talk about your approach to, enhancing the performance of a business in your years as a business leader. What kind of framework have you developed where you can just step in and kind of implement ways to enhance the performance of a business pretty quickly.
Josh 00:00:28 Over the last few years, I think, as our own business has continued to grow in scale, and I needed to build out a leadership team, I needed to myself write down what I felt were the biggest drivers, needle movers, biggest levers that I can pull inside the business. And so it forced me to kind of like narrow it down to like, there’s a million different things that I could be working on with inside the business, right? I could be working on just HR in and of itself.
Josh 00:00:59 I could be working on marketing, social media. I could be working on, you know, accounting, finance. There’s the list goes on and on and on. Right. So what I decided to do is just create like four areas where if we focus on these four areas within our business and we make strategic decisions, this should be able to make an impact if we pull this particular lever. So that’s how I kind of identified these. And I have specific examples here that I’ll share with you that that walk through kind of why I decided like this is a core area of the business rather than, you know, maybe accounting for example, and finance, although important, you know, these are the four core things that I can move into a business, make changes, and then be able to see growth happen real quick. Does that make sense?
Chad 00:01:50 Yeah, absolutely. So the first one that you listed, of the four was product innovation. Tell me a little bit more about you know obviously it’s very important, but tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on it.
Josh 00:02:00 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 two 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 1300 different products at this point is that you need to bring something unique to the table. creating meta 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. Okay. 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 home school 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.
Josh 00:03:11 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 1 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 rooms, so to speak.
Josh 00:04:21 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. 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? 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 00:05:29 Sounds good. Sounds great. Hey, let’s talk about number two people. you like to bring bring on smart people and use them as your secret weapon?
Josh 00:05:37 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 can 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 are 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.
Josh 00:06:37 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. 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.
Josh 00:07:47 Well, as soon as we brought on, you know, this R&D specialist that was going to help me. He, you know, pushed me to say like, I need like a mathematical way and 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, I dislike Excel. I don’t it’s 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, Vlookup and macros, all of that good stuff.
Josh 00:08:44 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 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 ten 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.
Josh 00:09:53 And in hindsight, I should have done it much faster, because look at the look at 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 at 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 overstocked 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.
Chad 00:10:54 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 00:11:01 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 not. 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.
Josh 00:11:54 So it all comes back to sales and marketing.
Chad 00:11:59 Hey, you’re your fourth core area of performance enhancement is operations implementing an operating system. Tell me about that.
Josh 00:12:05 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.
Josh 00:12:58 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. The importance of this operating system, and this is something we have worked on a lot this year for our business. This has 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 without me or Becca needing to necessarily hold their hand every step along the way. We established a weekly leadership meeting. We call it our level ten meeting that’s taken from the EOS framework, and this is where we get together.
Josh 00:14:13 And on a weekly basis, we are 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 411 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 and coordinating with our team members during these 411 meetings. The 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.
Josh 00:15:19 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.
Chad 00:15:47 Hey, our 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 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 00:16:02 Yeah. Well, number one, I would listen to, you know, some of the podcast episodes that we have here on Ecom Breakthrough. because we are going to be interviewing a lot of people in that operation space. And ultimately a lot of these people that will be interviewing are going to have courses, are going to be experts in that field.
Josh 00:16:21 So subsequently, you know, I would I would look into scalable, right? I would look into the sharpen 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? 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.
Josh 00:17:17 We do free audits all the time. So reach out to me at Josh at Ecom breakthrough.com as well.
Chad 00:17:23 Okay. Hey Josh, it’s been great to talk to you and look forward to doing another episode very soon.
Josh 00:17:27 Likewise, Chad. Thanks again.
Chad 00:17:29 So long everybody.
