i think the easiest way to structure operations is first list out the things the desired outcomes that need to happen i don't get a lot of questions about operations they just become obvious that they are a problem within a lot of the people that uh that we help serve and so it's interesting because now that we work on the allen side with resellers it's very clear who's good at operations and who is not and that is typically based on the size of the business the people who are better at operating are the ones who make more money um and this is kind of one of the the unspoken secrets of the entrepreneurial world especially within the internet space that we live in now it appears to be all about marketing and sales and legion and acquisition and although those are very important things and you have to start there it becomes very clear that typically the entrepreneur has that promotion type of character traits and doesn't dedicate the time to study the operational components of the business which typically are the reasons that someone is or is not successful and so i wanted to give you at least my simple mental framework for how i think about operations in general and scaling operations and so for the vast majority of people listening here um you're probably under eight figures um some are under seven uh but most people are listening this are probably business owners in the multiple uh 100 000 a year to you know several several million a year and so for that so this is who i'm talking to within that context i think the easiest way to structure operations is first list out the things the desired outcomes that need to happen all right um and i think of business very much as a pipeline which is from click to close to resell right and um resell within different businesses can be retaining them so that they pay again uh or could be a variation of ascension but when i say click it means how do i get someone to click and that's just within the internet environment click to opt-in to schedule to show to buy to then ultimately want to buy again and so uh if you have like with our gyms a four-step sales process or three-step sales process that's happening uh there are clear activities that need to happen right and so in the beginning you will have your front-end sales and so you need to list that as one of the activities right because the objective would be to sell them the activity is to take the call next you'd have the nutrition orientation which would be the next time you'd meet with them so then you need to allocate how many of those you're going to need based on your current inflow it's the nice thing is is that there's a ratio of for every 10 customers we need to do four of these two of these two of these in one of these right and so what you can do is once you realize what the outcomes are you can list out all of the activities that are required so for a typical client we might know that it takes about two minutes per client per day and if we know that a coach has three hours uh like we want to say winner kappa coach at 100 then we know that that coach is going to be able to do that within x amount of time right and so then we book that time on that person's day and so what happens is what you should do when you're creating your company is when you're creating each of the roles that are going to support you you need to look at a calendar and look at what the times of day that this person is going to be working and what they're going to be doing with each hour of their day and so you simply take the activities in the allocated time that they need to work and place those on their calendar and that's honestly all there is to it all right so i'm going to give you an example to hopefully flesh this out a little bit but within uh within an online fitness business which many of you guys are operating right now um there's really four if if demand gen is being taken care of right so if legion is being taken care of and lead nurture is being taken care of and i'm saying that because it'll make the example simpler but also because that's what we do in our company for gyms is uh if those two things are taken care of then there's really not a lot that needs to happen right so first you need to have first sales calls right to get new customers talking to prospects then you need an onboarding all right that onboardings will be typically a nutrition orientation and also walking through the app and the tech and the things that need to happen um and and that's it right uh the third thing that will need to occur will be some sort of ascension conversation which is going to sell them into continuity all right so that's number three now every customer is going to have one of these things right and so if you're selling here it is you're selling 10 people a week then you need to if you're going to if you're going to maintain that flow then if you know that your front end sale is 30 minutes your nutrition appointment is 30 minutes and then your ascension is 30 minutes then for every client that you're bringing in you have an hour and a half per week that's going to be allocated right now you can divide that up between different people but the keys to scaling is that eventually it becomes too much for one person to do all of those activities and then you start blocking entire pieces of that type of activity to the next person right and so i'm going to continue with the example after that the only other activity uh that's gonna be there would be uh either recruiting coaches right and obviously the fulfillment and so uh let's say that the average customer is gonna take five minutes today i said two earlier but let's just say it's five minutes today right and if somebody has uh uh whatever it is five minutes is a lot let's say say two for math sake so 200 minutes if you had 100 clients per day is what's going to be allocated so that's what it is three three hours and you know 20 minutes so you look at someone's schedule now that's obviously in a perfect scenario um but i'd look at one of my coaches schedules and say okay we're going to do 90 minutes in the morning and we're going to do 90 minutes in the afternoon and we're gonna block those times out so just like that we had eight hours a day now i have five hours left what else do i want this person to do well i probably want them to take the onboarding uh conversations with uh the new customers who are coming in right this is a coach and i know that if we generate uh 10 new customers a week on average uh then that's going to take five hours per week which means i can block one to two hours a day for that and be totally fine right so i might block now this is where availability becomes interesting because if you just do it at noon every day the new customers might not be able to make that time right and so i might have uh you know slots on monday wednesdays and fridays uh at one time and then tuesdays and thursdays at another time and that way it gives them some different times to select from right but again we have our daily activities now that you know for that coach is going to be the fulfillment that's ongoing we might also have them do the nutrition orientation which would be an hour or two hours per day right so if we have an hour let's say an hour per day so now we've got four of their eight hours that have been taken now we've got four more hours that can be used by this person so now we have options do we want this person to create content do we want this person to do outreach do we want this person to uh gosh i mean whatever i mean do we want to expand this person's capacity right so there's or we would know that this person's currently at 50 utilization now if you flip that and then think well maybe this person can take some of the exit meetings right so this is uh maybe this person can take some of the content now this is strategic questions not operational questions but i'm saying this is how you structure it operationally it's like okay if we're selling 10 people a week then we need to have uh 10 halfway conversations where we're going to send them into continuity and then we'll also maybe have transformation meeting which is the end where we take the pictures and all that kind of stuff so if you know each of those meetings takes another 30 minutes each per customer if we know that we get 10 new customers per week then we know that's going to be another hour so 10 hours per week total so that's another two hours per day assuming that they're working five hours a week and so now we're at six hours per day of work all right now that's if someone's being perfectly efficient i would still expect people to be perfectly efficient because i think you don't you get what you tolerate um and so that would be six hours a day for a coach now at that point this coach is handling uh basically everything post the initial sale right they're managing the ongoing fulfillment they're managing the onboarding activities for these new customers and they're managing the back end meetings with them uh to convert them into continuity right and so all of these things put together uh would create a role within the business and so my my my ask or my recommendation for you is if you haven't done this activity it provides you immense clarity in understanding what are the different activities that need to occur in the business to make more money and then once you have the list of the activities then you know how long each of the activities could take and then the only variable that will dictate um how many of them you have is what your inflow is right and so if you know what your inflow is and you know what your base of customers is and the num and your attrition you can very accurately back into what a an ideal day looks like for each of the roles within your business also the bigger you get the more you will find inefficiencies where you're starting these partial roles they're getting full-time pay for half-time work right and so this allows you to be more efficient because you can say hey i know you're only at 40 utilization why are you telling me that you're too busy right now why are you telling me that i need to hire another coach what else are you doing that is not within these parameters now if someone then says well i'm doing this this and this then it's like oh now either they'll be founded at things like things that are useful and you know value producing or they won't be many times they're not but that's not because the person who's who your employee is doing this out of you know nefarious intentions they're not trying to be malicious they're not trying to hurt your business it's simply because a lot of people just don't even know it's valuable right and so they they're they're trying to work they're trying to provide value but a lot of times they just don't get how like they just a lot of times they jump into the bigger picture or why you're not having someone do something right but if the thing that they're doing is is a core activity like i got to check in on these people i got to add them to this uh it takes this long to get the documents back or you know sometimes we have these past password issues then you can see is this something that we can fix operationally within an additional process or is it something that we can um you know ex either throw out and then get this person to refocus and then increase how much work they're doing by by adding more clients to their roster etc and so um all this to say this is how i've thought about operations is just in terms of activities and units of time and then expected inflow and so based on those three variables of this is how many people are coming in these are the activities that need to happen and this is how long they should take then it allows you to account for all the things that need to happen in the business and will ultimately allow you to have a more efficiently run shop now i guarantee you that because of the headline that i had operations redundant this will be one of the least listened to podcasts out there but it is the reason that the people who make the most money make the most money and i just cannot tell you like the amount of people who have access who have tried to copy our stuff at gym lunch and and and and are 1 10th 120th the size of what we are and uh guys just like it's it's the boring work it's the it's the it's the rolling your sleeves up it's the repetitive work it's the meetings and training your team on improving how good they are doing the things that is ultimately the thing that's going to propel a company and those things are based on culture and tolerance of the leader and so um i just want to leave you with that so if you feel like you're constantly overwhelmed and you don't feel like you have transparency into what your people are doing you're like what are they doing all day this is the activity that you can do that will give you immense clarity and transparency to what their actions are so you can also restructure the business to make the most money and also find inefficiencies or additional tasks that you're not accounting for that they are doing which are either revenue generating or requirements or they're totally worthless activities that they're simply doing because they just don't know any better and so um highly recommend doing it and if you don't know where to start the easiest thing to do is have your employees take a time study all right so a time study is very simple you have an excel sheet you have every 15 minutes of the day and you just have them write down what they did for each of those 15 minutes now they're going to think that's going to take a lot of time you are never more efficient than when you do a time study i probably every time i do one i tell myself i'm going to do it again like forever and then i don't but but you will literally be more efficient in your work than you ever will because you know that you're being held accountable to it all right so um it's like whenever layla and i need to go and take a close look at apartment the first thing we do like these numbers aren't adding up this feels weird this feels heavier this feels light whatever it is we go we ask them to times today for a week and then we look at their activities you can also very quickly see where there's right where people are like ah responding to emails i'm like why do you have three hours of emails is there something i don't know about how long does it take to reply to an email how many emails are you getting every day and so that's how you can start peeling the layers back and seeing if someone's being dishonest which happens right and then they're in it because they want to keep their job and i get that but that being said it's not useful for the business and so um that is how if you want to get a baseline of like okay well now i know what all the activities are you can deem whether they're valuable or not and you can deem uh whether you want them to keep doing it or whether they're expanding their time uh sorry expending their activities to meet the amount of time that they're supposed to be working all right so um that is my my quick uh that's that's kind of my mental framework for how i look at operations and how to uh structure them for different roles within the company is first look at the the outcomes that you want the activities you need to generate uh that that outcome how long those activities take per customer per unit and then you can extrapolate out based on the volume based on the inflow what each role needs to do and then at what points you will have breaking points where somebody will become overwhelmed and you need to create a new role all right so um anyways i hope that was valuable for you hope that made sense otherwise have a happy thursday uh happy corona happy quarantine and i hope you are adapting uh because you have no choice but to do so otherwise all right lots of love catch you guys [Music] you