The Ops Authority

if you're hearing you're a business builder then you are always in pursuit of clients and what's behind client acquisition it is a sales cycle cutting it in half sounds pretty impossible right well that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot and they used their tool hubspot tool an ai tool called breeze it tailor every customer interaction without losing that personal touch which is so important and ai is doing amazing things like this we already know but hubspot hasn't built in their results were really incredible their click through rates jumped by twenty five percent their qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing page if you're interested in this you wanna go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help you grow your service based business this is the ops authority podcast where my mission is to break down the backside of your business so you can take the right actions to grow and scale hey i'm natalie gin a small business operations expert and i'm gonna give you a front row seat to real solutions that will help you reach the vision that you have for your business all while equip you to put out those inevitable pesky fires and those fears that pop up listen in for strategies to grow your team craft the systems and processes that you need for your business and establish business foundations that you may have skipped over i know you're ready to do really big things so let's do it together hello hello friends welcome back to the ops authority podcast today we are recording episode number two hundred and eighty six and like i say nearly every single week it is such a privilege such an honor and i'm proud of you for being a listener and i'm proud of me for showing up here for this many episodes to just share and part what is on my mind what i'm seeing what is going on in the industry the space what it looks like to be a servant oriented service provider and even a freelancer if you're listening in and those titles resonate with you i'm just so grateful that you have showed up today and i also have a very special treat for you because well i have to imagine that you enjoy coming here to this podcast and listening to me it's just a really extra special treat when you hit me and then one of the people that i admire that has been influential for me in my career and in this whole space of navigating entrepreneurship and so i'm gonna be sharing a special friend with you today who has wisdom that i need and i know you need it's a message that i have heard before and it is so valuable for everybody who is listening in today because this specifically ties you guys know i vet every single person i bring on we get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of exhausting and awful pitches and the people that i bring on very rarely ever pitch me i'm the one that is pitching them to come on my podcast and that's exactly what is happening today i do that because i want the people who are talking to you that i am sharing airspace which sounds very fancy but i want the people who are coming here and i'm sharing space with you and with them to understand what you do and how you do this and today our guest linda to do is someone who actually understands what it's like to be a service provider her business like my business and your career have all taken lots of twist turns an honor to be able to pull some of the greatest knowledge and frankly intellectual property that linda has and be able to share that with you in hopes that you take one nugget or all the nuggets and really put to use every single time i'm around linda not only is her presence and impactful for me she guides me and leads me without being my quote unquote leader she's pure that i look up to and someone who's got a body of knowledge and side of her and shows up holistically and whole hearted to make sure that we grasp it and do something with it i've seen linda on stages i have inside of her community which i'll share with you here in a second and we have been box our friends for quite some time so without further ado let me introduce you to linda professional biography linda to do is a lead generation strategist and the founder of the mixer mind a dynamic community designed for established entrepreneurs who value connection over competition with a background in top performing pharmaceutical sales she brings a rare blend of strategy intuition and people savvy to every conversation that she sparks this is exactly why she's going to be talking to us today about the topic of visibility let me wrap this up really quick she's been featured in forbes and she's trusted by platforms that you probably know like cubicle to ceo and jordan gill the system saved me podcast linda is the go to expert for business owners who want to grow their network with intention not hustle another thing i pull out of here and i'm like yes this is why you're here at linda her passion for list building community led growth and meaningful relationships turns visibility into velocity and casual contacts into collaborations that convert girl you know i love some liberation welcome to the show thank you so much what a beautiful way to introduce me i'm so excited to be here in natalie well you are gonna be a gift to everybody listening in like i i've already you know toot your horn and i will do it all over again because you have something i remember being in the audience a couple years ago when i heard just a little bit of this conversation and i was inspired and affirmed to be honest because of are similarities in the way that we people i'll just make that a verb so anyway let me introduce the topic that we're gonna be talking about today and linda has something that she calls the magic match girl you do love a liberation like me i love that but the magic match and that's what she's going to be sharing herb wisdom on today but in essence this conversation is all about how to gain visibility with less effort and i wanna take just a few minutes before i turn it over to linda to kinda just set the stage of what it looks like as a service provider as an operator even a director of operations you know in these types of roles we're not looking for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of clients right we're not looking to do significant list building if you happen to be a service provider that typically describes kinda where we are we are looking for some close connections to be able to serve them in a deep capacity so we're not looking for necessarily volume but it is very very very important that we are looking for real values based connections from people so the magic match is going to be able to help a lot of people whether you are what i just described or you are one of those people who are listening today who may be a business owner or may have you know shifted or navigated to a new path where you are looking for a one to committee model where you're looking to bring in lots and lots and lots of people but the reason that i want to be intentional with this time with linda is to affirm and to let you guys know that we all need magic matches and i don't think we spend enough time figuring out who those magic matches are this is what linda encourages me and inspires me to really look for because it's easier to look around and say i wanna be connected to this person or i wanna be connected to this person and you can do so but is it truly like magic match quality right or is it gonna be something that's really more superficial and more transient in nature and i've had all of these types of relationships what i love about linda and what she's gonna share is there is a personality piece of this that brings awareness to me right like who am i what kind of personality do i have and then how do i synergistic pull the right people into me from a personality perspective because that amplifies not only the speed but the quality of the relationship that i'm able to build if these people that i'm leading into are truly magic matches magic duh magic really really really takes over in a much faster way and guess what then they're able to spread my message right or they're better able to mentor me in a faster way so anyway i don't wanna steal the limelight here but i wanted you to know why linda is here today visibility is one of those things as a service provider that takes a lot of energy linda i were having a private conversation yesterday about visibility for our own businesses and where we're exploring and thinking about putting in energy as far as like tactics and modes and models of the way that we can be visible when you narrow all of these different ideas and tactics out and you pull them back to who who should you be connecting with that's where you start talking about this on a people level and if you can find the right people your visibility efforts don't have to be wide and far they can be much more narrow and focused which of course is going to amplify the result and the quality of what you're able to get so service providers i hear you i know you it is visibility is an exhausting i'm gonna say it it's a chore right in our natural state the the way that we love to show up for people is to serve them so visibility feels like a very different part of our brain but linda has a solution when we start looking for magic matches that make this much more organic and natural and i am so excited to have linda to hear today to talk about the magic match thank you natalie i appreciate so much so you are here today to learn about the magic match and how to gain more visibility with less effort because you wanna propel your business forward but i will tell you the power of personal experience it's rooted in powerful marketing so basically what i'm trying to say is in order to build a meaningful cannot options you need to allow people to experience you because when people experience you they trust you but before we dive in i wanted to share a little bit about my time and pharmaceutical sales i learned the disc framework to understand how to better understand physicians how to communicate with physicians and also how to present and sell to physicians this allowed me to be more effective when it comes to one on one sales and less calculating and a little bit more authentic understanding personalities has become the through line of my success and so today i'm gonna talk to you about how you can use that for your business as well so here are three common myths that often hinder business owners from forming aligned partnerships time constraints confidence and outreach and finding the right partnerships maybe you're dealing with one of those right now possibly all of them investing and building relationships it might feels time consuming at first because i do think most people think it's time consuming but it's actually a strategic move that's gonna pay off immensely it honestly is kinda of leap frog into visibility in my opinion so finding the right partnerships will amplify your marketing efforts through personal experiences and recommendations fostering stronger connections and enhancing business success and today i'm gonna introduce you to the arc framework acknowledge relate and collaborate we're gonna kick it off with acknowledging yourself it all begins with a deep understanding of who you are and knowing your strengths this kinda takes me back to my disc framework days and so if you know if your task oriented are people oriented introverted or extroverted you're gonna understand how you leverage your strengths and how to communicate inform deep connections with others so if you imagine a grid if you think the top of the four grid so there's four different grids okay well four different quadrant i should say if you look at the top the top of the grid is going to be people who are action oriented then the bottom of the grid are going to be people who are a little bit more thoughtful with their decisions then if you slice it up and you go to the right side of the grid these are people oriented and if you focus on the left side these are task oriented so in a nutshell your personality is gonna fall into one quadrant over the other you are gonna actually be people oriented and fast paced or you could possibly be more thoughtful with your decision making and a little bit more task oriented and if you take an actual assessment you will have qualities that reflect all four of these personalities or all four of these grids right but the thing is is if you take an actual assessment it's gonna ask you so many questions in a different way that you're gonna ultimately end up in one of the quadrant over the other we're gonna look at this each a little bit separate so you can understand each different quadrant number one is the powerhouse personalities these entrepreneurs or service providers are fast action takers and more tasks are oriented they prioritize results they like to maintain control their fast action they trust clear benefits strong outcomes and they're confident this is beyonce in my opinion so they in order to actually collaborate with these individuals you're going to want to provide clear communication about your collaboration proposal highlighting the benefits and outcomes you need to also respect their desire to be in control give them options and allow them to take the lead in making the decision the next personality is still fast but these are people oriented people and i call them the passionate personality they prioritize creativity relationships positive energy they trust being an authentic they love recognition and they love collaborative feedback this is the oprah free of the personalities these individuals focus on building a genuine connection and rapport before they actually collaborate with people so be prepared to move once they show interest because they're fast action takers and move fast but i will tell you this personality you need to kinda warm up their relationship before you ask them to collaborate in partner because they really want to trust you just like natalie does before they put you in front of their audience i think i am this profile by the way you think you are that is exactly like me and it's funny that you mentioned because we people hard and you'd mentioned that before yes it's so i will raise my hand to that too i am definitely the passionate personality next and this actually this next personality is my favorite they tend to be some of my best friends personal life and an online business too but this is the pleasant personality pleasant personalities are are a little bit more thoughtful with their decisions but they're also very people oriented they prioritize sincere relationships quality over quantity and they don't like to be pressured so any type of low pressure approach to them will feel really good they trust low risk they love to look at testimonials and predictability this personality you know in order to collaborate with them they want to take the time to build a relationship first they also want you know once the trust is established it's really important that you nurture this relationship for a long term because they can definitely tell that if you're just like doing something for almost like calculating like or a quid pro quo type thing that's not something they're interested in they're definitely interested in values alignment and long term relationships they're also the type of people that if you have them over your house they're gonna stay after and clean your dishes after they had dinner they're just the best people next step is the precise personalities these are more thoughtful decision makers but task oriented folks and so they prioritize accuracy details structure and they love clear data proof to back up claims and logic so if you're gonna collaborate with this individual you really have to set them up for success by providing detailed information about the collaboration swipe copy for support a promotional calendar and you want to respect their need for accuracy precision by answer ensuring that all ask specs of the collaboration are well planned and executed so when you look at all the personalities don't worry too much about who is this personality when you're thinking about collaborations and partnerships the big takeaway from this is if you do everything at like a high level you can set everybody up for success when it comes to collaborations and partnerships so what does that mean as long as you're providing options for people and you're building a connection first and you're also nurturing that relationship and setting them up for success with detailed information calendars sweat copy and everything that can set them up for success you're basically gonna communicate and support this individual to support you and it's going to work out beautifully let's take a look a little bit about task oriented versus people oriented so task oriented people they're gonna prioritize efficiency and results by showcasing expertise and leadership and high impact events our buddy l is a great example of this so what is she gonna do when she attends an event when she's task oriented natalie ellen is actually gonna be a speaker out event usually right but what she does is she doubles down on her visibility exposure and she'll host maybe a mastermind the day after the event and so now she's turning one visibility opportunity into two so she maximizes the visibility and credibility with her industry and this is something you can do if your task oriented as well as you can double down on opportunities and think out outside of the box on how you can do that people oriented people might do something a little bit different i see these people as super connectors they bridge gaps between other individuals and use their emotional intelligence to forge meaningful connections and collaborations so what they could do at an event for example and i've actually done this before i'd be curious if you've done anything similar natalie but before i went to the ka job live conference i figured out who else was going to the conference and then i hosted a breakfast right before the events we could all walk in together but i did it for two reasons i wanted to secure time with certain individuals that were also attending the event and i also wanted to connect them with each other before the event started so it set us up for success i'd be curious if you've done anything at events or even in person or virtual that's very similar you know what's interesting for i'm putting myself in the event space and i think i'm more like after the fact very process driven afterwards like i at some of the you know events that we've been at together i came back and had a couple of pages in my notebooks of the people that i met something that i remembered about them and then i kinda have like a filing system off the back end where i follow up with people and i'm gonna leverage those relationships in different ways so i feel like mine is more after the event i will say during and i i i don't think i've ever done anything before an event and i'm a very like i can tell like i am growing more to be more of an am than just a straight ex when i was younger i think i was like full ex today that's a little bit different and so maybe that's why i'm not doing as much beforehand but while i'm at the event once i start to like feel out for who my people are it's really important for me to like do dinner with a small group or you know make sure people feel included that's important to me especially if there a synergy between us like i'll be sure to say oh let's grab dinner tonight let's go have a drinker let's do something so that i can bring those people together absolutely and i've actually capitalized on post event strategy as well similar to you i had pulled together like a virtual mixer one time from an event that i did and i got everybody's names an email address is and i coordinated this event so we could check in like a month after the event and see how things were going so you can definitely think of pre and post ideas definitely leverage your strengths and how that works out for you and the idea is find people that you have a values alignment with and stay connected with them and see how you can develop that relationship further because if you are coming to in person events there's nothing better that's gonna break down barriers and develop trust quicker than being in person with people absolutely that's why linda we talk a lot here on this podcast and with our students and our audience about there's been a big redirection i would say over the last two to three years about talking to people in your local area right because you're doing more face to face and more you know that connection is just so it's just it's un beat from a time perspective it just it collapses everything so it really does i agree and it's funny that you brought up am a little bit ago because i'm gonna take a look at ex versus introverts but i too feel like i'm more of an am at these days too when i was full on ex when i was younger so ex birds typically thrive in social settings and may naturally gravitate towards taking on more tasks or engaging activities that involved interactions with others they almost can hold more capacity for it in a way and so they draw energy from social interactions and they feel more energized when they're involved in various activities one time after covid i went to an event i was just so excited to be around people again i can barely sleep which is funny but anyway introverts on the other hand they may prefer to conserve their energy and feel more comfortable quieter solitary environments so they're gonna be a little bit more selective of what they decide to do and not do and maybe they decide not to go out to dinner that night and to order dinner in to conserve that energy they're gonna focus on activities that allow them to recharge and reflect so i'm curious if you've ever thought if you're introverted or extroverted it sounds like both natalie and i have landed on were a bit of both these days but it is something to think about when you're going to an event and how you go all in or not next we're gonna talk about relate this is the r in the arc and so equally important as so what's really actually this might be the most important thing in business is understanding your ideal clients so how do you learn more about your ideal clients you're gonna learn more through interviews surveys polls you can uncover clients desires needs and language to use on your sales page to communicate with them to sell to them and by tailoring your approach to resonate deeply with those you serve you'll build meaningful connections so let's take this a little bit further you don't know how many times i've asked somebody about their ideal client whether i was creating a quiz for them or whether i was trying to help with collaborations for them and they really aren't sure on who their ic aca is and you really need to know who your ideal client is so you can leverage collaborations and partnerships long term so very first thing you need to do is interviews one on one interviews or case studies or i loved zoom interviews back in the day like just one on one interviews because you could take that transcript and you could put it through otter ai and you could get a ton of great information to use but a lot of people don't like to do that so i think surveys are probably the next best thing but really asking people for detailed answers because a lot of times if you do a survey you're gonna get back like one word and that's not gonna help you at all you can also use polls in instagram you can do polls and your emails you could do like a this or that and make it fun but i will tell you so i live in seattle and i use the starbucks example all the time but starbucks puts their clients at the head of the table they will never roll anything out if it wasn't something that their own client said that they wanted and so when they served up the pumpkin spice latte people are just lining up out the door to get it this is what you want to do for your clients you need to know exactly who they are what do they identify with and what do they want from you so you can serve that so you work backwards from your client it's that time new month new podcast recommendation and this is from a peer that is also inside of the hubspot podcast network i'm recommending the podcast titled inclusion and marketing it's hosted by sonia thompson and she digs into important topics to us i know that our community loves and really resonates with her content expertise and that is in belonging in customer experience as well as diversity and it also teaches us how you can practice inclusive marketing within your own effort so whether this is for your business or the way that you can really help and build diversity and inclusion inside of your clients businesses you're gonna learn that by listening to sonia podcast every single week what i love about sonia podcast is she's got some great advice she also interview some really enterprise guests and then the other thing that i think is so fun and i think you will too is she looks at active marketing campaigns that are going on and she reviews them and is able to give us perspective on how inclusive or not they are so if this topic is interesting to you then listen to inclusion and marketing wherever you get your podcast are you ready to shift gears in your operations career if so then it is time for you to join us for the test drive the d this is an event where you're gonna get a real behind the scenes look at our director of operations certification program you're gonna be able to discover the strategic mapping model and how that's transformed the careers of over nearly four hundred and fifty ops professionals just like you this is gonna be your chance to peak behind the curtain and really understand exactly how our program can elevate your ops career we've done it a lot and we're ready to do it alongside you join us live reserve your spot today at the ops authority dot com forward slash test drive we want you to stop dreaming about success and drive it join us today so finding the right partnerships so without clear understanding again without a clear understanding of who your person is there's no way you can actually partner with people so the ideal clients come first and everything should be revolved around your ideal client anyways and we'll get to that in a little bit but why this matters is because when you form partnerships that align with your ideal client you can now target and leverage borrowed audiences that match your ideal client let me take that back a little bit basically i was actually talking to a client the other day who have known for a very long time i always thought that she served coaches and course creators come to find out she was telling me actually linda a lot of people that come through my program are actually doctors and maybe their therapist turned coach or their academics and they have a doctor in front of their name and this changed the ballgame for everything with her because prior to knowing this she was actually showing up trying to be on podcasts that served more coaches right well now she knows like if these are the individuals and she needs to leverage a borrowed audience she now needs to find people that also have an audience similar to that so she was able to get a lot more clarity on who she should have in front of her audience who she should be pitching to be on different podcasts and leveraging that borrowed own audience okay so we're gonna get into the collaborate and i'll talk more about examples of collaboration but collaboration you know you really need to establish solid mutually beneficial collaborations to make it a triple win so a win for you a win for the other entrepreneur and definitely the win for the client and people must experience you firsthand before you can create a collaboration so basic warm pitches is start by reaching out to someone you already know and if the connection has cooled re kendall that relationship before you make a request a cold pitch you can leverage this differently if you there's somebody that you know you want to partner with or collaborate with but you have no relationship with them whatsoever you need to think about your network and say who has been on that podcast that could actually send over a note to put in good feedback for me so then you lean trusted peers or mentors to help open the door for you and so you turn a cold lead into a warm lead by leveraging your network okay so now that you know warm leads versus cold leads and how to leverage that you need to find the right partnerships for your business again you need to really focus on a triple win so a win for you a win for your peer and a win for your shared audience a great example of this was i put out a quiz years ago and i think this is actually i can attribute this sole question to all of my success i've had in the online business you know since i've started an online business but basically i asked my audience what do you identify with and i said you identified with a coach course creator service provider i give examples fifty percent of my audience identified as a coach then the next highest i think it was like thirty five percent identified as a course creator why is this important because now that you know who your audience is and what they identify as that is the north star on the decisions you make to the mastermind you join to the in person events you go to to the conferences you go to right so when i decided to go to ka job in austin it was because there was a decent chunk of course creators that was in my audience when i was there i got to know the podcast host funny enough he ended up on my flight back to seattle there's a ton of people that work in ka job in seattle which i had no clue but i developed a relationship with him i pitched him and i ended up on that podcast so that was an intention i set because i knew i wanted to get on that podcast because it was filled with course creators so i want you to start making great business decisions and get roi for your own business through knowing who your ic aca is three people you can partner with today by the way this is so easy and it's right under your nose but it's peers clients and mentors and this is where we get into the magic match so when you have pure like natalie and i there is deep trust that is there natalie has trusted me to come in front of her audience to share my wisdom and insights you earn that you don't just get that right same thing goes with your own clients you've literally helped your own clients create a beautiful transformation so there's deep trust with your clients you have helped them go from a to b and make a beautiful transformation so your clients are gonna be people who really wanna encourage other people to meet you and they'll show up for you the other is mentors if you're earlier in your journey and you haven't quite yet have great clients that can speak on your behalf or peers that you've developed it through the years you can also leverage mentors back when i first started an online business i would give testimonials to people who i was in mastermind with those testimonials would end up on their sales pages then i would also shout them out on instagram or share the testimonial on instagram and i would tag them all of a sudden they would res share it in front of their audience which could be like fifty thousand people and now i was leveraging that platform to get in front of their audience right so you can use that by being an a plus plus student go through your own transformation create a testimonial and show up for your mentor because that too creates a lot of trust and by doing that and making them look good if you wanna pull the card later and be like can you help me or can you share this they're more likely to do it right or maybe they're doing it without realizing it by putting your testimony on the sales page or res sharing your instagram story with their community okay so where do you get the magic match it's when you have a client that turns into a pure that might have been a mentor or it could have been a mentor of yours that now hires you so their a client and because of your time together you guys have now become peers that is typically what happens to me when i create my magic matches typically like natalie you were mentor to me ellen was a mentor to me and it was funny i'll share ellen yu story because this was a beautiful example of how this happened but she was a mentor to me i listened to her podcast i pitched her to be on her podcast she had me on we talked about quizzes this is back in twenty twenty one i believe she hired me to create her quiz so now she's a client and through all this time together we've worked a lot together we are now friends so we are now peers so she is my magic match and because of this we've spent years together so there's a lot of trust that's built so how can you also leverage your personality type with magic match sometimes you just kind of vibe really well with people who are similar to you like natalie and i we might have the same personality right so we really really have a values alignment and so those individuals are great magic matches too or people that are next to you so if you're fast paced other people who are fast paced if you're people oriented other people that are people oriented they're really gonna be a values alignment and you can leverage those personalities to do partnerships and collaborations so your job today is to write down three people in your network who are your magic match and reach out to them to see if they wanna collaborate and partner i will tell you before i wrap this up and go back to natalie is there's nothing more viral than one of your peers clients are mentors given you their full recommendation we are in a world with ai right now and recommendations mean more than anything so it's gonna be really important that you can get recommendations and i will say having a community or not can lead to your worst and best moments in life back when i started my community to get the mix or mind i literally just invited about twenty five people into the small community to start collaborations and partnerships and to support each other and about a month after i did my soft launch or my beta launch i was diagnosed with cancer and this was not something that was on my bingo card that year at all and so i had to undergo a couple surgeries and radioactive iodine treatment and my community showed up for me tenfold and what i thought they were there for like collaborations and partnerships they really became my lifeline because they not only helped with calls on zoom but they raised money so i could get grocery deliveries because they knew i couldn't carry groceries i used some of that money for dog walking services that they truly became my lifeline and so that is how impactful creating partnerships can be for long term business and personal success linda i love all of this if you saw me looking down i was running a few notes as you were sharing first of all i'm gonna kinda chronological go through this because that's why my brain thinks but the overarching piece of all of what linda shared with us today with the arc framework is giving you a lens of how to incorporate emotional intelligence into your life and i don't know if linda you've ever even looked at it like this but all of these skills are helping people to people better and what do we mean by people better i mean when you're sitting across whether it's in person toe to toe or you know zoom to zoom your job as someone who is looking for these connections is to fill out that connection you know do you have that values alignment that linda talked about that we talk about a lot here whether you're looking for a client appear or a mentor like that's what you're looking for is that connection there and being emotionally intelligent is the most underrated and it's just not talked about enough and a lot of people just don't understand what that really means right and so for me in my own soft definition it's being able to flex to other people being able to uncover who they are to get them comfortable so that i can receive who they are and not a version that they think they should be when they show up because if you force people in that way then the obvious downfall is that you don't get the real then right and if you don't get the real them then there's not going to be a connection in the future the reason i'm sharing all of this is if you are looking for a particular type of client knowing like she said who your avatar is it's very very important so that you can pull that in you know the types of questions you know how to act how to be how to feel how to present yourself to make sure that that is truly what you're getting as service providers here we are not new to the game of getting into a business relationship supporting somebody in them turning out to be something you completely did not expect right and i think a lot of that comes to those initial meetings when you should be doing the vetting now there's a whole other conversation here about i always say have a quote that desperate attracts desperate so if you're in that state you're never gonna find the magic match but i wanted to pull your awareness to this arc framework really parallels increasing your emotional intelligence for being able to read to perceive to build bonds with people and it doesn't matter this really does bridge if you're looking for building connection with mentors peers or potential clients the other piece i wanted to bring out is that as service providers and i think a lot of people listening today linda are probably in that precise quadrant because it was really hard for me to kind of pick between passionate and precise and i do feel like and like you mentioned i i've got all of the quadrant sing a little bit to me i think the one that's the strongest is the passionate but the precise that system type focused in that precise quadrant is really representative of myself and of a lot of the people probably the majority of the people that are listening today so i just wanted to tie some things together here that if that is your personality we tend to be very structured we like process and we're very detailed people we are slow and we can be very ta right it's slower in task is that right yep okay so when we get into building relationships and even into the sales piece i'm going to reflect back to you and this is more coaching but for you to meet your magic match here your magic match can come in any of these quadrant right like just because your this doesn't mean that they have to be that the process that linda is walking us through is being aware of where you are and knowing that people fall in all of these and so you can narrow it down and be specific and say hey i want to pull in people from this quadrant fine i'm just telling you as you go to sell as you go to build relationships as you go to become more visible know that you've got a variety of different types and qualities of people that are gonna be showing up and it is always in our best interest to be flexible in the way that we present information to them and i talk about this a lot because i didn't know this about myself until later on but like you i'm very analytical i've got this great twelve step you know hiring plan and i would get on phone calls with prospects and talk about this hiring process being twelve steps i would take thirty minutes i would be so passionate i would be so excited and here i am talking to a powerhouse who's really really fast i lost them in the first five minutes and they're like not slow like honey i was ready to pay you in the first five minutes you don't need to give me the twelve set plan so i was attracting a lot of people like that and it took them reflecting to me because i didn't have all of this information that linda is fast tracking you with today i didn't have all of that so i just assumed that everybody needed to see the full plan needed to know every single thing i was going to do so that i could show value to them and it took so many of these powerhouse and passionate type personalities to come back to me and say i already trusted you like you already were the authority before we got on the call or in the first five minutes of the call so it really helped me to teach our students today how to be flexible when building these relationships and definitely in presenting the sale i have to do in in real life if i'm doing a discovery call for a hiring project i'm reading linda or i'm reading the person across for me to kinda assess what quadrant are they in do i need to go through the twelve set plan because you know what i was on a call last thursday and that lady needed a twelve set plan she was very detailed very methodical very kind of micro manager like very very very deeply curious and i love people like this but most of the people i talked to don't need to know exactly my plan they wanna know like very high level and so i have had to take my process and shorten the explanation of it but i basically have two different styles i can go long and deep or i can go short and very specific and i'm telling you that those teachings that i have shared with my community really resonate with what linda has shared and imparted with us today and then the last thing i want to wrap up with here is that the magic match as you were talking linda i think about my magic matches and one of those magic matches i think is how i met you which is jacqueline malone way back in the day so i worked for jacqueline at the very beginning of my business we're in a mastermind together probably before that or in a community together and then i started working for her and we have built a really strong relationship and that magic match is really awesome it made it very easy for her because she knew organically and wholesome who i was holistically excuse me who i i mean i think i'm wholesome but let's go back to holistic but anyway because she knew me because we did have that magic match she knew specifically who to introduce me to which by no surprise she introduce me to you right so anyway there's so many great uses for this and linda you have done a really good job of helping us to see exactly the variety and the versatility of the entire arc framework as well as these personalities and so anyway i'm really excited to share this i've been excited to share this with you all for a while because it's like i started this podcast it's so difficult and we have a lot of limiting beliefs because our style is so methodical and so structured we have limiting beliefs that we're not going to be able to make good relationships with or deep relationships or quantity whatever it is that you're looking for because the process can be long but this gives you a framework to be able to build flexibility into it to build clarity into it and then of course we just love information and the knowledge to be able to do this faster well because of all of the greatness it's no surprise that linda has put together an amazing community that continues to grow year over year which is hard to do these days in business but it's because of linda skills and abilities and what she's been able to see for herself and be able to pull a wide and diverse group of people together that still have a similar base and foundation and that is her mix mind i'm not necessarily here to pitch her mixer mind but i do wanna let you guys know that she has built a business that serves her natural skill set which is exactly what we are trying to do inside of the ops authority we are looking for service providers to take their skills and to monetize their skills that's exactly what linda has done and i have been a participant this year or a member i should say of the mix mind it's not open right now if you're listening to this live or when we publish this it opens once a year and if this is something that's been on your radar she's absolutely a great place for you to go there's plenty of service providers in there a lot of service providers inside of the mixer mind and it creates and cultivate a collaborative space for us to share ideas to dream to get feedback it's been really really great so i know it's not open right now linda but do you have a waitlist list that we could share with all of the listeners yeah absolutely i would love to have more natalie gin in the community so we are gonna open the doors in november however you can join the waitlist list and the waitlist list will get first d on the information on the events the magic mixer that you were a part of actually last year i'll be doing invites to those early bird to the waitlist list first so if you wanna get in the know and get the first invites to all the things definitely get on the waitlist list yeah and if i'm not mistaken last year the waitlist list almost sold out the entire mixer mind right fully well it was crazy the magic mixer events yeah the very first event that i did had a thirty five percent conversion rate so i sold a lot of seats during that event and then around that same time i actually opened the doors to the members that wanted to stay in the community and i was around a hundred members before i even had a chance to open the doors to the public and it actually sold out two days before the car closed days so yeah it was wild that is awesome i wish you the same amount of success this year and i look forward to continue to be a part of that linda thank you so much for being here today and thanks for sharing all of this i love the presentation and the content and the applicability to our audience and really to just humans in general so thank you for being here friend and i want you guys to head over to the mixer remind i'm gonna put that link here inside of the show notes as well so that you can head over and take a peek of that if that's of interest to you and linda thank you so much for being here today thank you so much natalie yes alrighty friends i will see y'all on the next or hear from you'll hear from me on the next episode of the ops authority podcast y'all have a great day thank you for investing just a little bit of time to listen to this episode of the ops authority podcast i am so grateful to be surrounded by real action takers like you who are invested in growing their business through operations will you have one more action to your to do list today visit the ops authority podcast dot com where you can join our community of business owners and other ops experts you're gonna hear from me in a week and in the meantime new big things on the backside of your business

if you're hearing you're a business builder then you are always in pursuit of clients and what's behind client acquisition it is a sales cycle cutting it in half sounds pretty impossible right well that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot and they used their tool hubspot tool an ai tool called breeze it tailor every customer interaction without losing that personal touch which is so important and ai is doing amazing things like this we already know but hubspot hasn't built in their results were really incredible their click through rates jumped by twenty five percent their qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing page if you're interested in this you wanna go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help you grow your service based business this is the ops authority podcast where my mission is to break down the backside of your business so you can take the right actions to grow and scale hey i'm natalie gin a small business operations expert and i'm gonna give you a front row seat to real solutions that will help you reach the vision that you have for your business all while equip you to put out those inevitable pesky fires and those fears that pop up listen in for strategies to grow your team craft the systems and processes that you need for your business and establish business foundations that you may have skipped over i know you're ready to do really big things so let's do it together hey hey friends welcome back to another episode of the ops authority podcast today we are entering in to episode two hundred and eighty five every single time i say that number i'm taking back a little bit and i'm thinking about natalie and the ops authority whenever i was recording episode five an episode fifty in episode one fifty and so today is kind of a testament to the grit that it took to kinda stick through all the waves the ups the downs the you know how much i've evolved and changed over my time as being in nor still of having this podcast so anyway big celebration for being at two hundred and eighty five lots of stories and tales and wisdom and lessons learned along the way and today in this episode we have a special guest who i feel has kind of been a silent partner behind me this entire time because we have been on this journey for probably around the same time and we were just talking pre hitting record about just what the journey has looked like and i know that we have both evolved so so much and that is absolutely normal there's no way that i would be content being natalie in twenty sixteen as i am in natalie in twenty twenty five and the same for my dear friend and today's guest kate ko little backstory story or little bio of kate she's a certified life and business coach and is the founder of success with seoul leveraging a decade of experience helping thousands of entrepreneurs build profitable sustainable and soul led businesses without burning out and you can tell those three words profitable sustainable and soul exactly why i've asked her to come onto this podcast today and of course it doesn't hurt that we have been along a similar journey sometimes tighter than others just in our journey of evolving but i mean you can see why she's here today she's a staunch advocate for justice and dismantling the patriarchy kate empowers her clients to achieve success through seo through funnels feminist systems and focusing on sustainable growth and here's the kicker without social media that is exactly that topic right there is exactly why i have kate on today of course i trust her which is another great reason to have her introduce my friend to you all today but the thing that has been really admirable for me is she does what she says and that's one of the values here at the ops authority because i feel like in this time and space and just the stress and the energy that goes into sales and into conversions into that marketing part of small business the delivery and doing what you say you're going to deliver can sometimes be a lonely place and so i'm only gonna partner with people who share that same value and kate is one of those people that not only do i think that i know that i've seen that and i trust that so that's why we have my friend kate joining us today to talk about something that is when i i'm just gonna call like a soap box moment because that truly is describes this topic that we're gonna introduce to you so first of all welcome kate i'm so glad that you're here thanks and i was blown away when you said two hundred and eighty five episodes i'm like oh my gosh that's a lot yes and fun little behind the scenes and side note is this morning i was talking about potentially bringing in a youtube component and our marketing manager says oh it's only taking you three and a half years to warm up to that and i'm like yeah if back way back in my baby business when esther was doing any kind of support that i needed esther was there for me i was like yeah it took esther about three years to get me to start the podcast so yeah we're about right on trend here so days wow yeah two hundred and eighty five really fun but kate i am excited to have you here so that you can share your wisdom you have walked the talk you have been able to capture that talk into a system that has helped not only me and my audience but now an even greater part of our audience into understanding how to build a service based business without being on social media before i turn this over to you to educate us and to show us the way i mean i know we could go round and round here too but it is such a mis number it's such a false hood that you need to be on social media all the time chasing a game that i know i fully know this is actually not going to help you win any faster or any better than doing it in some of the ways that you're gonna talk about today my audience is you know we're service based business providers we have been gifted a skill that we have been able to assess and create businesses and create a careers around and because we have that skill we monetize that skill through the service based business and when you're in into service based business we're not looking to serve hundreds and thousands of people we're looking to get maybe one maybe five clients at one time so just if you look at that i'm scared to use the word funnel but if you look at it like a funnel an upside down funnel where the top is bigger the bottom is smaller the bottom is obviously where you get that client where you convert that client but you need people to come into the broader part of that funnel if you will and to start having those conversations well if you're only looking for one to five people to make it all the way through that funnel if you reverse engineer that which my audience is amazing at because we're operators and we're great project managers if you reverse engineer that i mean what do we need like maybe fifteen or twenty conversations happening and as we start to have these conversations we get better and better and better and we're able to convert more so maybe it comes down to ten and i'm making these numbers up if you're looking for like to have five clients at a time which in my world as a you know director of operations there's no way i could have five at one time but you get the idea if we're not looking to have thousands and thousands and thousands of people coming into a product and we only need a hand less than a handful we don't need to be spending all of this energy on something that is actually really really really hard to get somebody to progress through that funnel if you will so i bought that talk for a long time just so we're all clear i felt like what everything i just told you was false i told myself i was impressed upon other guru in our space about a decade ago that i had to have all of this presence i had to be in all the places and all the things and the most important thing i could do was figure out how to repurpose all of these things and get them in all the places and show up and engage and be in that cycle number one it was unsustainable number two was exhausting and number three it led to the worst parts of me and it took away all the joy from that gift that i've been given that i am so excited and i'm still excited ten years later to be able to share and so that got me reassess and weight is that really true like i know these big cool people are saying this but is this really true for me so that opened up a whole other pandora box which we're not gonna talk about today but you know as we look back i wish i knew now what i didn't know then and i wish i had people like you to help show me how to do this because i know when i can see a really good system i know when someone has done what a lot of people don't do is be able to walk the talk that i could have short myself save myself a lot of stress save myself you know expenses and labor of you know whenever i realized i couldn't do it myself what did i do i ended up investing in other people to do it for me and guess what it didn't get me any closer to the goal for myself so i'm a full big believer in your process and what you teach and even more importantly the belief that as a service based business and we could even expand that even more because i know you have proven that too but as a service based business you don't actually have to be in the rat race of social media so i invite you to come here today and share the ways that you're able to do that we love really good tactical step by step and of course we also love to hear your history and how you've been able to do that for yourself so all of that welcome get thank you quite the introduction i'm so glad to be here and a few things came up for e when you were talking one of which you mentioned a couple times like finding somebody who walks the walks the talk not as such a value of mine and like you were saying before we hit record we were kinda talking about how maybe disillusioned and kind of jade we'd become about some of the big names and the industry and stuff and it just it's so i find that a lot of people will tell you oh yeah you don't need social media they might even be teaching like i'm hosting a webinar about how you don't need social media but they're literally telling you about it on social media like they're still using it themselves and so no wonder we're confused because we're like well they're saying you don't but they're still posting there so obviously something you know misaligned here and so yeah i quit social media in twenty twenty one so it's i'm going on over four years of not using it at all i don't post i don't scroll i don't have the app on my phone i don't use it as a consumer i don't follow just my friends there i don't have a secret account that i used to you know follow people i i do nothing and like you said i have so much more joy in my life i have so much more mental health i have so much more time to do things that actually move the needle in my business and whether you're a service provider or you are a coach or you have digital products really no business needs social media social media doesn't even need social media you know instagram got big without instagram and so i think there's rate marketing i mean in capitalism and patriarchy are really strong here where they've really convinced us this is the way you must follow it is like this cult almost of like social media is the only way you can do something don't question it and once i started questioning it i realized kind of the error of my ways because just like you for years i spent time just thinking if i could just get the right strategy or i'm just not consistent enough or i'm just not this enough or i just need to engage more after i post i just need to be in a comment pod or i just need to pay someone to do it for me believe me i tried all the things none of it ever worked in any kind of meaningful way and when i left i was able to double down on the things that had been working for me the whole time and my business is so much more profitable it's sustainable and joyful now and yeah i'm excited to share yeah so give us all the wisdom in how we can actually make this happen for ourselves okay so i would say if i could boil my system down to a few steps there's kind of three non negotiable that i do every single week for my business that allows me to make sales every single day but even if you're a service provider and you don't need to make sales every single day you can at least start getting a consistent revenue coming in and so those three things are i email my list and i make an offer so i'm not just sending nurture emails i am literally emailing them at least once a week sometimes seven days a week it really just depends but i am emailing them a sales email where i am making an offer i am asking them to pay me money for something and i don't separate sales emails from value emails or nurture emails they are both in one in and so that has worked really big for me this is not anything new everyone knows you need an email list that is just where i have doubled down i mean the hundred x down on my email list and it doesn't mean that you need to have hundreds of thousands of people there you know i've been able to make hundreds of thousands of dollars with an email list of two to eight thousand people and so it's not the same volume game that you feel like we have to play when we're on social media and you feel like you need to have a hundred k followers or something like that total vanity metric anyway okay so emailing my list and actually asking for the sale is something i do every single week i have a lot of automated funnels and series and things that are going out that can do that for me so i'm not constantly having to be on and i combine that with a hybrid model of some live emailing and a lot of automated emails that are pre scheduled and week running on autopilot all the time the second thing i do is i get in front of a new audience every single week and so you really can't do we were just talking about this in a coaching call today with some of my clients you really can't have one without the other if you are growing your email list but you're never actually giving them a away to pay you it is all for not you might as well have a hundred thousand instagram followers and be making zero dollars you have to actually ask for the sale but if you have an email list and you're asking for the sale all the time and my clients come to me all the time and they say i did the flash sale i did the launch i did this thing i have the funnel set up it didn't work nobody bought and i said say well how many people went through the funnel seven well of course nobody want even seventy okay well if an average email funnel converts at one percent which is industry standard that's not even one person would buy if you only have seventy people so you have to be doing both you have to be growing your email list and getting in front of new audiences and you have to be asking for the sale we put so many steps in between us and making money and i think that really hurts a lot of businesses and slows down the progress and the results that they could get so i have a lot of ways that i get in front of new audiences and if you've been on social media thinking that that's the only way i would just ask you how's it going for you are you getting hundreds of new people onto your email list by posting on social media all the time are you getting a new client every week because you've been posting you know three times a day probably not i have yet to really meet anybody that's seeing those kinds of results so there's lots of other more effective ways one of which is guessing on other people's podcasts so yep crm i am speaking on somebody else's podcast podcasts so that i can get in front of their audience hopefully then y'all will come over follow me on my email list and then i will make you an offer and you'll become a customer of mine as well that's kind of the whole the whole purpose here so i could list a hundred other ways that you can get in front of new audiences and we can go down that road if you want to but for now i'll stop there and say there's a bunch of other ways outside of social media and the third thing i do is more of a long term strategy and that's creating search focused content meaning i'm not creating short shelf life content like instagram or facebook post or tiktok videos or whatever things that basically have a couple hours shelf life if your followers even see them at all rather i'm creating content on platforms that are find so podcasts youtube blogging pinterest those are all search based platforms including now being find through ai so i try to post one thing every single week to one of those platforms and not all of them and you don't need to be in all the places you could just pick one and have some kind of content that's out there that people can type in a problem they're trying to solve and you will show up so that was it send an email to your list once a week make an offer get in front of a new audience every week and publish something on a search based platform that's it it's that time new month new podcast recommendation and this is from a peer that is also inside of the hubspot podcast network i'm recommending the podcast titled inclusion and marketing it's hosted by sonia thompson and she digs into important topics to us i know that our community loves and really resonates with her content expertise and that is in belonging in customer experience as well as diversity and it also teaches us how you can practice inclusive marketing within your own effort so whether this is for your business or the way that you can really help and build diversity and inclusion inside of your clients businesses you're gonna learn that by listening to sonia podcast every single week what i love about sonia podcast is she's got some great advice she also interview some really enterprise guest and then the other thing that i think is so fun and i think you will too is she looks at active marketing campaigns that are going on and she reviews them and is able to give us perspective on how inclusive or not they are so if this topic is interesting to you then listen to inclusion and marketing wherever you get your pie cast we've all heard and learned these things along the way yeah i think that we make i i'll just tell myself i have made a lot of excuses because it frankly it looks sexy to be on social but some of the downfall falls of social that you've pointed out is they're not sticky how sticky are the people on social not berry and then the other piece is it's not searchable it is just simply not searchable the shelf life is so short so constantly on that hamster wheel of always needing to create new new new more more more just to stay relevant and hope that maybe two percent of your followers even see what you're putting out there and i yeah i think about like this is more philosophical but i think back to like instagram when instagram started it was post you would come in there you would post something and then they created the whole ability to create stories which expire and oh my gosh well why did they do that i mean it's a drug so that you would keep coming back and coming back and coming back and always feeling behind the curve think about mental health and think about what we're doing and how we're training our brains which is another episode you and i could probably have a perfectly deep conversation on but that's what they did to keep you coming back at the same time people kinda raise their hands or we're like i don't want these stories to go away like what are we gonna do and so i'm sure you remember like i remember when they started creating the little i don't even know what they're called my highlights where you onto to those because people strictly because the human body wants to we crave memories we grade hold on to those things and so they sat us with these highlights how many people use highlights anymore hardly anybody you know why because the algorithm is sick and it has trained us to not even care i'm i'm getting deep but not care about those things that feel important in the moment it's just a drug it just keeps coming back and so if you're trying to build your business i mean maybe instagram has figured it out or meta has figured it out but if you're trying to build an ethical service based business that's not the way to create a sustainable and scalable space for you in that environment but look at meta like they're not posting on instagram instagram profile is not full of reels and posts and like that's not how there growing their business because it doesn't work yep yes yes but so what does work for service providers which is something i mean it's the reason we're here today it's the reason that i've been able to be successful in my own service provider business is through deep rich and ample conversations like that to me is the replacement for social media any day but the things that you focused that you have shared with us today emailing somebody offering the people in this case on email list telling them if i have this great service that i believe is divine and given to me and i never tell anybody about it exactly nobody is gonna purchase that from me right so i can't be in business without actually having that conversation and email is a beautiful way for a lot of people to do that because even i teach how to have conversations verbal conversations being on zoom and for a lot of people that is absolutely not what they wanna do it's not where their energy holds them and the number or the quality or the confidence that they lack to be able to have those is not a skill that they have right now email is a perfect place to do that because it's hands off but you're still putting yourself in a place where you can capture attention where you can be visible and it's a push and a pull you get to deliver it and they get to open it and take action when they're ready so it is a very gentle way but i am with kate you can't just have the email you can't just write the email you have to talk about what you do right i don't not saying you have to sell in neither a she that you have to sell in every single email but it's a great platform for being able to do that and then sharing about getting in front of new audiences i mean i was hoping that you were gonna say exactly why you're i mean guest podcasting hello but this looks a lot like a lot of different ways i have a community here in san antonio where i just got introduced to somebody else because they knew me they knew i was in business and now they're handing me off to a friend of a friend i mean referrals what she's talking about here is referrals and in a service based business referrals are huge is exactly how i built my entire business the first year of being in business completely outside of the space having never been in this space before i became a person who asked for referrals right yep and then i just feel so deeply true that long form content is actually the way of the future i wish it we would have never gotten side rail because when i came into this space in twenty fifteen it was everything blog blog blog pinterest pinterest pinterest and then we got stuck into this short form content space video space of all the channels that we're talking about today and you know what i haven't put a new blog we were just looking at this i haven't put a new blog out into this world in years mh and you they'll get traffic to your site and guess guess what we just we just welcomed round twenty seven into our cohort into our round twenty seven of our director of operations certification program and we're doing introduction videos and guess what kate someone tells me i found you on this article i was so frustrated with where i was in my career i went to pinterest i just happened to be on pinterest and i went into pinterest and i said what is operations and you popped up and i learned all about operations from you i went there genuinely asking the question yeah what in his operations and it took her a year she's probably listening to this podcast right now because she went from my podcast with that long form connected back to my blog that i wrote years ago yeah that she became curious she's listened to my podcast and now she's a student inside of our community exactly and this is i feel like how amazing that this is effort that you put in years ago that is still paying off today and it's exactly why it works because this person was typing in what they were looking for and social media is interrupted marketing you have to stop their scroll they're not there looking for what is operations they're there mindless trolling because they wanna relax because they wanna turn their brain off on veg on the couch after a hard day at work they're not actually even looking for solutions they're literally just trying to turn their brain off and so you have to not only engage their brain you have to stop their role you have to be so compelling that they want to leave the app which the app is designed to keep people there it's like you have everything working against you or you can publish a helpful blog post and years later people are literally searching for the thing that you can help them with and then they're ready and she might not have been ready to join the certification program right away but she was ready to take the next step which was join your email list or download your podcast or start listening to something else start following along and the more that she interacted with you in a meaningful way mh more likely she became to them purchase and so i have another tip to add on to this kind of like a fourth bonus tip two that we talked about at the webinar that we hosted together last month which is a way i think to shorten that sales cycle a bit whether you're selling services or high ticket packages or programs and that's by having a quick easy win that you can sell for ten dollars or less on the front end so when somebody opt in to your email list you're gonna give them like a trip wire that has a very irresistible offer like all of my products have seven dollar trip wires on them and you give them something it solves a very specific problem and it helps them do something very quickly so they can immediately get it take action on it get a result and then go wow that was good what else does natalie have and then they're gonna go and start looking through your looking through your website and seeing what else is out there and seeing how else i could work with you and especially if you design it in such a way where you're showing them oh i can do this myself or i could hire natalie to do it for me and save myself a lot of time in energy and headache then you've really shorten that sales cycle so i think a lot of service providers don't think about adding especially low ticket products into their offer suite but i think it actually is a great way to get people habit of buying from yale and get them a quick win get them wanting to work with you again yep and i think that it unveil the mystery it just it expedite everything but i think a lot of times when people are looking at a service provider it's usually a higher ticket investment and they wanna believe them right and in this space of especially remote cultures and you know all of this there's a lot of question that the cycle can be very very long so if you can give them a little bit of a taste of how you deliver your intellectual abilities or maybe some intellectual property very quickly it reaffirm to them that you're my person and maybe it repel them which is probably a blessing to you as well yes but i know that when we were going through the webinar we had a lot of people asking questions about what that looked like for an operator and so if you're listening to this today and you're thinking oh i wonder what that could be for me i will kinda share what some of the ideas that we had all come together with but if you're an operator and you're thinking oh what could i do for like seven dollars or maybe it's twenty seven dollars or maybe it's a hundred and seven dollars i don't really care what the amount is kate whole point is give them a taste that answers that question and delivers a result in a very collapsed timeline very quickly one of the things that as operators we are really good at being curious and we're really really good at spotting gaps or finding inefficiencies and so maybe your gift is automation maybe your gift is how to incorporate ai or maybe your gift is in spotting those gaps and spotting the weakness maybe your gift is in setting realistic and actual goals i mean there's a lot of gift that this community has so what does it look like to get in front of that for a really you know very low risk low investment but high value a lot of people were coming back and saying oh you know what i'm a strategist in x y and z ways all the ways i just told you and it doesn't really matter the type of strategist but the way that they were going to get in front of this and position themselves to get that first point of interaction of paid interaction was to do an audit of some sort so an audit is a great opportunity for a potential client or a prospect to be able to see how your brain works how you deliver you are who you say you are and for them to still walk away with something impactful if they get a little piece of that and you've only given them like one tiny tiny tiny tiny piece of your brain that can be done in a really you know fast timeline for you they're interested they're gonna remember you maybe they don't go on to become your client because it's not the right time for them but if you've been able to solve a problem a specific problem and a quicken them amount a time and you do what you say you're gonna do guess what now we go back to the second point that kate talked about earlier which is to partner with other people now they become a referral for you if they're not gonna work with you they still had a good experience they've still taken something away and the power of passing them forward is now possible if you never had that interaction they may never talk about you again so anyway i wanted to add that i got all excited about that but yeah i think audits are a great option and the other thing that came up on that webinar too was operators are obviously so good at organizing information data metrics tracking so any kind of tracker spreadsheet dashboard any kind of tool or something that you use that somebody could even just see oh wow like i'm a very visual person so if i got a great dashboard from somebody and it was pretty and it was organized and it helped me see the numbers that i needed to see i would be like oh my god if this is how they put things together and it can make my stuff look like this instead of some boring excel spreadsheet that i can't read i i definitely wanna work more with them i wanna find out more so i think that's another great option too and it's something that you could sell a million of and it doesn't cost you any more time because it's a scalable digital product yes well i love all of this today kate of i'm gonna wrap up here but i hope that all of you have been able to walk away believing something that i say all the time which is you actually don't need to be spending all that time on social media at least for a to build your business it is a mis it's a poor belief that you have do rely on social media when in fact it is one of the most i'm gonna say it corrupt ways of believing that your business will be a bigger blessing to more people it truly just isn't that way does it still have a space for you if you want it to but kate's here to tell you it actually doesn't have to be because she truly has not been on social since twenty twenty one and her business continues to be lean to have high margins and to do i mean before we hit record today she was telling me that she was you know out she's been on vacation enjoying her family and she's been able to do that because of the type of business that she has created we work so hard with our students to make sure that they're not copying the type of business i have or that their friend has or you know somebody else that they admire and respect you truly we are living in an age where you get to build an architect of business that serves you serves the stage of life that you're in to serve the passions the goals the dreams that you have for yourself we actually get to create that for ourselves and it doesn't you a huge to disservice to copy anybody else so hopefully these steps today will show you that you can do exactly that by not leveraging social media not putting the emphasis on it that maybe the outside forces are telling you you have to be there you have to invest in more people to do it better you need a better engine you're not good enough all those destructive things that are gonna stop you and delay you from being your next best self which i'm extremely passionate about here so yeah k thank you so much for coming on and for sharing and i would love for you to invite people into your orbit into all the great things that you have she's a great partner here at the ops authority we've had several students actually go on to partner with kate because if you've enjoyed me and what i stand for and what i believe in and how i teach you're probably going to be really interested in what kate has for you so tell us about that yes we have several d that have come in through my mindful business academy program which is basically like my everything offer all the strategies that we just talked about today are all taught in this program and i call it my everything offer because it's literally everything i sell all in one place for a fraction of the price if that's not where you're at today we also sell everything a la carte in our shop so you can say oh actually i really just wanna learn more about how to pick great go get pitch fast i really just wanna learn more about how to do an instagram nine grid and get off forever and never post again cool we can teach you just how to do that one thing so you can pick and choose we'll meet you where you're at and if you just wanna learn more about getting off the social media hamster wheel we've got a free four day challenge as well call it beyond the scroll and that'll help you take some of the first steps that we'll free you from the you know just as you said corrupt toxic cycle of social media and and find definitely freedom and joy on the other side fantastic and we'll have all those links for you here in our show notes so make sure to check those out i do wanna brag and commend those d for you know stepping in into building their business and looking for the right support for them kate is a great business coach and one thing that our audience really enjoys and i value as a learner is it's an accessible model both financially as well as the way that she teaches it it's not theoretical it is a combination of theory strategy and the how to is included and i think that that is such a big deal for operators because we get enamored by the you know how does that looking right but it's like how do we do this because we are very methodical analytical you know sequential thinkers and kate i have to tell you as much as you are a visionary you definitely have a strong operational muscle because i've seen your your teachings your trainings and the way that you educate and i i know that it's something that art our students and you know people that are listening today could really just it's it's believable you can do it because you show it and then we can learn it and do it as well so anyway i can go on and on and on i'm so grateful that we share the space and that you're willing to come in here and you know talk about these systems that are have you know they they get a lot of gl and glamour but they actually do not turn into a lot of dollars and i know a lot of people here are looking for some financial freedom and if we can do that in a realistic way i know you and i are all for it yeah absolutely thanks for having me that yes thank you for investing just a little bit of time to listen to this episode of the ops authority podcast i am so great to be surrounded by real action takers like you who are invested in growing their business through operations will you add one more action to your to do list today visit the ops authority podcast dot com where you can join our community of this owners and other ops experts you're gonna hear from me in a week and in the meantime do big things on the backside of your business

if you're here in you're a business builder then you are always in pursuit of clients and what's behind client acquisition it is a sales cycle cutting it in half sounds pretty impossible right well that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot and they used their tool hubspot tool an ai tool called breeze it tailor every customer interaction without losing that personal touch which is so important and ai is doing amazing things like this we already know but hubspot hasn't it built in their results were really incredible their click through rates jumped by twenty five percent their qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing page if you're interested in this you wanna go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help you grow your service based business this is the ops authority podcast where my mission is to break down the backside of your business so you can take the right actions to grow and scale hey i'm natalie gin a small business operations expert and i'm gonna give you a front row seat to real solutions that will help you reach the vision that you have for your business all while equip you to put out those inevitable pesky fires and those fears that pop up listen in for strategies to grow your team craft the systems and processes that you need for your business and establish business foundations that you may have skipped over i know you're ready to do really big things so let's do it together hey friends welcome back to another episode of the ops authority podcast i'm your host natalie gen in today you've got just me no guest solo episode here with the founder of the ops authority here recording this podcast today and the emphasis for today is about the evolution and the next era of the ops authority it is a massive big big time for this business because i'm really doing something pretty much outside of my comfort zone and so today i'm gonna be pulling back the curtain and really sharing everything that has been on my heart and then also showing off all of the hard work that my team has done you know we have built such a great great product here and i'm really excited to unveil that and to show that to you but as i get started i just wanted to kinda give my heart piece of this and then we'll move into more of the tactical stop and what this has looked like for me but i've heard this quote and i've heard it for so long it actually searched the internet to see where it came from and there's no one that i can actually give a solid of attribution to but they did say that mark cuban said it but i know that there's been a lot more people before mark cuban and that quote is the only thing that stays the same is change and you probably have heard it that change is the only thing that stays the same and i'm gonna put a little like astra cure to say in business so the only thing that stays the same in business is changed i have mentored thousands of people over my professional career in the last thirty plus years and i can tell you i have said that so many times it didn't matter if i was in my corporate days and mentoring people who were looking to grow outside or grow within the company i would tell them it's totally normal to feel like you want something new you want something bigger you want something better you really are at a place where you wanna change directions totally it's okay you can do that internally and externally and then i have coached and mentored so many people inside of the ops authority who i have given the exact same advice for and the reality is that there are so many reasons behind change and why that comes about sometimes change is a result of growth opportunities like maybe things are going so great and you were growing at a pace and now it's time to change other times it's because maybe you went out on a limb and you tried something and it didn't work so now you've got a change and you've got a course correct also i'm not going to lie we've got other really tactical reasons why change can be inevitable that can be economic drivers we're in a space right now it's twenty twenty five it's q three twenty twenty five when i'm recording this and i would be absolutely lying if i sat here and said that the economy has not shifted the way we work how we work who we work with and all of the above economic shifts are massive drivers for change technology disruptions oh my goodness right now as you're listening to this we're in one of the biggest if not the biggest disrupt based off of technology in my entire lifetime we thought the internet was big oh no artificial intelligence way bigger way more profound impacts on our lives and of course business as a result another reason that change can come up as financial positions so if you need to make more then you're going to have to do something different in your business you're gonna have to change your business maybe it's your business model maybe it's who you're working with maybe it's the team that supports you maybe it's your delivery but financially when your position changes it's going to affect the business like i mentioned you can have staff changes maybe turnover maybe somebody leaving your company abruptly that you really leaned on and as a small business i'm not gonna lie you really really really have to pay attention to all of these because in a small and a tight in a lean company when someone leaves it creates a bigger hole than anything that you could have ever imagined inside of a larger corporate style organization another reason for change is like a personal rec calibration of your needs or your goals when i first left corporate a long time ago i had one goal for myself my husband and i had this one goal he just said that you can do anything you want but you have to bring home fifteen hundred dollars every single month that fifteen hundred dollars was gonna cover our mortgage now this has been a hot minute ago but that was what our financial needs were and i hustle and i worked and i put things together that could fill that gap of fifteen hundred dollars now since then the last ten years our financial needs have changed because our lifestyle has changed my kids are older my kids are in college friends you will never be more broke than when your kids go to school people say oh day care so expensive trust when your kids go off to college it's a whole different style of financial maturity and financial actually just being strapped financially but anyway i've had to personally recalibrate how much i take home and how much we need to take home which means i have to work differently in our company so i know all of these things to be true because we have changed and we have pivoted inside of the ops authority over these last nine years that i have been in business because of all of the reasons that i just shared with you there are so many different reasons for change and i want you to know that that truly is that sentiment of the only thing that stays the same in business is change is absolutely true so if you're going to be in business i tell people this all the time service providers we love stability we love to be able to i'm gonna say the word control the environment and make something really procedural and standardize and methodical so that it can be easy to repeat that's away my brain works and i'm sure it's the way that your brain works ultimately it puts us in a place of being really risk ave ave but i'm gonna tell you today and i have to tell myself this i had to do mindset work on this because that is my natural state wanting to really create something very solid something that is stable something that doesn't change very often but you heard me say it and i know this myself the only thing that stays the same in business is change so if you are going to be i doesn't matter if you're a solo if you want a team in an empire of fifty employees it doesn't matter things are going to change sometimes in your control and sometimes out of your control inside of business and i have been sitting in that space of necessary change for one year i started this company nine years ago i started as a solo running this business serving clients in leveraging my services my skills my gifts and my abilities i worked inside of companies in a fractional capacity doing that i worked for myself i didn't have any team over the last nine years i have built out a solid team and that team obviously requires payment right and so with that we have had to you know generate more income and in addition to that our vision our mission of serving operators has continued to grow but about a year ago and i'm gonna say exactly a year ago i started to feel something really different in my gut and to me it was a disrupt to me it felt really uncomfortable i have always had a very clear vision for this company and to no fault of my own just the ability to be able to be so passionate about something so passionate about the people that we serve and that lean on us that trust us to help them do their work bigger better brighter for all of those reasons i have stayed and remain so passionate about the body of work that we have now i spend i was telling you i spend a lot of time on helping people to create the vision for their life the vision for their company and i'm completely in that business too i don't just teach you i do that every single year i make it a point by the end of every single year that i'm gonna revisit both my personal as well as the ops authorities mission vision and values now your mission will change if your services your offerings and your audience change your values rarely change actually i established our company values when our culture began to grow so about five years ago i established these very clear values it was only about a year ago that we added one more to that so your values are pretty stagnant they stay the same because they're very deeply rooted now your vision is something that doesn't really change of those three things your mission is gonna change the most because the only thing that stays the same in business is changed so your mission is going to change but your vision is five to ten years out and so that doesn't change as much because it takes so much work to get closer to that vision but this is work that i do every single year and i make sure to do it the hard thing about rec cali your mission your vision and your values especially your vision is that it's not something that you can just like put on your calendar and you can say okay today or this friday from eight to noon i'm gonna sit down and i'm gonna re look at my vision well you can do that and you can check the box but it won't be intentional it won't be deeply rooted and that's what i expected of myself to continue to lead this business and to continue to have the trust and partnership from all of our students and our customers it's important for me in my team my goodness it is important for me to have a clear vision of what it wants and guess what if it doesn't change that much year over year that's okay you're not doing anything wrong but for me something really started to feel uncomfortable not in a negative way in a very expansive way so i started to see the vision of the ops authority in a very different light than i was seeing it for the last like three to four years and this was bigger than anything i had ever seen before honestly it a way too big for me i doubted that i could actually pull off this vision and i really i i tried to prove it wrong i tried to not believe it i didn't tell my team about this for about six yeah six solid months i didn't wanna tell them because it really it felt that big for me i knew it was gonna cause a lot of work if we actually did it so i kept telling myself oh i'll stay safe and i'll just keep it up in my mind and maybe when the time is right or this is you know all of these excuses caused me to hold on to this and to not share it with the closest most trusted assets that i have in business which are my team friends i even did like market research for the sole purpose of talking myself out of it i kept thinking if i find an a facts i will prove to myself that there's no way i could do this i also told myself especially in the last six months you know what with all these economic changes this is a really bad time for me to try to do this i'm just gonna wait i'm gonna wait and then it bubble up to the point where it was like a tea kettle that had reached the boiling pot it was like blast off i could not keep this to myself i couldn't avoid talking about it dreaming about it and working on it so me and my team finally shared with them and me and my team began to build this out we were so intentional we were very strategic we were also scrappy and lean but we were committed we were just celebrating here recently that we set a due date and we met every single milestone now y'all know i'm a fantastic project manager like that's what we do here as operators and that is a skill set that every single person on my team is very very proficient and but i'm not gonna lie and tell you that we hit all of our milestones and we hit you know all of our deadlines we don't there's a lot of things that we're juggling here and so things don't go as planned just like they don't end your projects as well but for this project for whatever reason we hit every single target deadline milestone so today i wanted to spend some time to share with you what in the world this vision actually looks like for the ops authority and hopefully you'll be as excited as i am about this and most importantly i hope that i can convey this in a way to where you can see where we started and where we're growing and what kind of goodness that means for you as someone who is in our ops insiders world if you're listening to this we consider you an insider but i hope that you take this one step further and you see that dreaming can be scary dreaming can feel risky there's is a weight with thinking and really being specific with your vision but the payoff will bring this excitement that you're hearing from me alright so just trust yourself in that alright so what is this new era of the ops authority well i have taken a deep look and what we know outside of that everything changes is everything changes in business but it also you change your skills change the tools that you're using to execute on those skills change your circumstances change which means that your career has to change as well we are not the same person that we were let's just back it up ten years ago or a decade ago think back to who you were what you were doing ten years ago think about the job title itself what were you doing ten years ago now fast forward to where you are today wow remarkable differences right the greatest thing that i have ever truly believed and taught and tried to propagate to anybody who would listen to me is that we owe it to ourselves every single day to become the next best version of ourselves the times when i have been in a fun the times when i have felt defeated the times when i lived in fear the times that i was scared it's all because i stopped looking for and i really became obsessed internally which slowed me down and it was certainly not my next best version all of those negative feelings i'm just gonna call him more of like a depressive state they result when i'm hiding when i am totally slipping back to my last version of myself when i feel fear or threatened i don't typically it's not innate in me to rise up what is so natural is to go into that turtle shell into hide so if we owe it to ourselves and if our best date is thinking about the next best version of self then let's make that happen it's imperative that we continue to march forward we continue to equip ourselves with all the things the people the resources to become our next best version and this next era at the ops authority is doing just that as i'm getting into this i don't know how much you know about me but i just wanted to share with the vision of this era the ops era no doubt a play on taylor swift i love it but there's like eight eras in me just in me over the last thirty years there are eight versions of me and they're still counting because i'm only at thirty and i've got another twenty years in me right of working years i'll have more twenty on this earth but god willing anyway i i wanna take you through that journey of those thirty years in all the different versions friends i started out as a nurse version one is a nurse version two i was a professor version three the corporate girl era number four the chief of staff at a thirty six thousand employee company i never expected to be that remember refer back to version one where i was a nurse now i am in corporate america working in human resources project management and now i am the chief of staff what an unexpected journey but i continued to put my next best self forward and that meant that i had to make a really big change i had to shift from corporate into my own thing all because my vision for my life at that point was to support my family in a different way to become the mother that i dreamt of and not that corporate mom who is trying to do everything at home everything in corporate i needed to change and disrupt the way that we were living so that i could fulfill on my vision so now we're into natalie fifth era which is when i be came a solo service provider just like you i have the operational skills that it took me a second to realize that these were actually unique and not every single person had these but i took it upon myself to use the skill of project management and event management and i stood up my first business which was natalie gin dot com i literally partnered with business owners in the online space to help them with their project management that continued to evolve from a fractional space into a larger part time and even full time for a small stint of supporting people's holistic operations inside of their growing scaling businesses it's about this time that natalie sixth era my sixth version pops up and that's when i founded the ops authority there's a shift from that solo to the founder of the ops authority because that's when my team began to grow and this is only four short years ago about that same time the seventh version of me which you may know me from is the author of the director of operations certification this was a huge undertaking and it is the body of work that i am the most proud of in my professional existence it has brought so much growth for so many other people here that takes me to the eighth i thought that actually the seventh version of me is where i thought i would stop i was content i was happy i was doing my life's work i was working with the best people i had have existing an amazing team and about a year ago as i mentioned i started to really wrestle with that next vision that i had for the ops authority and i knew it was bigger than me but this eighth version of me is the visionary for all operations professionals not just directors of operations not just chief executive officers not just chiefs of staff this is now what i'm being called to do is to help be the visionary for all operations professionals that are looking to elevate and expand their career so here at the ops authority we are starting something brand new something that's gonna revolutionize the way that operators grow professionally and we're doing it in a way that is not your typical growth pattern we're gonna be able to do something different to where we can now serve every single operator in any industry and at any level of the business it doesn't matter if you're entry level or peer at the very very top we're also going to be able to bring operations education in an accessible and an affordable format i'm not ignorant to the economic changes that are happening right now i understand we're holding on to our money a lot tighter so it was my goal to build this in a way that could be accessible and affordable we are going to create we are creating the only marketplace exclusively for operators i'm not calling in marketers and all of these other types of people we are only focused on operators which is something that's near and dear to my heart but this is going to be the only marketplace exclusively for operators when we do this we're gonna minimize the amount of time it takes you to elevate in your ops career and that's what i believe deeply is going to help you get closer and closer to your next best self so dun the name of this is called the shop for ops now i'd love me some good iteration and the way that this arrives but the shop for ops has officially arrived has been birthed out of this vision from one year ago it is here today and i could not be more excited for what we are now able to provide all operators this is the only destination that's creative exclusively for all ops professional it's a collection of trainings and templates and technology and tools we've got master classes and guides and frameworks and resources all inside of one container called the shop for ops we're gonna be focusing on strategy and theory and practical application i believe that that is something that's really unique to the ops authority because i have been in the space of growth and development for a really long time and it's so common to cling on or to be taught and led by somebody who's really good in one of those three areas they're either really good strategist they're really good theorist or they're really good at the application piece we have a very comprehensive teaching style which combines all of those and that's what you're gonna find inside of the shop for ops this truly is a one of a kind playground for learning for growth and for development four operators as we're kicking off today i wanna tell you that there are three main buckets when we were kinda doing this design of this product there were three areas that made the most sense and that i know that our community wants to learn from one is the operational skills the tactical skills that we need to continue to refine what it is that we do to refine our craft even expand our craft so that we can create better offerings that elevate us to our next best self this is gonna cover your common disciplines of operations so project management human resources data financial technology administration those things the second category outside of operational skills is business strategy so if you're here because you're monetizing your operation skill set and you're building a business around it you're gonna need business strategy this is different than building anything else you can trust us because we've already done this this collection is gonna enhance the way that you structure your business it's gonna help you with how to attract clients how to market your business because it's different as a solo business or as a service provider business you're gonna market yourself differently you're not gonna have as many resources to be able to go you know running facebook ads and having really big campaigns you're still going to be able to be very successful and we wanna make sure that you're focusing on a lean operation so that you take home all that cash within the business strategy category you're also going to find systems for selling as well as for pricing we get so many questions around that and then the third pillar or category is career growth this is for all of you guys because every single one of you guys does are desi growth and to continuously develop and if you're gonna do that you're gonna have to have the support beyond the skills and the strategy that we just talked about this is the category where you're going to expand on your soft skills relationships communication leadership balance balance for you balance for you as a mom balance for you as a female and balance as a wife inside of a company as well as running your own company is so so important that's where you're going to be able to expand and to elevate so we've got these three different containers operational skills business strategy and career growth underneath each of those you've got really finite topics which are where our trainings are going to come from at the time of recording every single product in the shop for ops is gonna be in one of those categories and i think the biggest thing one of the greatest disrupt here is that these products are going to be between seven dollars and a hundred and forty seven dollars that may change over time but at the time of unveiling the shop for ops we've got very low priced accessible products for you my greatest desire is to serve more people and we know that pricing is going to increase accessibility also all of these products are going to be able to be downloaded instantly so this is not where you need to show up to calls you don't need to carve out time to meet face to face this is all asynchronous and you're gonna be able to instantly download this and another great thing is these are not just for ops professionals but also owner operator so if you're a solo and you don't have a dedicated operator inside of your business and you're wearing the hat as an owner operator these tools are going to be fantastic for you as well so i've just shared with you what the shop for ops is like today now remember all of the stories about the vision i was having here's where it comes together in twenty twenty six the shop for ops is going to expand exponentially this is when the shop for ops will become a bona fide marketplace what do you mean by that not well we're going to be able to rapidly expand the number of products that we have inside of our shop because we're going to leverage our certified directors of operations these are the finest the brightest the most diverse operations leaders i know and they have knowledge and wisdom to meet the needs of more than what i can do on my own so what you're seeing today inside of the shop is not what the shop is going to look like in the future if you imagine going to amazon are going to etsy those are marketplaces where you can literally pull lots of different things off of the shelf kind of in an a la carte manner one of the things that we are doing as we have launched and something that you're gonna see us you know do a couple of times throughout the year is we're gonna run campaigns where we're going to allow you to come into the shop and to buy an all access pass these all access passes are gonna give you an opportunity for a really reduced price to buy everything to get access to everything in the shop that you see at that moment for a massive massive discount these are gonna come out during you know like i said during different times of the year and when we put together some different campaigns hint tent look out for black friday if you missed this launch then no that hint intent we're probably gonna have one of those campaigns around black friday so just know that our all access passes are going to be an awesome opportunity for you to come in and really absorb every single thing but if you're interested in something and you don't wanna wait till the all access pass is available i encourage you to go into the shop there's a search function in there and you can search click up you can search project management you can search mindset you can search communication roi reporting data financials whatever it is make sure to go over there and just give a quick search all of our products are gonna be between seven and a hundred and forty seven dollars for the time being as we were kicking off we identified a lot of products that we could put inside of the shop we gave ourselves a timeline we gave ourselves a goal of initially starting with twenty products inside of our shop and we were able to do just that but that doesn't mean that we're not going to continue to put my brain and wisdom inside of the shop we have about fifteen products that are up our sleeves right now we're never gonna stop this is the place that we are going to put my new content inside of and like i said we have fifteen identified products that are going to be making their way into the shop over the next six to eight months and i would be lying if i didn't tell you that i can't tell you how many times i'm driving in my car and you know we already have already mapped out with the products that are going in the shop the ones that are on our road roadmap but as i'm driving around or i'm having conversations or i'm mentoring other people i'm like a that's a great idea i keep making notes of more and more products to put inside of the shop so you're not gonna run out of ways to learn from us you are going to only be able to learn more have a greater platform for seeing the way i do operations and then in twenty twenty six you'll have the opportunity to see how other people inside of our certified alumni community are tackling ops today if you're wondering hey i have always wanted to do the director of operations certification program where does that fit well friends as i started this business remember back to version i think it was five of me where i was the solo i came in here and i was doing all of the things as i began to become the founder of the ops authority we began growing a team we now have a program manager over the director of operations which has been my baby it's been what i've been working on for the past six years things it isn't a very stable yet thriving place and it's got an owner on top of it it's like i may be like the president but we have a program manager who directs who sets everything up who is fully in charge it is now her baby as well and the certification going nowhere in fact we're gonna continue to be on a mission to serve more and more people at that level that will always be our signature are immersive in our most transformational opportunity to gain the highest level of and the most in operational skills the other thing about the certification that makes it so special and another reason we'll never let it go is that that's the only place within the ops authority where you're going to get one to one coaching high high amounts of accountability so that you complete the coursework so that you get the result that you want which is to be certified as a director of operations in the shop we're really looking at a comprehensive view of operations meaning different levels right so we're able to serve all different levels in the certification we are really building strategist operational strategist so that's where that content is we're gonna continue to bring on three cohorts every single year and there's a lot of licensed material and intellectual property within the certification and it is going to stay there the items that are in the shop there are not duplicates they are not duplicates of what is in the director of operations certification program which means if you're already a certified d or if you want to be but the timing the financial resources just haven't aligned for you yet you can partake and still grow with the shop for ops it's a great complement to the certified d program that we run three times a year so that is what has been on my heart that's what we have been working on so hard over this last division was about a year but we've pulled all of this together in a very short time frame of six months which may feel long for you but it has been a rapid pace working over here and i just wanna say thank you thank you for being here thank you for listening thank you for believing in your growth it's because you believe in your growth that you value operations education because of that you light me up to continue to serve more to serve greater to serve deeper just thank you for walking in this journey with me the shop for ops is bigger than a collection of tools this is truly my commitment to operators at all levels to operating professionals to owner operators for you to continue to grow your career your confidence and for you to evolve as an operator this entire product the shop for ops was built specifically for you with you in mind for our director of operations community and for every single operator that is tired of wing it and for those who have a burning desire to do more i cannot wait to see what the shop for ops does for our profession and honestly for the entire world this has a really big ability to be a massive disrupt and i am here for all of that i'd love for you to go check out the shop for ops dot com take a browse let me know if you find anything in there and we'll be seeing you inside of our free facebook community the ops insiders dot com i'd love to hear the product that you just could not live without alrighty friend thank you so much for listening in thank you for giving me the space to share my heart the ideas that i have and to be a little bit vulnerable about how this big idea was planted on me and i tried to run and i did escape the hiding of that which is why we were also proud today to unveil and debut the shop for ops alright go take a look over there and you will be hearing from me very very soon you guys continue to do big things and always be working on your next best sell thank you for investing just a little bit of time to listen to this episode of the ops authority podcast i am so grateful to be surrounded by real action takers like you who are invested in growing their business through operations will you add one more action to your to do list today visit the ops authority podcast dot com where you can join our community of business owners and other ops experts you're gonna hear for me in a week and in the meantime new big on the backside of your business

if you're here in you're a business builder then you are always in pursuit of clients and what's behind client acquisition it is a sales cycle cutting it in half sounds pretty impossible right well that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot and they used their tool hubspot tool an ai tool called breeze it tailor every customer interaction without losing that personal touch which is so important and ai is doing amazing things like this we already know but hubspot hasn't it built in their results were really incredible their click through rates jumped by twenty five percent their qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing page if you're interested in this you wanna go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help you grow your service based business this is the ops authority podcast where my mission is to break down the backside of your business so you can take the right actions to grow and scale hey i'm natalie gin a small business operations expert and i'm gonna give you a front row seat to real solutions that will help you reach the vision that you have for your business all while equip you to put out those inevitable pesky fires and those fears that pop erin kelly and natalie welcome to the simple pin podcast hey hey hello i'm so excited to record this and i've introduced you all in the intro so everybody has a little bit of background so wanna gonna jump into how we got started with our mastermind here and i'm gonna start with my first part of the story and how that kind of kicks off and then we'll kind of have each one of us tell where we came onto the scene but in twenty seventeen there was a conference that we had all went to and in the evening there was a girl that i connected with there and there was lots of wine flowing and we began the conversation with what if we could recreate this on a smaller scale where we are having these conversations about business and life and faith and it's this long standing group where we could really connect and go deeper in business and it was like well yeah that's a good idea who's gonna start it and the two of us kind of looked at each other like well i guess we can and it became this like who do you know who do you you know wanna connect with who do you wanna be involved one of the things that are important and this conversation is only literally like thirty minutes maybe and the idea for a mastermind was born and i think actually natalie you are the next one i think that i mentioned this to that i said hey do you wanna be a part of this so i guess pick up on that part of the story that of how if we remember because we talked about how this is twenty seventeen like you know eight years ago nine years eight years ago yeah i can't do bath so nat tell me where you pick up on this where you hear about this mastermind idea i like counting good numbers the years with my fingers because it has been a hot minute and honestly when i think of eight years and like where we were that night kate y'all have like gone the distance with me the whole time i have been in pretty much the whole time i've had an emerging business at least so yeah so that we were all at this conference and what a pivotal like what just thinking back just what a great pivotal moment for me to be able to join in with partnership of you guys in a different way that we might think of partnership from a business perspective but yes the wine was flowing i remember you guys coming over to me it was also a really pivot that day specifically it was a very pivotal day for me which we will not need to go into in the thought path but i felt a sister hood this that was like the biggest gift because it was a very trying day it was a from a developmental perspective and growth perspective it was huge it was a destroying day and also a day that was met with a ton of just love and french friendship and when this opportunity i just got goosebumps but when this opportunity came up and you you know included me in this mustard seed of what could be it was like maybe this is going to truly be a mastermind that serves me in a different way than all of the other ones that i had participated in thus far mh and i looked at the people that you guys would had approached me kelly is that the first time i'd had met you i no no wait i'll talk about that origin store because i didn't meet you until we got on the plane to cancun mh really because that was it was the next year that kelly had come to that conference so it was really just the few of us were there and i actually went kelly we were in that personal mastermind and i was like hey because actually to what you just said nat i think at that moment i had that same ache for something that could be deep and personal and we had had this kind of zoom mastermind was like there's something missing here like it's not going to that next level so it it's kind of like when that piece happened then i went back to kelly i was like hey what do you think about i don't even know how it started so actually now i'll jump to unless not you have more to share on that i'm just left if someone's watching this on youtube they're probably like why is she sm i instantly went to cancun to a flight to cancun yeah oh my gosh well think i think just to summarize where i was and to move the story forward i was in a place of wanting to be connected to people that were you know like minded and then also different which i know will also dive into as well but it really came at just such an offer at a great time for me in my journey and i felt like i was playing with the big girls playing with people that been in the business who had really understood a lot more and had more history than i did and in this specific space and so it was just such a big gift and a big honor to be asked to be a part of it yeah it was definitely in the beginning of something amazing i can't wait to get to that cancun flight kelly so i i come to you and actually i don't even know if i don't actually remember the conversation so you tell me your perspective of how this door kinda of cracked open well i think i just butted myself in if we're gonna be honest so like you guys are looking at me funny but like because i have known uk for eternity like that i mean i mean over a decade and probably closer to two thousand eleven at aaron's conference did yeah and i've known aaron for that amount of time too and aaron and i have traveled a lot together so you know we knew each other really well and i had heard i think you had mentioned something about this or aaron had don't remember but then i was like well i won't be part of it too and so because aaron had been invited by another person at the time into the group and i just remember i kinda butted my little butt in there and i was like i won't be part of this because for the same reason we had been part of a personal mastermind together i've been in other mastermind too over the years and i was just looking for something deeper and different and i was kind of letting myself be open to that so yeah and didn't meet mad until the plane ride because not and aaron are both from the same area in san antonio and they were flying and we were meeting up at houston okay houston and so like i met them at the gate and met nap for the first time in aaron for the first time and then we took advantage of the free beverages on southwest and then i i knew instantly like this was gonna work because i'm also introverted which you three are extroverted and so it is kinda scary to meet new people you know and to put yourself out there but like i knew by the of that flight that i was gonna be fine so yeah oh so good so aaron tells us how you kind of you know got your way in because it what you and i knew each other and but i actually didn't know what was kind of working behind the scenes until i think kelly might have told me like hey erin it's gonna join them i was like oh no way so tell me a little bit about that i think do i remember this i think it was kind of a joint like i knew kelly i knew you i had been in a small four person mastermind with somebody previously that ended because one of those members was no longer gonna be working an online business kind of going back to sort of mom life and in that season of her life and so it are that one just sort of ended so i was at like a hey i would love for this type of thing to continue it's such a blessing to me and when this came about it was just like okay that's the natural extension because and knew both of you not at least literally up the road but i didn't know her yet and so it just sort of i say i fell into it it but it also goes to you know who do you know who is like doing something similar to you and but not well competitive anyways right i know we'll get into that so i think it just seemed like the natural fit because we this is a very difficult night life to understand being a woman business owner it's all on you you know building a team i mean there's so much to all of this instead of have the comm the empathy the support the strap bouncing i mean there's so much and so that it was just thrill gift to me so i think i sort of fell into it don't know that i bullied my way like kelly thinks she did even though she did it but i think i kinda fell into it just through knowing you guys through the event circuit and the grapevine vine and whatnot well and one of the things that i didn't say in the beginning which i think is important to know is that we did start with seven original members and in november was when we had this first conversation and in march was april when was our first may february into february okay for spring break yes i do remember the spring breakers in the transfer van from the airport that was real intense so we met with seven and i think what's important to note is that we are all gathering in cancun and that was a really important component to it was that we didn't want it to just be on zoom we wanted it to be this intensive or we came together we were able to talk about those three elements of business life and face and we were able to kinda bump along and figure out what it was going to be so this first one was really an experiment in is this going to work like are we actually going to connect and gel and that first one was great and then we had two members fall off and then we had five and then a couple years later we had another member of fall off so i think what's important for people listening to note is that if you're trying to start a pure mastermind you need to be flexible you need to be willing to ebb and flow with the differences of people and it could be their schedules it could be their personality could be their stage of life but it is going to take a long time for you to curate a culture within the group that you have that allows for those things to happen so that i think it's was just really important it was seven of us we all met cancun cone we purposely chose an all inclusive because we did not wanna have to think about meals we didn't wanna think about having to spend extra money on different things we wanted to just arrive at a destination and mexico really offers that because there's no all inclusive in the us and this was we didn't wanna do an airbnb we have since done those but this was just a really good opportunity for us to meet there and be together so that's kind of the jump off point from here and kind of how the group has evolved so before i get into kind of the differences i wanna say this is that we have met multiple places over the years we have done some years we've done two meetings a year sometimes we've done one meeting year we actually were in mexico as the world was shutting down for covid and we were barely got back which is great we were in cabo so we have done cabo multiple times they have done cancun we've done palm springs we have done texas so we've chosen a dot a lot of different locations but also one of the things to know is that we're all mothers we're all mothers of kids who are around the same age in fact three of us just graduated kids from college and from high school so that's a lot to accommodate baseball schedules sports schedules you have to have a group that is okay with that and i think this group that we have here of the four we landed really well in these things but i wanna address our differences and so i wanna jump in first with that to natalie i wanna kinda toss that to you we don't have the same business models and that's actually really cool but i guess talk a little bit about those differences that you've seen kind of emerge as we've kind of created our culture yeah i think it's one of the greatest things of this container that we have created for ourselves and it's one that has allowed me to really feel like i could contribute and i could receive and so part i i mentioned earlier and i think all of us and even those of you guys are listening have probably been in other peer groups or other groups pay you or peer and it was important for me at the moment that we all came together and still continues to be very important to me that i was in a peer group and you know the pay groups had served me well in the past but the thing about us c this together and really to find that synergy i knew that i needed number one at peer group but number two i needed to be in a place where i could receive i do a lot i find myself just the person that i am i find myself in places where i give give give i'm an operator and so what that means to me is like i'm always listening i would say i'm a good listener but i'm always finding gaps and ways to improve what someone is telling me whether that's my kids whether that's my friends and my husband my business friends this mastermind it doesn't matter like that's just the way that my brain works and so i have found myself so many times in places where i am in a mastermind or in a container or group where all i really do is give give give and i haven't and this is a flaw in my own self but where i haven't either felt comfortable or been around the right people to be able to receive and ask and so the thing i think that has made this group for me be so sticky in a place of comfort and true authenticity is that i've been able to find people who are like me and who are different for me not even personally or personally as well as professionally and this group's differences are far and wide even though we have stuck together and we have a lot of synergy there's is i mean we're more different than we are alike but for the right reasons it works and you know we've mentioned we've got faith differences we've got political differences we've got business differences the things that are similar we've already talked about we are all mothers we are all christian we all find faith the middle of us we all value family we are in this digital space that is different for each of us our in consumer looks different but there's a lot of things that are very similar too which of course are going to be the threads that hold you together so if you're listening to this and you're thinking me and how do i curate something like this for myself i think the natural things to find people who are like you but the thing that has made this so sticky for me is that there are a lot of differences as well and these women have really mentored me because they all came into the digital space before me they knew the landscape and they've been able to give me perspective and advice and i just found myself in a place where i could truly be open to whatever it is that the experience that they had and the wisdom that they had and if i you know looked at this like every other group that i've ever joined i may not have i've have said yes so the differences this have been very very po for me yeah and a lot of groups actually would hold them back it would say i don't want somebody who's so different i want everybody here as a you know there's to b2b b businesses and two business to consumer businesses they would say i only want b i only wanna learn and i think when people join with that take take take mentality it sap the group dry because you're going into it with this like i just wanna get what i want from this group and then get out but there's so much that we wanna contribute to each other and actually kelly i think one of the things that you brought up that was so great when we were prepping for this and i was asking like what are the things you guys wanna talk about you brought up this idea of superpower like what does each of us possess that contributes to the group to elevate the group so i wanna talk about that first like what i guess what spurred that thought for you and in kind of wanting that to be a really important question that was brought to the table well we all have different businesses and because of our businesses you can say well they're really good at x right so like you know kate you have an agency and you know aaron and i are both business to consumer and that you've got you know this like amazing d that you do and so like those are your super superpower right we wouldn't have gotten into business without those but i think the other thing that i learned is we spent more time together is that each of you have other superpower as well and you know as aaron mentioned this is a crazy business to be it's lonely it's you know you don't have coworkers really that you're seeing on a day to day basis you know we've all talked about that being an entrepreneur is like the worst session of therapy ever like all of your bad stuff comes flying out and so it was nice to be able to kinda see how else we can help each other so like you know for uk you have an agency so you are so great already at putting together teams and systems and that the way that you you know just really have that connection with your team but in addition to that like you are one of the best connectors i know of people you do an amazing job of knowing people and then knowing how to connect them to other people for them to continue on their journey and that's not something that is necessary to your as part of who you are you know and i talked you know with aaron aaron is my greatest cheerleader like she firmly believes that all of us have the ability to do whatever we wanna do and she will say it on a regular basis like we'll just go do it you can do that you totally you can do that like all the time but the other thing you don't know about aaron is that she has a steel trap for people and their names and everything else so like we've bend to conferences and out don't know anybody because like a name goes in my head and then completely out and she's like well that's so and so and i'm like who she's like well they do and then she will have like their whole backstory story down and like then she goes up to him and then she's connecting and they're connecting with her and like that is just it's a superpower that i don't have but i know if i have a question about somebody that's what i'm gonna call because like she's gonna remember who they are nat is amazing at operations of course she is right i mean like and just like she said like i always build those gaps but nat is the best communicator i've ever encountered where she can take we've all had this like a really hard situation that we've came to the table with and she articulate it in a way that is fair and it is kind but it is to the point like she just does it in such a way and i'm always like writing you know to do that so i think those are things that help a mastermind it's just not to your to matt's point into your point kate just take take take but that you can come and that they can help you out in ways that are degree different than even what their business is yeah absolutely erin to you know bridging off of that what do you see in each of us that has kind of really help support your business on that superpower piece you know what has been the stand thing about na and kelly and i that's really supported you i mean i think d kelly obviously i think there's things that you've each pushed me to do that i wouldn't necessarily have done to understand like how i tick then how that like translates to both day to day and like high level sort of things you know even practical things like i don't know that i ever would have done a disc profile if natalie didn't know the brilliance in that and like how that like of that is so important for understanding how you operate and then team members operate and then how you click together like they're that that's the same for you uk like just knowing how all of that works y'all have always had a bigger team than i have had and so it's been a joy to see that be managed in a way that you know maybe i well one day maybe be i don't know and so that's been a real gift to me as well and i just think that like this we believe all each of you has created this space that it makes me think of that the little tiktok thing that goes around we listen in and we don't judge like that's how this group has been from day one like we're just here to listen and then solve problems i think that actually is the really maybe we haven't talked too much about that like we're here to help each other solve these very unique problems maybe not i mean unique to you know online entrepreneurship maybe not necessarily unique to business so i feel like big disk space i guess safe space i don't wanna sound like a snowflake but it really has been that and just getting this is more general than each of these specifically but getting that like love back and support back whether it's a life crisis because i think we've all had one of those and you know helping navigate through that with grace and patience and also pushing forward i don't know i'm kinda rambling but i think their tribute has spoken into my life my heart my mind my business in different ways over the years really and i think it comes back to that like this is just a safe supportive place and that each of you is a you know very important part of that despite you know differences seasons of life graduation i don't even know which direction was the last month but here we still are right so i just feel like it's the love and support from each of you and d out to what kelly said so i agreed matt what about you like feedback on powers differences mh collectively it's i look at this group as my like board of directors if you will right this is like as aaron said it's a safe place but i see this container as truly my board if you will my best friends in business my you know this it's wild especially from someone from the outside looking in maybe even someone who's not been in this entrepreneurial world before but these you know the three of you guys are some of my best friends on the planet and our touch points are not like anyone else's best friends right because it's a whole different world and it's very very hard to articulate or even envision and i'm so grateful that we took the time and to build what we have here so if you're thinking of or if you're wanting and desi something like this i think that's a good i want to share that with you guys that i really have invested so deeply in these relationships because they are you know on a personal side they're are some of my best friends and then on a business side i look at them as my board and why does that match because when i'm inc new ideas before i'm like have the courage to tell my spouse or my director of operations or my team they hear it they hear it ugly and these are the people this is my say the word again that this is my board and when i think of that i look at each of you individually i think wow like kelly's is a person who i can bring is she truly doesn't like she's got such a great creative mind and very strategic and also balanced with that data piece and the gift of telling somebody with no filter how she really feel and and it's not personal it's like she's gonna make it to how my market like she really inserts herself into a prospective director of operations even though she's not one but you think she doesn't follow my stuff on social you think she doesn't listen intently to me she absolutely does and so when i come to her with a big idea she's like hey let's like let's look at it this way nat or like let's take this a little you know three steps further down or let's expand it and there have been some things that i put into my business that truly she has cultivated off of my mustard seeds she's taken and made something else erin i you know erin ability to genuinely listen to you she's a fan eva i watch her here she's just a fantastic listener but her experience in this space and we have weird overlaps of like of local friends who we each have you know parts of their businesses and our brains and stuff so we've got a lot of synergy there but when i share something with erin she meets me with that operator brain she is very creative and strategic but she's also the one who's gonna help me like break it down and actually make it come into its next version and then you know kate and i have the most similarities of our group because we are both you know b to b we both are natural our native state is being a service provider i think that just our histories are very similar we both have a passion for building team based businesses and stuff like that and so you know i lean on her because she understands more than kelly or aaron about what my business is doing or what i'm facing in with these economic changes and you know i all of us have been through the highs of business together and we joke about them i forgot what we call twenty twenty money oh with twenty twenty one yeah working buy a yacht like we broke we i mean actually that with our said good laughs but anyway we've gone through twenty twenty money and we've gone through the secrets that we don't want anyone to hear and we don't want to vet with our audiences and heck we may not wanna share with our spouses but it's like we've gone through the man should i what should i do next like should i really bail from this like this is really really a tough season we've navigated all of those together and i just got chills again so but such a fantastic group yeah i so agree yeah i was thinking twenty twenty money when we were talking about that and i think to that point of i believe it was in march of twenty one we are in marco island it was kind of the first time we could get back to other after covid yes that was there's so many stories you guys but we did i think the strengths finder during that and we've talked about the ground before and matt and i've taken the colby and our colby are almost identical they're like one number off so when we did that though what was really interesting is kelly you so high on like a marketing and the strategy and i'm not like i don't even think about it like i i'm in the relationship piece i'm in this like positivity space not the kelly isn't positive but that's like one of the things and it was so great to see those differences and like erin is such a she's a quick start which is opposite on the colby of matt and i who are fact finder who we are just like sometimes analysis paralysis and aaron's like get just do it like go like research and do it take charge and those all come together in this really cool place where it's almost like we're ping pong off each other in a discussion and when somebody's taking the hot seat whether they're struggling with it and there's been times when we've done a hot seat or we've done a whole day and we have talked about business but we also wanted to like speak into people's lives when they are in these places where it's just really tough or we don't know there have been seasons where some of us have come to the table and said i don't know if i'm gonna have this business in a year i know that even if i don't have a business we will have this like that's not really going anywhere but this question of like can i navigate through the recession can i navigate your covid can i navigate through all of these things and sometimes you just need a group of people who have different perspectives to show up and say yes yes you can and it's almost like you have four people that are together like picture us all back to back but we're looking out in different places and we turn around inward and we bring in that perspective to the center and now you don't just have these thoughts in a vacuum and we talk about that a lot too like we'll see these messages online and we have a boxer channel where we'll bring them in we're like we know that's scrap we know that selling tactic is garbage we also know that if you're buying into a twenty five thousand dollar mastermind or thirty or six sixty d i think we would sell it for a hundred one time if you're buying into that like that's not really what you need like you need your rider eyes like you need these people who are gonna show up for you and sometimes in those places where you're paying they're not always bad but when you're paying for someone to lead you or you're pain to get closer to that person or whatever a lot of like what we've created here goes out the window completely like the authenticity gets moved down the way the raw many of us have all of us have come to the table broke cried people and crying and just and not because we're in our forties you know like yes just because of what's going on pain exactly and i think that is the beautiful part and we've talked about this before too and i wanna share this just before we get to how we structure our time together but we've talked about how we know people ache for something like this and how we know they're spending money to try to find it and they end up coming up empty because they joined and they thought well i'm gonna get connection and i'm gonna get know depth of business and it's almost like that money spent there's a barrier inhibits something from people growing like i don't wanna sound chew down on like mastermind you know we've all talked about it aid mastermind sorry we've all talked about it here but it's just you gotta you have to inter that you have to inter like why am i joining something what do i hope to get from it and am i hoping to contribute to it in the good the bad the ugly because if you are then knots the making for something that's really gonna grow obviously none of us knew that we showed up in cancun and spring break twenty eighteen like i mean we just didn't know it so let's talk about a structure of timing here and i wanna toss this to you there's been many different ways that we've structured over the years but i feel like we've landed pretty well on like a system of just when we go into it we kinda fall into this structure so talk about like where have we gone how did we choose a time and then like what do we do once we get there well i think it in large part depends on how much time we have together we have been together for a week before we've been together for three days two and a half days forty i mean we've really it's been a little bit different every time but i think the consistent structure within each of those is that we each get an individual i don't know session i don't know we don't even have a name for but like it's a session and sometimes it's a full day sometimes it's a stay it really just depends on the time and the session is just kind of a long walk of time where we're sitting somewhere somewhere not when we're out watching the whales on the boat not then if that's not the time but where we're sitting it can be around at the pool it could be around like a in the lobby in a big like laundry space it's been a different sort of physical space every time but the structure has been very similar where we'll focus on each one of us at a time and it generally starts with sort of like state of the union where are things right now what's working what's not working and then it turns into make things we wanna do in the future and then let's address the problem so it's been slightly structured differently time wise but i think overall getting in the making sure that our needs are met and we get what we need from it if we all scattered and it was oh let's talk about this and then that like you know yes we what does it call squirrel rabbit trail whatever we do that but like very much it comes right back to okay i know this is kate stay we're gonna finish talking about this new product line they wanna do or des shopify store or whatever it may be right and so that's we just really try to keep it focused on that and then we just use sometimes we use you know a breakfast time sometimes we use not usually dinner though that's more like life type stuff but we really just try to keep it focused on each one of us that way we get the feedback we need we get the honest feedback we need we get the questions answered we get i always come away with like this is where i need to go with things like i was thinking this way but also maybe picking that and maybe we're already gonna do this and then it's like okay i have a clearer path of what needs to happen based on where we are what's you know the rub i guess and then you know it just gives me that clarity of where we need to go yeah i think that's a general rough our time together if you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time you know that the signature way that we have been educating our students is through the director of operations certification program and that is going nowhere however i wanna make sure that you are fully aware that something brand new is taking place we are taking over the ops world in educating you all in another way brand new to the ops authority and to the world to be honest we want you to be first in line to claim your vip pass to the ops era tour the tour is gonna kick off on monday july twenty first at eleven am central will be having a big time party for those backstage pass holders to unveil something very very new that you all need to know about tell me what your most memorable or favorite or whatever like most impactful you use whatever term you wanna use like when you think of one of our trips like what has been one that you've walked away from either business building or you were recharged or you refilled like what's been your favorite trip so far i mean we've had so many fun little memory moments right like mh i mean the dolphins hanging out with the dolphins and shelling and markle island and then whale watching it caught i mean we've had so many of those like i almost feel like that's as much of a highlight yeah as like all the business stuff i think the most impactful for me was that we started the how are we gonna get our businesses through the recession conversation before anybody else did i remember it it was twenty twenty one right march twenty twenty one mh yeah we were at le leblanc and i was like do we differently really need to be doing this everything's fine mh here we are four years later and we're all still here and i've seen you you know we you all know this but you see heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story of friends and colleagues who have poured their lives into this and then just yeah so we're still hyper focused on that conversation and making hard decisions we all have and might have to continue right we don't know but i think that that early conversation i don't know if i living in a cloud or what but i was a no you we're fine why fine like so anyways that was impactful for me because that helped me make decisions early on about you know both on the consumer side as well as on our internal side mh and then i just think that you know clarity on new products new programs financing finesse programs the tri new strategies things that have worked and have it worked you know all of these little nuggets that come up over the years or have come up over the years i think is i don't know if that's the first thing that comes to mind i know i will think of more things later yeah yeah no it's totally fine that's how all of our brains work these days and we know you can just box to us later yeah i will we'll i'll be sending out my this is what i've meant to say i talk something yes totally kelly what about you a favorite destination or a moment or most impactful time together that just spurred it to the next level for your business or life i think marco island was probably my favorite i mean destination we went to it things had just opened back up we've been stuck with our families for out don't know how long and we were done being stuck with our families for how long and we pull up to this house which literally looks like it should've have been part of mtv crib in the nineties i mean we pull up and we're all like one in the world like for in honesty eight we are usually pretty frugal we are pretty financially good stewards but this house was huge i mean let's just be honest it was huge like we didn't use half of it i think there's rooms we didn't even go into but for me that was probably the trip that solidified us as a group the moment we spent almost i think it was five days together it was one of our longer trips we had a lot of deep conversations about family and about money and our businesses we had a really baller pool that we were spending time in and bought alcohol from costco so there was enough of it to go around but it it's just a that's like i love all of our destinations but that one has a real special place in my heart of just we just i felt like we just really poured into each other a lot during those days and yeah i'm favorite thing for my business i think it's you know there's been many like i think palm springs was probably the most strategic you know when we had the day and had the paper on the slider glass door and we all do real deep and then we had papers that we took home with us and mh but each one has been i think super memorable and what i loved about it is having the day or the time allows each one of us to keep going until we feel like we've had enough and so you don't have that situation of somebody else button in with their stuff not that we've ever but can happen right like you've got somebody that wants to do that and you know we usually say like do you feel like you got what you needed mh and that's how we kind of know that that's the end of that that time and then we can move on to dinner time which is a little different always fun yeah it is always fun but yeah the mtv crib house in morgan glasses yes and that like for reference to as members in the group have fallen off that was our first one where was just the four of us and i agree like i think that was such a pivotal time to offer for all of us to connect not what about you like what's your favorite i am just sm and giggling over here care of all the crazy stories and circumstances good chances that we have encountered i think that we've met up over ten times i was just trying to make a list of it but i looked over here and i have a picture from nashville over here picture from a cabo but i always think that the i mean i love every single trip and all of us are gonna say the same thing because they are trips that we plan we organize we have as you can tell from aaron's explanation of how we kind of bring all of us together they're all thought through like it's not like you know i don't think any of us go on a family trip without some sort of an idea of what we're going to be doing and we treat this like a real trip at the same time every single time we go they are destinations on purpose because we're rewarding ourselves i truly look at this as a business expense where i'm rewarding myself for the efforts of being a ceo of a growing business and keeping us and our team afloat and continuing to forge a difficult path of entrepreneurship and so there as much of a gift and a reward as they are that strategy that i need to feed my soul so i can continue in this path so i always think that our mexico destinations number one when we go to mexico it's a feat because of you know we're looking because of travel but we get typically five days and you know that's a good amount of time that's the most refreshing for me because we get like a whole day or three quarters of a day to focus on each of us and the thing is this is also getting into like the structure piece but you know i wake up that next morning and we're all pretty early rise and before we get to whose day it is i'm following up with kelly or aaron or kate or whoever it usually it's kelly or aaron because i always i was gonna stay sleep with kate but you can say that you you can share with secret so i at her at nighttime but i'll follow up with questions with kelly or aaron in the morning and say okay we talked about this about me yesterday or it may be three days after my day quote unquote day and i'm still like mu on things because as much as i'm giving and listening and i'm still learning from who else you know from other people so anyway i love the mexico retreats i we have some serious moments there that are you know just unforgettable i also love that we get taken care of and we truly get pam we get to go to the spa we get amazing food and we always choose destinations that have good food because we've learned over our time we care about that mh there is no time to waste with crappy food and i not to cut you off now but i think to piggyback off of that i think what's interesting is the iteration of the economy to erin point about recession is that we chose this amazing resort in mexico leblanc it's beautiful you know that was where we went in twenty twenty and it was just very luxurious and amazing and i don't know if we had talked about recession but did we buy the coupon for the next year that year because we kind of knew and they were trying to get people to come back because everybody could see the right on the wall travel was going to cease to exist and we were like okay fifty percent off sure we'll take it and even this last one where we met in vegas it was a really great place but kelly found it and it's through it we went to virgin and it was how can we get this as cheap as possible because we need to meet with each other but we know we're spread financially we know this is the time it might not be our year to go to little leblanc but we will still make space to have good food and to have a really nice atmosphere because we are intentionally choosing to take time out and make it a reward like we have put in the hard work like we have been in the dirt and this is going to be a give back to us you know not just to be with each other i was actually wondering how many times we had met so you got ten so far not that's round number i don't know okay well we've been to mexico four times texas palm springs natalie i guess national marco vegas yeah see i it k yes but two two canned and two combos yeah right okay for three combos yeah two and two combos okay so support because there was a time when we were trying to meet twice a year and we planned on international and then state side to make money yeah exactly went doing yes we're being real there was twenty twenty money was fun times okay i'm gonna switch this up a little bit i was gonna do the giving advice to other business owners that want to pick a master my group but before we get to that i want to talk about a favorite memory i don't care if it is an excursion or a moment like what has been your funniest memory takeaway from one of our trips kelly killed the story of kelly bank and on the weekend that was going to be i was i was prepping i was like oh can i do that so funny oh well kelly you get sorry you can route yourself out if you want i can i mean that isn't it's not my favorite moment it's just kinda who i am but my favorite moment was whale watching which i think somebody also probably saying and give some details on it but that particular moment we were at leblanc we were at the night the nicest restaurant at lip leblanc we're one french one yeah it was nice and we were there early so it wasn't like we were in there at like prime time dinner time like we were one of the first reservations and we were having a good time like we were being a little silly and the wine was flowing maybe some champagne you know we were just having a good time and there was an individual there with his pre teen girlfriend he okay let's be honest it was like you got sued like this teen girlfriend and he was shu natalie because they were he thought we were being too loud and he didn't do it once but he did it like a couple of times like shu you and i was done with that like no one does shu my good friend like i'll show you and so we gave him some dirty looks and he just kinda kept going at it so we left because we were at the end of our meal anyway but then i just decided to take it a step further and i went to the front window where they were setting at and i banged on the window in front of them and i do believe i used some explicit to say how i felt about them and then i bought off and then you flipped in the bird yeah as well as saying you know how i felt about you yes using four letter words yeah a lot yes that was a good one kelly is mama bear though like she is our mama bear she loves us so fiercely and she was straight pissed that this person would be rude to me now i might have deserved it because i know i was over served the loud and and but frankly we were early it wasn't like it was like seven o'clock and everybody was there eating the place wasn't even full like i was just like oh good gosh and the was so supportive of us they were not annoyed by us at all yeah so good yeah yeah i had some words to say to him i banged on that window pretty up yeah yeah that is it's good one that what about you you know i don't know who here would not say the whale watching like that was like core memory for all of us i just i saw the question what was your favorite memory and those were the two that popped up we're seeing the whales i'm telling you was that a march trip mh yeah so march in cabo if you're into the whales even if you're not it was like unbelievable and it was just it was such a great experience to have and luckily i was with these ladies to see that happen and then of course kelly's kelly's window banging it came up really quickly thereafter but i mean we've had great memories at every single place sometimes my takeaway is not necessarily the place but what business lesson i got or what inspiration or what clarity i got but mexico and the whales is is it for me yeah aaron what about you i did o to both of those however y'all don't remember the uber breaking down oh that's that's say my brain it's really to kid that we just clueless like we're fine so like we gonna die we did not die thankfully well here so we went from leblanc we went off property one of the few times we ever did in large part because of horror stories that you hear that i'll never be asked we'll be pines so we go to this adorable precious harm table i've actually known several people to go there including my sister anyways but we uber over and we're leaving and we're going back to the hotel it's twenty five minute driver so not terrible and he's like my car breaks down i'm like everybody out we're out we're out get out get out get out he goes there but this is what he said and i speak spanish so in hugh i was talking him and he said there's somebody else coming i was like no we're calling another uber absolutely not this is how it happens this is how i died in mexico anyways but if i'm gonna die in mexico car wanted to be with y'all y'all but anyways we call the second like another uber so that we didn't like get in this some other they've get stuck in some other guys trapped that wasn't gonna happen that day well anyway it wasn't kate the only one that had phone coverage too because the rest of us are to eat to have he only needed to butt really i know anyways yeah but he it literally was like how you read like the car breaks down somebody else comes along it was that exact scenario and thankfully i listened to enough true crime and enough missing people stories to see what's happening in the moment i was like you don't get away from the car come over here everybody look every direction and the second car was like right there it was like coming around the little circle i was like nope we're getting in there one bye you can i'm pretty sure natalie was like i'm not telling just this like well now everybody knows yeah everybody does that was hilarious i forgot about that i too yeah i think only other fun excursions to go i mean we've done so many fun things in addition so well in that is a part of it too that we've curated it with this whole idea of like our dinners are usually really nice like we will kinda scrap it up it when it comes to like breakfast or lunch but then we'll choose one really nice dinner for the week or maybe in this case it was like an off property breakfast so that you know we actually had to pay for it there and then we'll sometimes choose an excursion and these excursions are so nice because we just kind of let down right we do something that's really fun in the area we get out and in cabo we did the whale watching and then in marco island we did the shelling which was amazing i had never done that i didn't even know that was a thing but i'm we don't do that in the northwest so but it was so cool because we went to this island and we just gotta pick up all these shells and then lay them all out and take them home and i still have them here on this bowl of shells as this memory and that has been so cool for me i think in texas we did the pet nat the sword thing at that sn winery right where they were kinda sn as well i don't know loud i don't i don't actually think we were i think it was like something weird about i don't remember what it was but i do remember the sword and that was pretty cool yeah yeah and even just the pool in palm springs there has to be a pool i think that has been our constant theme like wherever we go there must be a pool because the conversations about life faith and business times happen in the margins and sometimes it can happen between all four of us or just two of us or three of us but that's when you're kind of relax ensure we do this whole hot seat thing by the pool too but it's this time where you just you are away from the business you are not sitting in front of a computer you are not doing any of that but you are starting to let your brain relax and think and these excursions or these nice dinners kind of releases that a little bit to where we do end up talking about business over dinner sometimes or maybe somebody in their hot seat that day or their session is like oh i didn't bring this up and so i'm gonna bring it up now and we get to end up having this really great conversation and so yeah i think the dolphins for me might be in the dome homes which i've heard are no longer there after that hurricane yeah so being able to see those was like super cool and just we just laughed too it's like we are actually getting this true physical release of old attention and all the stress of business and life and you're just gonna to do something fun and it's like most women in their late forties early fifties don't take enough time to do these types of things and especially the pressure of being an entrepreneur i think is pretty tough too okay so to kinda round it out if you each were talking to somebody about starting a mastermind or looking for one that they wanted to join what would you tell them it doesn't have to be one piece of advice but like what would you say to them about where they needed to start so aaron gonna start with you like what would you tell someone who comes to you and says i'm thinking of starting to mastermind well what should i know before i start this i think it's about your intention and kind of the taking little and nuggets i it's actually from all of you said is like you have to be willing to give and receive you have to be willing to be open you have to be vulnerable you have to not judge you have to have hard conversations you have to let conflict refine you and make you better it's such a complicated dynamic and i think just going in with shouldn't say complicated dynamic there are a lot of dynamics at play in order to i think get what you need from a pure mastermind and so to be willing to be i think just open and vulnerable in that kind of giving and receiving which is kind of what we've shared all the way throughout and then i think you know if it's not the right fit you know for yourself bow out you know there's no hard feelings anywhere from any of the bow outs that i had in previous ones or you know from our original seven and so i think that that's just you know but it's also just keep putting yourself out there and then i think also not being in one that with somebody who's an immediate like competitor to you that would be a hard note for me because you know i mean there's such thing as like coop competition right cooperating in competition but that's i think at a higher level not at this dislike life mastermind level so i think that that would be something to be like maybe your really good friend has a very very similar business model to you and then you're like well maybe you're gonna steal my things are you like how do you protect that i think that's to that adds a layer of you know complication that is not worth it so i think not being competitive with would be another one yeah yeah just but it's putting yourself out there just doing it yeah for sure kelly what about you i think that one of the things that's made us work is that at least for me is that you have to be able to love deeply to each other and there will be conflict like i think that's something we haven't mentioned but there has been conflict within the four of us before and i think the thing that has allowed us to keep going is that the ability to say i'm sorry mh and i screwed up and can you forgive me because it's just natural that it's gonna happen and i think that if you don't have that ability to love deeply to forgive easily and also to ask for forgiveness and to listen for greater context and understanding but you know i think you have to have those in order for a mastermind to have gone on as long as ours has mh and so i would say those things and they're not easy to do you know but i think all of us come to the table with that and that's why i think we are as strong and as deep as we are like i don't really believe that there is anything that we could do happen with us mh that we wouldn't be able to work through and i think it's because of those things mh yeah great for sure not what about you i think knowing like being really aware like if you're craving something like this i mean this is like life coach one zero one but really knowing yourself first and being honest with what you need where you are what you want and i would say that i have i thought i was doing that with every group paid or peer that i have been a part of and there have been many many many that i have been a part of but really what makes us work for me is being ultimately aware of that and then looking at this from a whole person perspective i have done and been somewhat satisfied in the past by being in groups that served me in one dimension but not all dimensions the reason that this one has longevity is that it is whole person it is you know i can be going through a hell personal time i can be going through financial i mean one of the most raw moments that i will never forget is in cancun talking first cancun talking about like real financial stress in my home right had nothing to do with the business had everything to do with the home and you know that formed a whole new level for me that i had never been able to really fully express and that was my feedback my three sixty at that moment of like whoa this is like like friendship on another level from people who barely know me right and so anyway i've just say my thing is looking at this from a whole person perspective not just you know aaron touched on you know sometimes i've been in mastermind minds where they were all very similar to me they were all service based or they were all moms or they were all this and this is truly a place a bubble that we have created that is very whole person it's very we have a lot of similarities and we have a lot of differences and because of that we have been able to like persevere through the highs the lows the challenges of personal the the id that we have as people in a group and then it's knowing that the transactional mastermind that i have been a part of did not work and that's where i show up and i give give give but i don't have i'm not in the right place to ask and to receive and then know that everything is a season we've talked about people exiting and by the way they self selected out we didn't it wasn't like a we kicked them out it was like they had the awareness to raise their hand and say this isn't a good fit for me because of life or their season or a struggle or changing businesses or exiting business or whatever but you know if you find yourself you know don't feel like you have to build a mastermind or build a peer group that lives on forever that may not work no i would say that what we have cultivated feels somewhat unicorn like because for sure the things that we have seen and been a part of in the past but think the biggest thing is just the whole person knowing that i have been most fulfilled here because i could be pretty and i could be ugly and i could be together and i could be clear and i can be all those things in this one container and if i could go back and look at those other groups that i have been a part of in the past what didn't serve me was that they weren't whole person yeah that sums it up really well i don't really have a lot to add to what the three of you have said besides be open to take a risk because it is a risk like it was a risk to all me in cancun and be vulnerable to lean in to say okay i am going to try it and i think that is part of the risk the risk isn't getting on a plane and going to cancun like that anybody can get on a plane the risk is showing up in a small group and when it's your turn to share these pieces of yourself to watch how they're receives to feel the bumping up against and knowing like are these my people can i connect with them can i go deep with them and that only comes from being willing to risk vulnerability and that is hard when you are in an online business space because what do you do all day you are in your own space by yourself and kelly to your point you tend to go more introvert so it's even harder for you because you know you it's talking right like that is what a mastermind is it's a lot of people in it's a lot of talking and now it's easy for us because we kind of know our rhythms but in the beginning you have to be open to taking a risk and for a lot of people that's just not something they're willing to do and there's no shame in that it's fine but when you find yourself presented with an opportunity be it at a conference late at night when there's a very excessive happy hour and you come up with this idea take hold of it don't just see it as like well that's a pie in the sky idea that would never work grab hold start telling a few other people and they'll tell a few other people and you'll end up with a few people in mexico and then ten years later or so you could be like yeah it worked it actually ended up working but it took hard work it took vulnerability and it took being able to say yes to each and every trip because each of us says yes knowing full well this is time out of our family lives this is time out of our business lives we know our team needs us we've all answered you know slacks and boxer messages by the pool or late at night but we put prioritization off it on it because we risked at first and i just think that is such an important thing that i would tell anybody and even in the day and age where things have changed in the online space ask great questions to like ask people questions about have they taken personality to us have they like how are they wired what's their view of the future with their business are they in it to win it like it'd be really hard i think all of you would agree with this to join a mastermind right now with somebody who's been in business like one or two years because you just it's so volatile right and i think that was a unique thing about our group was that we hadn't been in business a chunk of time enough to know like okay we're in it but also was a different time then too i think that's something important to highlight the twenty seventeen twenty eighteen leading to twenty twenty money was fantastic right like those are golden ears we thought hard them i love the fact though like we were okay we call it twenty twenty money but and and we've had that and then we've now having twenty twenty five money which is very different but i think we're still finding ways to make it work and i think that's you know you we still do yeah it's so important well ladies thank you for sharing your story here on this podcast i'm sure people listing that well actually i'll say i hope people listening were inspired and encouraged and at least gave you a little idea or something that you could start on your own and we would all encourage you to do that we would all encourage you to step out in faith and you know next time you meet somebody at a conference and you strike up a great conversation lean in and go back on that so thanks ladies for being on the podcast and i'm excited to see how our story impacts other people thank you for investing just a little bit of time to listen to this episode of the ops authority podcast i am so grateful to be surrounded by real action takers like you who are invested in growing their business through operations will you have one more action to your to do list today visit the ops authority podcast dot com where you can join our community of business owners and other ops experts you're gonna hear from me in a week but in the meantime new big things on the backside of your business

hey friends if you're looking for an amazing conference to go to that's really going to combine the ideas of entrepreneurship marketing sales ai then i wanna suggest to you inbound twenty twenty five since i have been in business for myself inbound has been one of those conferences that always comes up that sparks my attention because they have the ability to bring together really big businesses and i know that small businesses are able to learn so much from these bigger players so this hotshot conference is gonna be held september third through the fifth and it's gonna be in san francisco three days and you're gonna have keynote they've also organized it to where you're gonna have tactical breakout sessions you're gonna see some new products be revealed and also some immersive workshops which is always important for the operators of the world you're gonna be able to network with some big leaders and gain some actionable insights to implement right away if this sounds good visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today this is the ops authority podcast where my mission is to break down the backside of your business so you can take the right actions to grow and scale hey i'm natalie gin a small business operations expert and i'm gonna give you a front row seat to real solutions that will help you reach the vision that you have for your business all while equip you to put out those inevitable pesky fires and those fears that pop up listen in for strategies to grow your team craft the systems and processes that you need for your business and establish business foundations that you may have skipped over i know you're ready to do really big things so let's do it together hey hey friends it's natalie here with the ops authority podcast and today we are going to be recording episode two eighty two and this is another behind the scenes this is all about the journey of coming the director of operations here at the ops authority and this podcast is about sharing the journey of moving through the ranks as they say gaining trust building a partnership to become a director of operations as well as celebrating alex's promotion and their tremendous job and impact that she makes every single day here and to me as well as this company at the ops authority so as you know we teach operations here at the ops authority and in fact we have a certification called the director of operations certification so i'm telling you that because this is something that is probably like we teach how to become a do and i'm gonna share with you how we have cultivated and what it look like for alex to become the director of operations here inside of the ops authority let me preface this by saying that not every single business needs a do it needs to be the right size you need to be at the right revenue level and have the right margins in your business you also have to have the right leadership mentality and you also need to have a team those are kind of the criteria for having a director of operations on your team in a recurring or in a retainer type of fashion now inside of our company we are leveraging full time employees which for my size of company and for the dreams and desires that i have the way that i've structured this business that makes the most sense for me but again even that fluctuates in other businesses business models etcetera so if you're listening to this and maybe you're listening this as a founder or you're listening to this as an operator inside of the business and you're thinking well my team isn't this size and we're not making x amount of dollars and we don't have a team so you know we're not really ready just understand if you're not at that point then the ceo or the founder truly has to fill that gap and they are not only the ceo but they're also the d and probably a lot of other titles too and full transparency that's exactly where i was up until about this last year as the team grows my responsibilities have shifted but i was still the one that was owning division of the entire company as well as all of the operations too but of course i had people who are helping me who are on this team to get things done and even to manage some of these initiatives that we had but at the end of the day i was both ceo and d so here's our story and it's one that i think a lot of founders can benefit from in just my philosophy of growing talent internally but it also is a great compliment to people who are operators like many probably most of the people who are listening to this podcast who desire to grow within a company it's always my greatest intention that you understand you as an operator understand your values and you partner and you look you secure companies and brands and leaders who share that because i believe that when you do that that's when you have the ability to truly grow inside of a company so let me take you down a little path first of all i wanna preface this by saying that alex has been with our company for four plus years a little bit more than four years actually in january that was her four year anniversary so it's four and a half now but she started out in this company as a full time operations coordinator she was my very first full time hire actually i had to go look for her job description and it looks like at that time it's been a minute and we've done a lot of things over that time period but she had a lot in a variety of tasks that covered the operational side as well as the delivery side of our business let me explain to you what delivery side needs so i told you about our director of operations certification program that is our may that has been our signature way of doing business with us and so for us to be able to facilitate that we have what we call a delivery side of our business where we fulfill the obligation we have to our students so you can think of it as like delivery or maybe even like our programs discipline of our company but she was doing a whole lot of things and her title was operations coordinator she functioned primarily as an executive assistant to me helping me to keep my calendar organized which always needs help ensure that i closed the loop on tasks because i'm infamous for starting just like you and many other people right we start things and we don't quite get them to the finish line she was excellent at helping me to close the loops she did a little bit of project management and actually probably a lot because managing me is a big project and she was a massive i can't stress this enough she was a massive facilitator of the director of operations program i'm gonna call that the dol certification as we move through this podcast but a lot of what she focused on was implementation with a little bit of manage but mostly she was involved in the implementation activities and when you think about the delivery side of the program side of our business this looked like facilitating our calls making sure i was prepared before the calls making sure that we got our trainings our live trainings up into our learning management platform communicating to the students handling you know failed payments or late payments and all of that so she was really operations not only for the brand but also for the d sort of vacation and that's when she was a ops coordinator or an operations coordinator for us speaking of the doj program she's the very first person that i had to really really help me to create the program to have a stable structure and to have the capacity for us to take an active stance in creating standard operating procedures for the program also integrating and managing some of the projects that emerged or bubble up as a result from the feedback that our students are giving now you probably know this from listening to this podcast but i'm really really really active with our students and i wanna create an environment where they tell us what they would do different or spot opportunities or gaps that we have and i had been holding all of these things but you know when you are doing this on the super super lean team and maybe you're the only team there's just so much time in the day and so by bringing alex you know having her really look over in shepherd the doj program we were starting to be able to tackle some of these things that really made a significant difference in the experience which i massively care about for our students but she was able to be very instrumental of that her oversight of the d program was the perfect way to highlight her ability to be a strategic partner to meet and it was such a critical part of what we do in how we generate revenue and what our brand looks like internally and externally and this became just insanely valuable to me and it was at this juncture that i gave her a promotion from operations coordinator to d operations manager and this was truly a bridge between heavy management as well as establishing herself and dipping her toe into becoming a strategist inside of our company i had been able to test the strategic part of her brain while she was overseeing the d program because i was truly del in stepping back and letting her own some of those critical pieces that i had maybe held on to a little bit too long or too hard in the past so i had seen her be proficient at strategy it was uncomfortable for both of us but i saw her really thrive and at least be curious at this point so that kept both of us really invested in one another of course the results that i was getting kept me there as well at this point it was time for us to ring on another operations coordinator to allow us to some of the task that she was doing that alex was doing and that we're going to i needed to be able to free up some of her time so that she could take on additional new stretch tasks for her but she couldn't do everything just like i couldn't do everything so for the same reason that i brought on an operations coordinator so i could delegate things now alex had settled into this operations coordinator role she had elevated into the ops manager role and it was time for her to delegate some tasks as well this is when we brought in the amazing adrian so if you've been around our structure then you probably have met adrian but she's is a person who came in right behind alex and alex this is who alex trained to backfill her role as an operations coordinator and just to give a holistic picture it was at this point in my business journey that i was just now starting to see a matrix organization coming together to support the initiatives that we were doing and what i mean by this is that we were at the point where i can strongly delineate the marketing function from the operations functioned as well as from the delivery or the programs function not only could i see three different departments if you will we were also building support underneath each of those so it wasn't complete at this point but i could see the vision for these three different functions to come together and then i could also see in my vision having leaders of each of those areas along with support personnel underneath them that they were independently managing but that's kinda where i was mentally at this time when i had both an ops coordinator as well as an ops manager new month new podcast recommendation this is a good one it is called no straight path and it's hosted by ashley min baba she is also inside of the hubspot podcast network which is where i get my podcast recommendations every single month the great thing about the show and something i know that you're gonna love is she's gonna be shedding light on the stories behind all the shiny resumes that you see in the linkedin profiles the social media highlights and the crazy cool job titles but in this podcast she strive to human success from the millennials perspective and i know i've got a lot of millennials here listening to me today if you like an interview style conversation with diverse and important voices you should definitely take a listen this show is going to be perfect for the business builders inside of our community you're also going to love it is a pleasure to listen to ashley on those straight path she just has the perfect podcast podcasting voice she also has a unique perspective and there's a ton of vulnerability and we all love that listen to no straight pack wherever you get your podcast this month it's no secret that if you're listening this podcast you are dedicated to up leveling yourself and all your operator ness and to make that possible i'm telling you you're gonna need to up level the type of clients that you were bringing in every single day i'm hearing of people being dis with what they're doing and it's not because they're not delivering it's not because of the amazing skills that they have it's because of the clients that they are currently serving so stop no board do you have to continue to take the clients you have been taking there is another level of client waiting for you i promise you it is not just for him her or them it is for you and you have access to that today i put together a guide for you for this it is called the ten ways to finding high quality clients and i give you ten actual strategies that me natalie have used in growing my business to continuously attract the right level the next level of client for me you can find that by going to the ops authority dot com forward slash ten ways the number ten ways so now that adrian is here she has assumed some of the responsibilities that alex had now it was time for me to really showcase alex in her ops manager role and to do that her scope changed of course she was still running to back into the business but now she had become our chief project manager she set up and she managed click which was somewhat new to us we transitioned into that tool from trello and she still does that by the way she began onboarding our new employees she oversaw our podcast and documented a tremendous amount of processes which shouldn't surprise anybody listening to this but she had a very holistic view of the business she got to know me very deeply what my desires what my working style look like and because of how closely that she supported me in her previous role as an ops coordinator and because her scope was bigger it was easier for me to leverage her now to go all in to leveraging her as a strategic partner and it was at this point in our journey where i saw her being a decisive counterpart to me this is very very important not all founders are like this and not everybody has the same strengths and weaknesses i do but one of the things i really have struggled with because i'm a natural i'm a native operator i am not a native visionary so it's a stretch for me to be in that visionary space but one of the things and the deficiencies i have is being able to make quick decisive decisions so having alex be my partner has truly helped me to become more decisive this doesn't have a price tag that i could even share with you guys it is insanely valuable and what this looked like in real life was and you need to hear this was her pushing back when things were out of alignment helping me to rep prioritize initiatives that really didn't help us get towards our goal you've heard of shiny object syndrome i am no stranger to that either but she helped me to rep prioritize whenever i was getting off of my path we as the strategic map so she was always great about she is always great about knowing what our goals are and whenever i start to do other things that are gonna take us further and further away from our goals she also had and still has a lot of times where she will redirect me when i go to over extending myself or not being realistic with my time now this is another real i'm telling all myself but this is another really big big flaw in me because i i feel like i can get it all done and i'll just work nice and weekends but she knows that that's not something i really want to do and i've proven over and over and over that i may say that but i really don't do that so she's amazing at helping me be very realistic she has mastered lots of skills to this point but it was truly this that made her indispensable to me everything that i have just shared is really the thing that elevated her and speaking of elevation to elevate her and her confidence which she did need i gave her a huge responsibility in this operations manager role and that was to coordinate the redesign of our entire certification program now this is the way this is the signature way the only way that people work with us now this is a huge project because it's a hundred and twenty videos we res scripted every single one of them i mean we had a content plan we had and she did all of it and i can't even i will never be able to articulate everything that she did but to give you an idea she redesigned our entire hundred and twenty training curriculum this is probably the largest project that our company had taken on and i delegated it all to her i totally knew that she could do it and i knew that she would thrive but i also knew that it would push her and it definitely did that this involved her writing the project plan managing an ever changing project plan documenting processes negotiating with vendors and all the support personnel that it took to do this reorganizing restructuring the content taking the output of us working with instructional designers and laying out the program in a new way and then of course back to managing all me the main content creator behind every single one of these videos and also helping me to manage my time so that we could get this done in a timely manner she also quality checked and tested every single link every workbook i mean navigated paying all of our contractors and then also many flights to texas to get this project done this project took us about one year to complete all the while she's not only managing this huge project she's also managing all the other items that i previously shared and managed our matrix our growing matrix team this was a significant milestone for me and i remember thinking now this is the perfect time for me to take her to the quote final test if you will i remember the phone call or the call that we had where i was discussing if she was open to learning the financial side of the business which would be the discipline that she was most uncomfortable with and it was completely new to her i really didn't know what she was gonna say but i was really really hopeful i guess one of those things where i was like bracing myself for her to say no i'm fine right here and we've always been very open and honest so she should have felt really comfortable to say no but she was all in i remember her eyes were a little bit big and i could see the doubts in her but it was up to me to help her to feel comfortable and also giving her the training in the tools for her to be able to step in into this last rung on the ladder of being able to overcome all of the objectives it takes to become a director of operations so from a financial perspective we centralized and we brought all of our financial strategy in house this will forever be the biggest payoff off in our business and for so many more reasons and i can share on this podcast today but alex learned she redesigned she asked really good questions she researched and she improved our financial position she continues to be just a force to be reckon with especially on the financial side and this is nothing that she thought was in her skill set when she came here and that makes me so so proud not only for her but then also the gift to our business she's so connected to our products our level of expectation are my expectation of accuracy and delivery and she fully understands our vision and my vision oh she understands me and my goals is my personal goals too so after one year of doing this her efforts her attention to detail her in ingenuity ingenuity has saved us nearly ninety thousand dollars in one calendar year as i was receiving our tax preparation documents for last year for twenty twenty four i saw that on i thought oh my goodness we saved ninety thousand dollars ninety thousand dollars in operating expenses which was unbelievable it totally saved our profit margin in a pretty challenging economic market so her attention to financials i want you guys to hear this saved us nearly ninety thousand dollars let's go ahead and round up to six figures so yeah she's pretty darn legit in addition to this she has been working on our financial four now this is like the tip of the iceberg when i look at financial management one piece of it is making sure that your finances are clean that your sound that you are in a good position but the other part of this and this is something that you know i've been able to put into mature companies and really aspire to be able to do over time but she has been working on our financial forecasting which is a whole big project but this exercise is something that we do at the end of the year with our goals as well as our historical information and data to be able to build out what we can expect financially month over month if we perform at our good goal it's extremely important for companies to do this so that they know and they have an expectation of what's coming in and even the bigger deal is so that we can recognize are we falling behind or are we ahead of the curve and that's where this strategy really comes in so we look at this eight in every single month and this is where alex has been so amazing at helping our company with growth or contraction if that's where we are so at this point of our journey together she has proven examples of being competent and a leader in every single one of the five key components of being a director of operations which are strategy project management human resources data and financials and throughout this podcast i maybe not have called every single one of those out but that's exactly what alex's journey internally has done and this is why it is an absolute no brainer to promote her to our director of operations here at the ops authority now this is our story at the ops authority the timeline looks different in every business and for every single leader i believe in growing and building teams internally rather than sourcing for new levels and leaving my most tenured employees at the place in which they entered so you'll see other companies who will look externally in the external market to bring in managers or directors into their business because they're looking for someone who has a lot of experience in that place for me it just makes a lot of sense and i truly believe for most small businesses they need to take a path similar to what i have done and plus you build that legacy you build that partnership which is really difficult to find and to fast track in somebody that you're just bringing in from the outside that hasn't truly quote unquote grown up inside of the company now this isn't gonna work every single time it's not gonna work in every single person's business but it's been something that i've been able to successfully do a ton of times over my twenty five years of management both in small business and large corporate management you also might have taken away where i started this podcast and said that this has been a four year journey you might be thinking i don't have four years to be able to do this i'm excited and ready to dive in to being a director of operations right now so don't let this sway you this timeline is ours my business went from a baby business to a teenager business to a big girl business with the partnership of alex and so if you're looking to fast track this you wanna come inside of a company that is further down the road in their maturation journey alex came to me with an implementation role she grew into management and she has joined me in the strategic and visionary side of this business she has truly grown beside me as i have grown the ops authority and to be honest in her early years of being a full time employee at the ops authority i didn't need a director of operation but today i do and we do so with all of that i wanna give a heartfelt congratulations to the most amazing alex on her promotion to becoming the director of operations here at the ops authority she is truly a confidant she is our key strategist she is my protector a people leader she is trustworthy she is my dear friend and she is also very candid the most important value to me even when it's uncomfortable for her so i wanted to just bring this to you again to celebrate alex and her journey with us on this promotion which is a key pinnacle part inside of our brand and internal team structure at the ops authority but also to show the rest of you guys what this may look like for your company whether you're leading that company or you're a team member or even a decision maker inside of that company i hope this finds you all very very well join us inside of our facebook group the ops insiders and congratulate alex alongside me and i look forward to being back here on another episode of the ops authority podcast bye for now thank you for investing just a little bit of time to listen to this episode of the ops authority podcast i am so grateful to be surrounded by real action takers like you who are invested in growing their business through operations will you add them one more action to your to do list today visit the ops authority podcast dot com where you can join our community of business owners and other ops experts you're gonna hear from me in a week and in the meantime new things on the backside of your business

hey friends if you're looking for an amazing conference to go to that's really going to combine the ideas of entrepreneurship marketing sales ai then i wanna suggest to you inbound twenty twenty five since i have been in business for myself inbound has been one of those conferences that always comes up that sparks my attention because they have the ability to bring together really big businesses and i know that small businesses are able to learn so much from these bigger players so this hotshot conference is gonna be held september third through the fifth and it's gonna be in san francisco three days and you're gonna have keynote they've also organized it to where you're gonna have tactical breakout sessions you're gonna see some new products be revealed and also some immersive workshops which is always important for the operators of the world you're gonna be able to network with some big leaders and gain some actionable insights to implement right away if this sounds good visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today this is the ops authority podcast where my mission is to break down the backside of your business so you can take the right actions to grow and scale hey i'm natalie gin a small business operations expert and i'm gonna give you a front row seat to real solutions that will help you reach the vision that you have for your business all while equip you to put out those inevitable pesky fires and those fears that pop up listen in for strategies to grow your team craft the systems and processes that you need for your business and establish business foundations that you may have skipped over i know you're ready to do really big things so let's do it together hey hey friends welcome back to another episode of the ops authority podcast we have a special ops edition today and if you're listening in and maybe these are the episodes that you come back to all the time and maybe this is the first time you're hearing an ops edition but what is an observation here well it is when i invite my incredible friend longtime team member of the ops authority someone who has coached over two hundred women inside of our program to become their next best self by leveraging their operational skills that special guest my dear friend is lynette robinson today we are going to take three questions that i have come into our community from existing director of operations students and we're gonna tell you guys are two perspectives the reason i love these ops edition episodes is you're not just hearing from me and how i think you're getting the duality of the way two different people who are high level holistic operators solve and work through a question or a problem that is being presented to us and so anyway it is my pleasure to have lynette here with us to talk through these questions and i know if you are a prospective student meaning you're looking at a certification program this will give you a little insight into the types of questions that come in and also on the other side of that you get a sample of what it's like to be supported by this incredible coach lan as well as myself the mentor inside of the d program so lynette are you ready to tackle some questions today i am ready the only thing that would make this better is if we were sitting in person and just chi chatting so zoom will have to work for today but i guess this isn't even zoom this is fancy stuff but we get to see the other face to face and it's always an honor to be in your company you have such great perspective and lynette is you know she's engaging with our students every single week and in a one to one capacity as well as in a group capacity and so she knows what is happening in the operational world and we all tackle things a little bit differently so you're gonna get and glean two different ways of looking at a question or a situation so you ready to dive in i am ready thanks so much natalie i'm excited yeah awesome alright so vip days this is a topic that comes up quite a bit for the people in our sphere who are business builder so people who have a skill and they create a service around it and they're looking for clients there's a lot of different ways that we can deliver the solutions and the transformations that we like to do and so one of the ways that comes up a lot is a vip day so that means taking whatever deliverable you have and instead of working with somebody on a retainer or recurring relationship or length of time they're condensing that solution into a much shorter time frame so here's the question i just wanted to give a little perspective as to what a vip day is so this individual says that she really likes vip days because they fit with her lifestyle however for what she wants to deliver it requires more than just one day possibly maybe even one week have you ever seen that structure work where it's not doesn't fit in a day but maybe a week have you ever seen it done and then also how would you suggest setting this up this is a great question i've heard of vip days being completed over one day i've also heard of them being done over several days my suggestions for setting up the vip offer that's gonna fit your lifestyle whomever this person is are not that different from what i would say to a person who setting up their project or who's setting up you know their process for even being in a retainer relationship so i a couple questions that i want ask you to help you design this vip day offer that's taking place over several days there are things that you wanna keep in mind question number one is what is the outcome you want the client to experience by the end of the vip day be sure that as you're setting up that the outcome is attainable mh also when you start putting together the vip day be aware of the information that you will need in order to even begin one of the key components of having a vip isp day is gathering up all of the information that you needed in advance so that you can either work behind the scenes or work alongside the client to complete the desired outcome so what materials what systems what information do you need ahead of time to be able to execute this vip day in that shorter time frame the other thing that i would say that is similar to if you're doing a project or retainer is be aware of what is included in the vip day and what is not and make sure that you take that a step further by communicating that to the client you want them to make sure they understand that even though this is an offer that is put together in a different structure a shorter time frame these are the things that are included and these are the things that are not next you want to make sure that your process and structured is communicated you want to have that in into place your framework is what we often call it in the certification but you want to also make sure that the client is aware of how the vip today is going to work so that their expectations are set that there are mutual expectations that's a term that we like to make sure that everyone is using and i could go on you wanna have the tech and tools in place you want to make sure that the customer knows how they're going to be paying you have any agreements all in all what i'm saying is whether you have a retainer offer whether it's a project offer or whether it is a vip day offer what you do to prepare it is going to be the same whatever you do you want to make sure that you have clarity mutual expectation and mutual understanding between you and the client that you're delivering the offer to i love all of that vip days i feel like those come like in style at a style and it really depends on you know as this person said like she feels like an offer delivered in a vip format which is a shortened condensed format she prefers that for her lifestyle and so like for us as coaches who hear a lot of how people are gonna leverage their skills you know sometimes these are like hot things and sometimes it's not and it really comes down to a lot of what lynette said is like how do you want to give people that transformation i believe if you're going to be leveraging a vip solution that it needs to be very specific kind of you know where lynette left off was like you know scope you know know what you do and know what you don't do know what's included know what's not included that's all talking about scope and with a vip offer it needs to be very specific i don't believe that this type of container is conducive to like a high level holistic operational like solution that would be more for like recurring retainer relationship so don't give away the farm it's not gonna work for you to do that and then she touched on this too but a note that i had made prior to getting here is like have a realistic time frame i've been in those situations where i've over committed and let's say it was like i thought it was gonna be a four hour meeting and then in reality there's no way i could've have accomplished what i intended to accomplish in four hours and so you know run through this yourself learn and you know take the time to document how long these things would be and one of my general rules for life is just add twenty percent also if you've never done this before add twenty percent of the amount of time that you think and just build it in there because guess what at the end of the day if you get done sooner nobody's feelings are going to be hurt when you have a vip offer you need structure and lynette on the specific structures that may come up for you or that you need to think through but it's it needs to be a highly structured solution and the framework for you that you'll hold yourself accountable that you also communicate with the client just is gonna be very important so those are my thoughts on a vip i think a lot of times vip days are very sexy or appealing when you're delivering something very concrete what do i mean by that if you're someone who wants to be a high level strategist it's more difficult to have a compelling sell or compelling solution in a vip day when you're just selling strategy there are ways around it but you know i think that where i have seen vip days be very effective are when you're delivering something very concrete at the end alright lynette we're gonna move into the second question and this is more of a mindset question but this comes up so this person had shared with us this is the very first time that i'm selling this particular offer and i've never been paid for it before i know i can see exactly what i wanna do i know how i'm gonna do it but i've never actually been paid for this how do i know that they're gonna get the projected desired outcomes if i've never actually been paid to do this i'm having a mindset challenge to overcome because i'm weary of saying that i'm gonna deliver something and then what if i can't actually deliver on it because i've never done it before so that's the question and everybody has been in this situation before because we have all done something for the very first time lynette i know that you are amazing at supporting students and a lot of the people who are coming through our program we're teaching them new skills and new methodologies that they have never done take strategic mapping no one's ever done strategic mapping before before they've come through our certification yet the majority of our students are going to do that inside of the six months and so they're all doing something new how do you help them to overcome maybe we'll call it imp the question that they have of themselves of am i able to do this how do i tell people that they're gonna get this when i've never done it and been paid for it before i echo exactly what you were saying what i say to students who have reservation about putting themselves out there with a new offer is that first of all what your feeling is completely normal it's completely normal so i always start there the first time you offer something new it's easy to question if the outcome we're promising is good enough or if it's real for the client to experience but remember the right clients are not expecting you to be perfect the clients that we're working with want clarity they want the one who's honest and they want someone who is going to partner with them and guide them from where they are to where they want to be so if you've created an offer that is rooted in your true skill set your experience and your intentions are good then you're already ahead of the game yep you're already ahead of the game so instead of focusing on whether or not you can guarantee certain results focus on whether you've designed a clear and supportive of experience that gives your client the best possible chance to move their business forward or make progress with you as their partner dining them along the way that's what i would say i love it i i really and i can feel myself as i was even describing her sharing the question like i am still in that place we do new things all the time or we do things for the first time all the time right even in an offer that you've had for a really long time you may be shifting you may be working with a new type of client which requires something new and so i think the bulk of the question is around like the fear we have with doing something for the first time or it's completely new and maybe it's the first time we're doing it so that's going to happen and it's gonna continue to happen over and over in business and building the offer around a place of confidence you know take me i'm not really a great tech person i can muddle through tech i can figure it out but it's not my source of strength so i naturally feel less confident around it if i am selling somebody on a technical solution it's not my jam right and so i'm gonna have more mindset setbacks i'm gonna have more g lens coming into my head trying to call me out telling natalie what are you doing that's not your strong suit so how do i overcome that i create an offer in specialized areas where i know i'm really really good at what my very first offer that i ever did in my entrepreneurial journey was around event planning why i'm a great project manager i had done tons of events and corporate and it was the easiest place for me to step into with confidence i knew exactly what to do yet i didn't really know the environment of how online i didn't know this space but i had that skill so know the places where your skills are top notch undeniable forces when you have that you will have confidence which allows you to be literally in that situation you have an expectation of how you're gonna deliver something and so confidence is everything if you're selling something that you're not confident in there's a host of mindset setbacks that you'll run up against the other thing is if you're selling something for the first time you may be selling it for the first time but that doesn't mean that you haven't practiced this i think operators are very realistic we're kinda risk ave immersed and so if you're doing something for the first time tested it on yourself test it on a friend but at a minimum mock up the process for yourself i mean this is something i would definitely say take the time to practice it on you i'm not saying you have to give it away for free you to your friend or your neighbor to your sister i'm saying mock up this process know how you're gonna deliver it and actually take the time to walk through it on your own self or your own business that creates a good expectation and it helps you to be able to articulate what you're going to do and how you're going to do that why is this important it gives you confidence it gives you structure and i believe that structure will give you the confidence that you need to minimize any of those like impostor feelings that step up when you're doing something for the very first time and then one thing that i know lynette and i talk about all the time is business and offers are iterative meaning the way you deliver it at one time is not gonna be the way you deliver it the next time we're dealing with business and on the other side the clients that you're supporting the vision that you're supporting they are iterative right they are always changing and pivoting so our services are going to do the exact same thing so know that if you're doing something for the first time come in there with confidence and just know that as a part of being a really good solution oriented person that your offers are going to need to be adaptable and you can always improve you're gonna deliver it the best you know you're gonna prepare you're gonna deliver it you're gonna come in with confidence you're going to you know that provide a solution around areas that are in your greatest strengths experiences and skill sets and guess what the next time you do it every single time you do this you're gonna gain feedback you're gonna gain perspective and you're gonna continue to make it better and better and better to where you're always showing up in your most competent self new month new podcast recommendation this is a good one it is called no straight path and it's hosted by ashley min baba she is also inside of the hubspot podcast network which is where i get my podcast recommendations every single month the great thing about the show and something i know that you're gonna love is she's gonna be shedding light on the stories behind all the shiny resumes that you see in the linkedin profiles the social media highlights and the crazy cool job titles but in this podcast she strive to human success from the millennials perspective and i know why i've got a lot of millennials here listening to me today if you like an interview style conversation with diverse and important voices you should definitely take a listen this show is going to be perfect for the business builders inside of our community you're also going to love it is a pleasure to listen to ashley on those straight path she just has the perfect podcasting voice she also has a unique perspective and there's a ton of vulnerability and we all love that listen to no straight path wherever you get your podcast this month as i was diving in into entrepreneurship as a service provider i was so lone sum i was looking for a place in a community where i fit where people understood how my brain works and when i was looking around there was nothing out there for me so i created it myself and you're invited today to join almost forty five hundred other operators who are in the market doing the things supporting clients just like you are if you're a project manager an online business manager a director of operations in training an ops manager a virtual assistant any of those titles ring true to you then you are invited to join us inside of the ops insiders the ops insiders is a free facebook community where we carry on the conversations that we are having here on this podcast but in addition to that you will see job postings you're gonna see other people sharing wisdom and looking support connection and growth if all of this sounds good head over to ops insiders dot com join us today something else that i feel like i heard in this question is around integrity like they want the person who asked this question wants to be sure that they are in integrity in what they're promising to the client but i wanna say to this person offering something you does not take you outside of being in integrity it does you are expanding the ways where you can flex your skill set yeah and bring something unique to the marketplace that does not make you out of integrity so i just want you to know that as well as you expand the ways that you offer operations or whatever the industry is where you find yourself offering new things in new ways does not take you out of integrity it's you flexing yourself and coming up with new and innovative ways to provide service to be a support to the people who need you i love that integrity that really does because our people people like us we are very i mean what i can see in our community there's several adjectives that i would use to describe us but we are very real we are very tangible and that integrity is something that all of us i mean as a service provider it's something that we want because our credibility lies upon it so yeah thank you for pulling that out alrighty we're gonna switch to something this is kind of mindset as well but this is something that is so true especially as we're coming off the heels of a question around for the first time we're doing something here's the question when i started out i started out working and helping a friend and i helped them for free and now i want to charge and they need to charge but i don't know how to have that initial conversation i cannot tell you how many people and i do not advise this but a lot of our students and a lot of people in our community will say that they are getting experience by working for free so anyway i can't tell you that that's what i would suggest you to do but that is what a lot of people will do have done at least before they get to us and they have our coaching but lynette lets the two of us answer that question i started helping a friend for free now it's come to the point where i need to get paid because guess what nobody likes working for free but how do you suggest that they have that conversation with their friend that they've been helping for free my heart goes out to whomever sent in this question it really does my encouragement to you is to be strategic and approach this a very specific way get your pen and your paper okay the first thing i would do before you can bro achieve this conversation is get a testimonial from this front mh get something out of the deal and if you get nothing else get a testimonial so that you could use it in your marketing whether it's on your website or your social media platforms so before you even bro the conversation about getting paid get the testimonial because if you get nothing else you can use that look at you that is i love that let's be strategic about this k now the second thing that i would say is get your pen and paper again because you're gonna write a script here's what's gonna go in the script i would say to print friend i'm so happy i've been able to help you in your business by doing fill in the blank as you know i have a company as well and while i've enjoyed helping you it's taken considerable time away from my prospecting efforts i really need to turn my focus back to bringing revenue into my business i've documented the projects or tasks i've been working on for the past few weeks and if you're ready to pay me for this work it will cost fill the blank i'm happy to create a plan for you pay me on a sliding scale over the next few months until we reach this number or if you're not able to pay me i understand however i'm sorry i can't continue to work for you for free i hope this doesn't change our friendship let's discuss what work i can complete for you by the end of the month or next month because i wanna make sure that we mutually agree on how we're going to move forward if i have to transition out of your business that's the script that i wrote specifically for this question so if you take those words or you finesse them a little bit to make them sound more like yourself i encourage you whoever wrote this question to write down what you want to say to this friend so that they hear your heart either way and that they understand that just like you are supportive to them in their company that you have one too you need to make money too so that's my sir yes thank you lynette it's hard for me to see this question come in because it's something i personally have never done and probably would never do but that's not to say that it's not a valid question because we do get it so we if you're listening to this and you find yourself in a position or a proposition where someone is asking you to work for free i would tell you to stop yourself before you get there but if you have gotten into this place and i've seen this with siblings i've seen this with neighbors i've seen this with church friends i've seen this you know our operators have such big servant hearts that it's not a surprise to me that they find themselves in this situation but really i think when they do enter this they're looking at it like i can gain experience which is why your suggestion of getting a testimonial is brilliant thank you i would not have even thought about that but that is extremely valuable and one of my personal values is can and so even if it's a hard conversation to have you owe it to yourself to show up in your full authenticity and sharing and what lynette said is absolutely right you have mouths to feed and a business to grow and your value of time and money by the way which hello commerce is commerce like we all need that so they understand that from a human perspective and it may just take a little pattern interrupt by you having what feels like a difficult conversation but it's a realistic conversation nobody's gonna hear you on the other side and say yeah you know i'm spending free time with you that i need to reap appropriate that time to work on my business and to work on bringing paid clients in i do like that lynette shared kinda giving them a runway i wasn't thinking of that at all in my mind i'm thinking hey in thirty days we're gonna discontinue this work but from a friendship perspective you enlightened me because they are your friend and the tapering off of time maybe it's over two months right instead of cutting them off in two weeks or four weeks like i probably would you know giving them a little bit longer runway to say hey i'm gonna do this in the next thirty days and i'm gonna work less over the additional thirty days but these are just different solutions and how you can manage this what i want you to take away is that you have to respect yourself enough to know that you're not being unrealistic bike asking them to pay for your time commitment skills and passion you deserve that that's why we have careers that's why we work and so your good hearted has come into it a place where you can still continue that but you continue that in exchange for money that's what business is so i'm very glad this question came up lynette thank you for your perspective and how you tackle this script hello winning think if that's amazing for all of you listeners out there that may have been in this situation find yourself in this situation right now that script is very very valuable so lynette anything else to wrap up today these have been very very good questions what it reminds me of is just the great heart that operators have we want everyone to be successful we give our all so that others can get their all but don't forget that you're running a business don't forget that you're running a real business the integrity the support like all those things that works two ways so don't forget about yourself that's what i would say in closing us out don't forget about you and all the hard work that you're putting it to make your clients businesses successful don't forget that you have a business to make successful to yes and the value of the result that you get for your clients has a dollar attached to it i know it's difficult to price things it's difficult to price a service but you have to look at the transformation and the result that you and your unique skill set is able to bring friends thank you all for tuning in today i love that you're listening to the ops authority podcast and we will be back again next week with another episode lynette thank you so much for sharing your perspective and your wisdom i should say wisdom because that's what you bring here and of course i will always thank you for your partnership in all of the work that we've been able to do together thank you for being here today you are so welcome it's my pleasure alrighty friend you will hear from me next week have a fantastic week thank you for investing us a little bit of time to listen to this episode of the ops authority podcast i am so grateful to be surrounded by real action takers like you who are invested in growing their business through operations will you have one more action to your to do list today just visit the ops authority podcast dot com where you can join our community of business owners and other ops experts you're gonna hear from me in a week and in the meantime do big things on the backside of your business

if you're here in you're a business builder then you are always in pursuit of clients and what's behind client acquisition it is a sales cycle cutting it in half sounds pretty impossible right well that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot and they used their tool hubspot tool an ai tool called breeze it tailor every customer interaction without losing that personal touch which is so important and ai is doing amazing things like this we already know but hubspot hasn't it built in their results were really incredible their click through rates jumped by twenty five percent their qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing page if you're interested in this you wanna go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help you grow your service based business this is the ops authority podcast where my mission is to break down the backside of your business so you can take the right actions to grow and scale hey i'm natalie gin a small business operations expert and i'm gonna give you a front row seat to real solutions that will help you reach the vision that you have for your business all while equip you to put out those inevitable pesky fires and those fears that pop up listen in for strategies to grow your team craft the systems and processes that you need for your business and establish business foundations that you may have skipped over i know you're ready to do really big things so let's do it together hey hey friends welcome come back to another episode of the ops authority podcast you're catching us on episode number two hundred and eighty and i think you're in for a treat i feel like i could say that every single week because i try to be extremely intentional about what i'm bringing you guys how we show up every single episode but today i really do feel like it's extra extra special we have done several episodes like this before and we've got a couple more in the queue and let me give you some oversight as to what we're going to be doing today so i've got my incredible friend and a longtime team member at lynette robinson here with me today when i say team member she's been on our team for over four years she's a certified director of operations she is a current accountability adviser and just a premier coach inside of the certification program the reason outside of all of that i have a huge heart for her she has a huge heart for what we do here the mission behind the ops authority and she has a ton of experience in coaching operators to become their next best self she has been part of probably two hundred and fifty is it around two hundred two fifty when i would say so yeah a just a ton of our students she's been behind their transformation and i want to bring her here to share some space and we're going to take some questions that have come inside of our community and the two of us are going to answer these in our own ways we know what the questions are but we haven't collaborated and said oh i'm gonna say this said you're gonna say this the reality is i wanna bring you a different perspective you get to hear from me almost every single week definitely every single month and so you probably get a sense of where my mind is that that i love bringing different perspective it's the same thing we do inside of the certification when we have our expert coaches coming in for each of the different modules that we teach on so perspective is very important for me because this is never gonna be the natalie show operators have very complex ways and different ways of solving problems and so i'm showcasing that today alongside my dear friend lynette lynette how are you doing this morning i'm wonderful excited to be back again i love it i love these number one they're so easy for me to do and i learn a ton about the way that you think and other options and other solutions whenever we do this so i'm so excited that you're here me too likewise i love how we arrive at the same place in different ways yes and you know what i know some of you guys may be seeing this in video but i also love that we are rep the brand colors today but we are so insane let me day alrighty well let's dive straight in i'm all about making sure that we keep these as tight as possible but we've got some big questions today someone on our team has pulled these together for us and we were both like whoa these are big questions and listeners you are in for a treat here because these are true questions that come up inside of our community so you might be thinking these as well let me set the stage for the first question when i am teaching this is something that we teach inside of our program and i wanna make sure those of you guys who aren't inside of our program or are curious about our program or are just general generally our operators which is every person listening to us if you were trying to sell or communicate your services i find that operators tend to be very long winded and i might just be picking on myself probably leave lynette as well but we're long winded and why are we long winded it's not because we have a lot to say it's because we are very complex thinkers and so what do we do for a living we literally spot problems and we provide excellent solutions and many of us have our hands in creating and executing on the solution so we are all i'm at the top end of that we are excellent process and project managers like it's how our brains are wired what does that mean it means that we create step by step solutions so in my mind i joke about this all the time if i'm gonna go to the grocery store i create a plan i have a regular plan in my head and it's something i do every single week and i could create a twelve step plan on how natalie goes to the grocery store right it's the way that i think i break everything down into a sequential solution so i do this for everything that is presented to me right it's why i live by a to do list it's why i thrive in organization and productivity that's just the way that i think and i'm sure it's the way that you think as well i'm getting to my point here but the reality is i've got a lot to say and once i'm having an active conversation with somebody about a business problem or gap in my mind even before my mouth ever opens is coming up with a one two three four five this is how i'm gonna tackle this and so when i get into an active conversation with somebody oh that can be very very long winded so in my process of trying to system this and make it more su i have the expectation of myself and this is something that we teach our students to make this and keep this most su for people i like to create a visual process which highlights how i'm going to be solving that problem so if you're a business builder if you're a service provider who is leveraging your gifts of the skills that you sell that's what i call a service provider that's what an operator is who is building a business for themselves then i like to think about the solutions that i bring and i hold myself accountable to stay the sync and to clearly articulate what i do by creating like a visual representation of the transformation or the deliverable that my offer provides my clients so why is this important to me it's important to me i already told you to keep it su synced secondly to hold me accountable so i don't go on and on and on also so that i don't bite off more than what i can chew i don't love that analogy but you know scope creep is a real thing for operators and so when i pull up a four step program or a four step process or a six step process it holds my words to what my actual deliverable can be so anyway i can go on and on but you can get the idea of why this is important and how this question came up so that's the background to it but are you ready for the question i'm good question one of our students she understands the value of documenting the visual process which is what i just described but her question is where do you suggest placing this as you're going through the buying process as you're trying to acquire a new client there's a lot of different places and times when we could use this visual process along the client acquisition process as well so there's a lot of different places in that client acquisition process there could be somebody could find you on your website somebody could find you on socials somebody could give a referral and then you're likely going to be in a discovery call and you're sending contracts and follow ups so when i talk about the client acquisition journey those are some of the different milestones i would say that take place but this question is alright not i understand why the visual map or visual process is helpful where do i put it what do you think it so when i think about this question two things come to mind the first is the process that you just talked about the journey from a person becoming a lead to when they become a client that's what i call the intake process the second process or journey that comes to mind is when someone becomes a client what i call the work in progress phase of the relationship there's a process or how you complete the work and the deliverables for the person that you partnered with in business i've seen both processes outlined on websites and i don't have a problem with either my personal preference however is to have the work in progress process that portion of the client service provider relationship to be off the website instead i covered the work in progress part of our relationship during the discovery call and here's why when i go through the process during discovery call it gives me an opportunity to further explain the offer see the client's reaction to the information that i'm providing and in real time answer their questions about why my process is what it is if i put it on the website they may bring that up they may not but i don't wanna take the chance of losing an opportunity to give a thorough explanation of why i do what i do the way that i do it this creates space also for authentic connection it allows the client to understand the structure of my offer and if there's anything proprietary about my offer it helps me protect that proprietary environment so the work in progress phase of our relationship i would keep that off the website and cover during discovery i referenced the intake process how a lead journeys from being someone you've just met to someone that you're now in business with that intake process no issue with that being on the website whatsoever it's great to give people a visual representation so they can see of this of the steps of the process and then as operators we get to flex how we cover the details how we take a person through becoming an actual client of ours they get to see a little preview of how our brain works so i would keep the intake process if you're gonna put it on your website that's where i would place it but the work in progress phase of your relationship i would keep them in the discovery recall right these are a lot i have written down quite a few things here i tend to agree with you on the website part of it you know the different milestones that i referred to earlier like where i would put my visual process i agree wholeheartedly if you wanna put what i would call like the onboarding process of how you become a client on your website fine go ahead i don't think that that's gonna be compelling i don't know if it's a great use of real estate on the website but that's not what we're talking about today right but what i do like about it and you highlighted this and you're kinda coaching me i do like that you're showing like a one two three four and what people are looking at from us what vision are looking at from operators is they realize that they don't have that systematic approach that they don't have a methodical brain and so by showcasing that on your website that's pretty cool now i think it's i find it and this is a whole other question but i don't know if like building out and investing a ton of money in this crazy wicked website is actually a good use of your funds do you need one i think you need a storefront and a footprint but i don't know if you need to go like crazy because as a service provider we're looking for a handful of clients we're not looking for fifty thousand clients and so our website we need to have a storefront or a footprint but we don't necessarily need this like tricked out website but that's provides the point if you are gonna have it i don't think it hurts you to showcase your methodical brain on your website since joining the hubspot podcast network i had challenged myself to listen to a new podcast every single month so i'm gonna challenge you to do the exact same thing and the one that i'm recommending is the science of scaling one of the episodes i recently listened to was with alyssa rose who is the head of sales for open ai a tool we all are likely using anna thought was a really cool behind the scenes look at how she got the job how she builds her team and of course lots of other operational goodness that i think you're really going to enjoy so take a listen to the science of scaling wherever you listen to your podcast as i was diving in into entrepreneurship as a service provider i was so lone sum i was looking for a place in the community where i fit where people understood how my brain works and when i was looking around there was nothing out there for me so i created it myself and you're invited today to join almost forty five hundred other operators who are in the market doing the things supporting clients just like you are if you're a project manager an online business manager a director of operations in training an house manager a virtual assistant any of those titles ring true to you then you are invited to join us inside of the ops insiders the ops insiders is a free facebook community where we carry on the conversations that we are having here on this podcast but in addition to that you will see job postings you're gonna see other people sharing wisdom and looking support connection and growth if all of this sounds good head over to ops insiders dot com join us today now if you do have your you know lynette used the work in progress phase which is what i would call like how i bring the solution to my client the deliverable like how i do what i do right that's what i create as a visual process you know if i was gonna put that on my website i would make it very high level for the same reasons when said that's your intellectual process that could be your differentiator from somebody else out there so know making that public i would if you do it you need to make it really high level and there's still value in that again because you would be showing that you do actually have a process there is a structure to the way that you show up and then the risk in putting that out there is you're leaving it up to interpretation if it's external meaning website social media you know if you're putting this out there you're leaving that up to interpretation because you're not able to partner that visual with your words and so you know people i mean think about how we define operations people define operations all different ways and so you know i think that that's just my thought came to my mind as lynette was speaking is you just don't know how other people are going to interpret it so if you have it out there keep it higher level and then i agree with lynette creating something more granular that you can speak to you know have a visual like the visual is very powerful for vision that is something i would want you to take away but having it on a slide or on a pdf so that you can pull that up when you're having a one to one discovery call is extremely powerful for all the reasons i talked about before like you're gonna hold yourself accountable hopefully you can help yourself to stay distinct and then also the learner or the potential client on the other side has something to wrap their head around as far as what they're going to tang get from the experience altogether i don't believe that you have to keep this that you should actually make this external i do believe that you need create a visual representation of what you're doing keeping it to you is good and i personally would use it in my discovery calls i would have it as a pdf i would use it in my follow of emails and maybe even in the contractual sheets of your work together can i add something else to this conversation when we talk about website and things that we could put on our website that would make this a valuable use of debt real estate and that investment talking about the transformation and the results that clients can expect to receive as a result of partnering with you showing them what's possible the outcomes referrals i'm sorry testimonials is what i'm meant to say that is a great way to use your website and that very important real estate think about it a person's gonna go and access your website outside of your presence what do you want them to see is it going to be most valuable for them to see your process or do you want them to see the result of your process and the transformation through the words of other people who have worked with you and data that you collected from the success behind executing your process with your clients so let your website be a place that gives clarity that gives outcome that highlights the transformation that clients have received as a result of working with you more so like let your website be what highlights the end state more so than the beginning parts that he state is more valuable to me yeah so good do you hear everybody why she is so amazing that is that is very very very wise advice people wanna see they wanna put themselves in the experience of what happens at the end right the result the outcome that's what you wanna highlight so thank you for adding that too alright we're gonna move into our second question and this is something that comes up and as operators we are always looking for ways to be visible so that we can call in new clients the right clients higher level clients and so the amount of options of visibility tactics is very high so and you know they're seasonal like sometimes like i've been in this game for ten years now and so i've seen email swaps i've seen podcast guessing and so anyway they're all over the board but the question that we recently got is is it worth it for me as an operator as a service provider to participate in summit and so if you're listening to this and you're like what is a summit let me give you a quick description really quick it is where somebody's in charge of this somebody's putting this on and hosting this they reach out to a really they can vary but anywhere i let's just say like twenty different speakers they're gathering twenty speakers on a like topic or a like solution and everybody contributes to this presentation which is a summit and so everybody gets maybe twenty to forty five minutes as a speaker to bring their goods and their topic to this summit and so that's what the summit is it's really a conglomerate of mixed voices coming together to talk about topic that the in consumer finds important and finds valuable so anyway that's what a summit is lynette what do you think is it a worthwhile effort from a visibility tactic to be a part of a summit as an operator that's a big question so because there's also an investment involved right with the summit there's a part of me that wants to say absolutely till the summit but then there's the other part of me that says let's take a step back here and qualify whether or not it is worth it for an operations professional to participate in the summit there are different ways that you can participate you can be a keynote speaker you can be someone who does a workshop or you could just go as a guest with the goal in mind of networking and gaining clients from the other people who are attending the summit right so the first thing that i'm wondering is how do you want to participate or attend is this stomach gonna have your ideal client there are you going to have a legitimate opportunity to speak to your ideal clients even if you're doing a workshop where if you're doing a keynote and you're pitching what is the actual opportunity that you will get to bring those clients closer to you where you can talk about your business not every summit is gonna be worth your time mh and that's something that's very very important that people need to remember and a lot of times if i had a nickel every time an operations person told me well i'm an introvert i'm an intro mh i'm not a person who puts myself out there keep that in mind too as you're trying to consider whether or not a summit is gonna be worth it for you if you're not someone like me who can walk up to a stranger strike up a conversation think about that mh you can't get caught of in the ro of all these people are gonna be there and all my clients could possibly be there if you're not a person who's gonna walk up and talk to someone so know what you wanna get out of it do you want networking do you want visibility collaboration or you just go to learn be clear on what it is you want to get out of the summit how does it align with the goals you've set for yourself for the year is your ideal client in the room if you are actually participating in the summit how are you being positioned is there something you can leave behind where people can contact to for business inc inquiries like there's so many questions i could just go on and on and on so i will just a minute this is the detail that natalie we was talking about earlier that we could live in and swim for days as operators what's the cost to participate in a summit can you afford to go if you have a budget that you've set for your business for marketing for the year does this fit in that budget do you have time to follow through with the people that you need from the summit do you actually have the space to do that and then the part that a lot of people forget is what is the opportunity cost of me participating in this what am i saying no to to be here for this day or two what do i have to reschedule so that i can fully show up and be in this space and then the last thing that i would say about participating in a summit is if you're not the person who is putting on the summit is the person who is putting on the summit in alignment with your brand like you don't wanna just go jumping on anybody's platform if their brand is not an alignment and the value system that they have is not similar to yours because then your audience is gonna be confused about why you're showing up there so all very very very good and much more in depth than i was planning to come with so i'm very glad to have another perspective for me it's all about idaho ideal client if the host of the summit is attracting somebody that is i i'm speaking from experience is attracting someone that's at your level or like you and the profile of the guest of the summit is not your ideal client you are wasting your time and all the things that lynette just talked about there is a lot of time invested in just showing up to a summit much less preparing a presentation and the energy that's going to be required to present and to prepare for one so you know if your ideal client is not represented on the sales page of the summit it's a hard no for me and i would tell you not to do that the other thing to consider is what do you offer like the whole reason that you're participating in a summit is it's not to educate people it's to educate people and get them to get into a relationship with you it's to educate them enough that they are interested in buying what you have to offer so is your offer at a price point that makes sense for this audience which dovetail tells very nicely into is your ideal client the person that they are targeting and then lynette i wasn't thinking about this but you're totally right if you are a weak presenter people are not going to feel compelled to continue in relationship with you so just know that about yourself be aware maybe you know another visibility tactic is more important for you maybe you know maybe video is not your thing maybe it's more audio and then i would tell you spend more time in doing podcast if written word is more compelling than being on video or audio then start figuring out how to write longer form blog post or do linkedin post or something like that but i'm gonna tell you to know yourself just like she did know what your capabilities are lynette and i i mean we're here we're on video we're on audio right now because that's our jam we're both very comfortable in those elements i've had people on this podcast who are not strong enough where i'm like yeah i can't air that because they're not showing up as their best self because there's too much going on for them so anyway know yourself and that was a very very very strong point there so anyhow these are two amazing questions that came in and i hope those of you who are listening in today are like yes i've had those questions or i was thinking about that or at the very minimum you're walking away with something where you're like oh yes i learned something today that's exactly what these podcasts are for we call them the ops edition because you're getting these perspectives and you're also getting real questions that come into us that pertain to operators these today were really looking at operators who are using their skills to create an offer and a service we call those service providers so believe that this has been beneficial thank you so much lynette for hanging out with me today i always love spending time with you and i love the perspective and the heart that you bring not only to this podcast but to our entire brand and to the hundreds and hundreds of students that you have supported with me alongside me so thank you for being here friend it is my pleasure it's always a great time yay thank you for investing just a little bit a time to listen to this episode of the ops authority podcast i am so grateful to be surrounded by real action takers like you who are invested in growing their business through operations will you have one more action to your to do list today visit the ops authority podcast dot com where you can join our community of business owners and other ops experts you're gonna hear from me in a week and in the meantime do big things on the backside of your business

if you're here in you're a business builder then you are always in pursuit of clients and what's behind client acquisition it is a sales cycle cutting it in half sounds pretty impossible right well that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot and they used their tool hubspot tool an ai tool called breeze it tailor every customer interaction without losing that personal touch which is so important and ai is doing amazing things like this we already know but hubspot hasn't it built in their results were really incredible their click through rates jumped by twenty five percent their qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing page if you're interested in this you wanna go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help you grow your service based business this is the ops authority podcast where my mission is to break down the backside of your business so you can take the right actions to grow and scale hey i'm natalie gin a small business operations expert and i'm gonna give you a front row seat to real solutions that will help you reach the vision that you have for your business all while equip you to put out those inevitable pesky fires and those fears that pop up listen in for strategies to grow your team craft the systems and processes that you need for your business and establish business foundations that you may have skipped over i know you're ready to do really big things so let's do it together hey hey friends looking back to another episode of the ops authority podcast today i am sharing with you episode number two hundred and seventy nine and today's episode is a little bit of a behind the scenes in a cool way i have a program for our alumni once they graduate from our certification program they can come inside of a new container which they get my personalized one to one support what does that mean it means that my v my main mode of communication is through boxer which is an asynchronous tool if you've never used it oh my goodness it is so addict but i love it because people can lean on me whenever they want it doesn't require us to have a zoom call or have you know a long email thread but anyway v is the tool that i use and the reason that this is important to you today is i wanted to come in here and share with you some of the obstacles that operators these alumni who are in our orbit who are doing their work as operators inside of other people's businesses they are experiencing these obstacles and they're coming to me they're leaning into me for some solutions and so today in episode number two hundred and seventy nine it is about the current obstacles that operators are facing and how i am coaching them and so you're gonna get to hear and probably resonate with some of these situations that are happening and then i will share with you you'll get a benefit in the perk of kinda hearing my side of what i think that they should do so hopefully this is helpful to even more people than the individuals that are coming to me right now these that i have chosen today they're across the board so there's nothing kinda that is the same from one person to the next and you should know that as an operator inside of a business even if you're someone who works fractional and you're working in several people's businesses every business is so different and even if you have an offer where you're providing x y and z the way that you're going to deliver that to a variety of different clients is going to change because their team structured changed the personality of the leader changes the scale of the business changes the delivery model the products it is going to be different can you streamline that yes but i will say that no two businesses are alike and so the way that you deliver your services to two different businesses is going to be different so first thing i wanna share with you is one of my students and clients and actually all of these people have become my friends but she has taken on a local construction company as a client it is a huge contract and one of the things that she is struggling with right now the obstacle that she is facing is actually there's two and i could probably share a lot about this and it would resonate with you but the first thing that i will share is she started talking to this client this prospect of client a long time ago this has been one year in the works over that year she has stayed consistent with talking with them with being in communication with them it wasn't every week you know at the beginning it was more frequent and then it kind of got further and further apart as the time went by but they consistently told her that they were interested in working with her they just had some things to do internally before they could bring her on now the way that she was coming into this business is in a project or a consultant capacity so it's not like she was working in the implementation or administration layer it was definitely more in that strategic role where she was coming in auditing their systems auditing their personnel and creating solutions and recommendations for them to be able to implement and it was possible that she would be part of the implementation but the first thing that she needed to do was come in and get a good understanding audit of what is happening and then she would take it to the next level by giving recommendations so i wanted to share first of all that this took a lot of time her being very ten it's hard for me to withhold their names but i am going to do that it took her being ten to continue to follow up now on the mindset side this is the part i wanted to come to you with the obstacle that she's facing is that because it's been such a long period of time her mindset is now in the place because it oh i forgot to tell you this it's becoming reality they came to her and they said okay we're ready to do this send me the contract so now she's all heightened up have you ever been in a situation where you were hoping that you were going to get a client and you were working really hard to secure the client and then they finally say yes and then you have this crazy amount of impostor syndrome well that's exactly what my friend did that's exactly what this d is going through right now she's asking herself am i really qualified to do this what if i get in there and this is too big for me those are her exact words like is this too big for me the way that i'm coaching her is to understand and give her reassurance that she has done this before even though it's a bigger company with more layers of matrix to organization internally her main stakeholder are really two or three people and those are the only people that she needs to understand right now the other thing that i was talking to her about is i gave her four steps and i know as operators we are so much more confident when we have a plan laid out for ourselves if we're sitting by ourselves and you're working on this independently and you're thinking oh my goodness i'm not big enough for this or this deliverable is too big for me why did i ever say yes to this one of the things that you need to be reminded of is number one that you've done this before but number two you need to lay out a plan for yourself we are so good with having a plan so i told her the first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna understand the expectations what do they want out of you now this has already been talked about many many times in the procurement process but now when everything is becoming real and true and there is actual money being exchanged we need to recalibrate hopefully before the contracts are signed but we need to recalibrate and get a better understanding right now of what the expectations are so understand the expectations define the success metrics for yourself then you need to come in and needed audit you need audit what is happening and we talked about this whole audit system you know depending on what the expectations and the success metrics are that would guide the way in which she's going to audit so maybe she's going to audit the financials first and then she's gonna move into the leadership and then she's gonna move into the independent teams i don't know that you know she's still learning that herself but that's just so you understand you know you can break this down to where it feels like you're not really going all you know you're trying to get to that success metric without a framework that's not the way we work and when we start to put this in bite sized pieces everything becomes way more doable we start to see oh yeah i can do this what happens at that point you start to feel confident so i wanted to share this because you've probably been in a similar situation where maybe your actually getting close to working with a dream client or really really big client maybe your biggest client that you've ever done and you have this like smack in the face where you're like oh yay i did it oh goodness gracious how am i going to do this so my encouragement is to set small goals for yourself create a plan and definitely have a good understanding of what the expectations are when you're working with big clients you may find yourself in a place where they want a lot and if that's the case then you're gonna need to come back to them with realistic expectations and maybe adjust the time or adjust the scope maybe it's you know how much you're working with them so anyway i wanted to share that that is one of the ops that our high level operators are working with right now and how i am coaching them since joining the hubspot podcast network i had challenged myself to listen to a new podcast every single month so i'm gonna challenge you to do the exact same thing and the one that i'm recommending is the science of scaling one of the episodes i recently listened to was with alyssa rose who is the head of sales for open ai a tool we all are likely using and thought was a really cool behind the scenes look at how she got the job how she builds her team and of course lots of other operational goodness that i think you're really going to enjoy so take a listen to the signs of scaling wherever you listen to your podcast if you want to ensure that you're working with the right company then you're gonna want to be clear on exactly where they're going and what they stand for if you want your work to be seen and felt you must be on the same page as the leader and if you want to make a lasting impact and do the work that lights you up then you're gonna need to help your leaders define their mission vision and values i know you want every single one of those things that i just described so here's your ticket i've created a free mission vision values training guide to help you create that solid foundation here's what i suggest do this for yourself master it and then walk your leaders through the exact same exercise again you're looking at action do it for yourself and then share it with the people that you work with in fact this is the very first step that i use when i'm working with clients and i encourage you to do the exact same you can download it by going to the ops authority dot com forward slash mission alright another thing that is really really real realistic stick is you have these people on retainer and for this individual who has come to me she has an agency in the agency she has clients working in different packages paying different amounts with different deliverables attached and different teammates of hers that are assigned to different projects and different clients so there's a lot of complexity there's a lot of moving parts but she came to me and wanted to lean into how to get more consistency in her financials so she was feeling the fluctuations where you know people were paying they were starting contracts at all different times during the month and so she was really trying to stabilize her monthly retainer income very very important this makes more sense in an agency model for a lot of directors of operations who are gonna be working f or even in a full time capacity they're getting paid once or twice a month from one or two three people but in an agency model you're getting paid by lots of people at one time and you're getting paid by several people at one time or separate businesses during the course of a month so she's trying to create some stability for herself which i totally understand so i recommended to her we kinda talk through two different scenarios one was maybe everybody starts at the beginning of the month you have an onboarding process where you start collecting information and then at the beginning of the month is you know the first payment that is brought in and then also everyone is on a similar cycle that didn't feel really good for her and the reason it didn't feel great for her was the fact that you know what if these are what if scenarios which always kill me because how many times does it actually happened this way but it could and i'm sensitive to that she said if somebody comes in in the first week of the month as a lead and they want to convert and they want to start working with her she doesn't wanna have them wait for three weeks or four weeks before the next top of the month rolls around so two suggestions that i had was pro rate them you know that there are four or five weeks in every single month and most of the time is only four so you can pro rate them if they wanna start immediately pro rate their first month another recommendation i had is to charge an engagement fee we all know and this actually if even if you're not an agency and you're working in retainer maybe in many project scenarios this could apply but you know the first thirty and sixty days of a contract or a new role are the most labor intensive because you're learning you're integrating and you're applying all of this at one time so you know it's like karen scar at the very beginning of a contract it's also for me some of the most fulfilling times in a business because they're seeing my value and i'm showing my value and i know it's different than anybody else it's ever been in their business so it's really like a very gratifying time if you will but it's a very very busy time and so my recommendation to this alumni was to consider charging an engagement fee for the first month it would be a higher rate than their typical monthly retainer but this allows her to increase and to maybe put those additional funds maybe into her savings so that the fluctuations could be covered by this engagement fee so i mean the reality is if you don't do an engagement fee you should basically take what that engagement fee would be and spread it out over the life of the contract but they're gonna fill that increased value at the beginning anyway so it wouldn't be i've done this myself before so it's not that far off to ask somebody to pay a little bit more at the very beginning when you're onboarding i've actually seen people call it an onboarding fee and engagement fee is another way of looking at it but these are two recommendations that i've made to this alumni to create more financial stability inside of her business and then also at the same time creating a little bit of a nest egg so that if that stability is fluctuating she can pull from her savings to create more of that consistency alrighty friends i'm gonna be back here shortly to share with you other obstacles that operators are facing and in the meantime i want you to listen to all of the episodes inside of our podcast or at least some of them all would be a big stretch because as of now we have two hundred and seventy nine but there are some real gems inside of here if you're a service provider if you are a high level operator or you're aspiring to be a high level operator this is the gold standard for learning how to navigate the up level of where you are to where you wanna be my promise is to come in here on a regular basis and share with you what's really how happening in this industry especially as there are changes that are happening right now i wanna be that real source for you to help you overcome some of the obstacles like we talked about today and even other obstacles i encourage you to come to our facebook group which is the ops insiders dot com share your obstacles inside of there so that i can bring them here to this podcast as well alrighty friends i hope you have a fantastic week a prosperous week your energy is really really high and you bring excellence to all of your clients and the leaders that you support you guys have a fantastic week and i'll see you next time thank you for investing a little bit of time to listen to this episode of the ops authority podcast i am so grateful to be surrounded by real action takers like you who are invested in growing their business through operations will you have them one more action to your to do list today visit the ops authority podcast dot com where you can join our community of business owners and other ops experts you're gonna hear from me in a week but in the meantime do big things on the backside of your business

if you're here in you're a business builder then you are always in pursuit of clients and what's behind client acquisition it is a sales cycle cutting it in half sounds pretty impossible right well that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot and they used their tool hubspot tool an ai tool called breeze it tailor every customer interaction without losing that personal touch which is so important and ai is doing amazing things like this we already know but hubspot hasn't it built in their results were really incredible their click through rates jumped by twenty five percent their qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing page if you're interested in this you wanna go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help you grow your service based business this is the ops authority podcast where my mission is to break down the backside of your business so you can take the right actions to grow and scale hey i'm natalie gin a small business operations expert and i'm gonna give you a front row seat to real solutions that will help you reach the vision that you have for your business all while equip you to put out those inevitable pesky fires and those fears that pop up listen in for strategies to grow your team craft the systems and processes that you need for your business and establish business foundations that you may have skipped over i know you're ready to do really big things so let's do it together alrighty friends welcome back to another episode of the ops authority podcast i'm your host natalie ga i'm back again and you know you could always count on us having really good information really actionable information here on the podcast and or an amazing guest with us today and that's what you are coming into on episode two hundred and seventy eight today so meghan ge is going to be chatting with us today and sharing her perspective of being a student here inside of the director of operations certification program she recently came through is a stellar human being i'm gonna start with that and that has also allowed her to be an amazing student inside of our program so we love to bring these students in to share their perspective because i can tell you all day long why you should join us why this is a great next step in your career but at the end of the day i know as you know being on the other side or being a listener here i would wanna hear what somebody else who has been in a situation that i am you know curious about what their experience was like and even before they join the certification what their occupation what their work history was like but i can get a better understanding if this is the right next step for me so you're gonna hear that today from our friend our alumni and a proud certified a student from the ops authority and in the director of operations certification program so let me give you a little glimpse here into who megan is and then we'll dive through just an organic conversation none of this is pre scripted but you'll get to know megan and understand why she is someone that we are just so proudly associated with so meghan get part is a certified d she's also a certified mindset coach and an army veteran with eleven plus years of leadership experience inside of the military entrepreneurship as well as the nonprofit sectors her passion is organizational change with expertise in strategic planning operations team growth strategic communication as well as public relations which she now integrates as a sustainable business consultant through her business which is named apostolic fruit which she c founded a year ago with her best friend and business partner anna sa meghan and anna served catholic as well as christ led women in business ministry and leadership especially those who specialize in women's holistic health and well being they have got such a great niche i love working with them because i see this coming together in such a beautiful way but meghan is also a certified pregnancy and postpartum athletic coach and spearheaded policy change at the highest levels of the military for women mothers and parents who serve while she was on active duty as a military intelligence and public affairs officer meghan is incredible telling you right now we have had offline conversations and when we talk about policy change and leading by example and making the military accessible for women and fit into their lives as you know that conversion into motherhood man she is really just so admirable to me now let me wrap up here with meghan is a wife to her husband who's currently serving in the army and is the mother of three energetic boys one in which she gave birth to while she was inside of the certification so meghan welcome to the podcast today so excited to have you here thanks matt yeah appreciate your kind so much it's such an honor to be here good good i'm just so grateful that our lives have overlap and i worked very closely with the military sector for my entire really most of my professional career and so i'm always honored when military spouses as well as those who have served really partner with us because i feel like so much of my professional life was spent supporting that part of our nation here and it's an honor to have you i have an associated understanding of what your experience is like and it's just a huge honor to have you here and then i can't begin at this podcast without thanking you for your current and past service and service that you're still giving to your spouse oh it makes me well up here thank you i shit yeah husband just got back from a training course for several months so yeah he's just rein integrating now and grateful to have him back home yeah it's such i mean we can have podcast podcasts upon the podcast on what it means to serve and then also how you're leveraging that service and the experiences of that and what you're doing today if you're watching this you can see my eyes are awful full it's a big deal it's a it's a just such a big deal so i could brag and brag and brag on the person that you are and i know that the person that you are has led you to the service that you gave our country and is also still a very big piece of what you're doing in how you are leading your own business today and then also just the skills that you have carried through your entire life you know a lot of people who have listen to this podcast have heard my story of being eight year old natalie writing on that piece of paper creating a list for myself every single day and if i could turn the times instead of someone telling me man natalie you should be a nurse you're so caring you're so heart centered you're such a good communicator you really have a passion for this that and the other i wish somebody would have told me natalie you would be a great project manager natalie you would be a great hr manager but in the world in which we lived back in the seventies and eighties it was really you're gonna be a teacher you're gonna be a nurse you're gonna you know maybe you'll be a doctor but talking about project management and operations would never have been advice that somebody would have given me so knowing that you have all of these skills that have really traverse your entire life and you're still present today are things that have led us and our paths to overlapping so i love that we have this nerdy and wonderful fulfilling space of operations to overlap and that's what we're gonna expand on today in this podcast so thank you again for taking some time to be here and let's dive in a little bit deeper to your professional career what kinda of led you to getting to have interest in being a certified doj and i i know we talked about the military but tell and listeners more about meghan sorry thanks so much that do yeah so obviously you heard his military background my career was in the active duty army as the west point graduate i was primarily in intel and public affairs so i did a lot of strategic communication and both to internal and external audiences a lot of p media relations work some digital marketing a lot of community relations but i also found i just naturally gravitate towards where can i help assist with organizational culture change in a lot of ways and and that was you know in the teens that i was part of but it was also more broadly i've always been a strategic thinker and i always really want to have a bigger picture impact and so that was something that as i observed the gaps that i experienced personally as i became my mother while serving i immediately knew okay i need to do something about this i'm not the only one experiencing all these challenges and you know is everything from discrimination on the basis of pregnancy to just the challenges of balancing you know a family and growing your family well trying to pursue your career and progress forward and so that's what led to a lot of that because the efforts that i did while serving but alongside that i also was an entrepreneur for a little bit i i a say about five years while i was serving so the last five years i had a small business so the side gig really just i was passionate about helping other pregnant and postpartum women helping other mothers and so that's why i became a certified coach in several different facets both the fitness coaching but also the mindset coaching because i wanted to serve women holistically and especially those that were navigating the male dominated environments and just trying to figure out how do i thrive as a human being and the context of of these really challenging circumstances and ultimately i decided to transition out this past year his past summer almost a year ago now at this point because as our family grew and was going to be growing to three babies now i did want more flexibility and my husband and i got to a point where we recognize recognized you know it's just unsustainable to continue to serve both of us and the cost became too high and we just felt like the values are no longer aligned there and so we needed at least one of us to have more stability and it just made more sense and i felt very compelled that it ought to be me and i knew that god was calling me into more presence with our family and in the home and to be able to still pursue my calling in different ways and share my gifts but without as much of a compromise in the home life i know natalie that's part of your story too that you resonate with and probably a lot of listeners too and i i was in the stage of transitioning out of the military and i was like just deeply discerning where are all of my gifts and passions and talents and eric's of expertise and where is this all meant to merge together in this next stage and season and i knew that you know my family needs a certain level come to be supported but i i also didn't feel called to a full time job and so it was kind of in that in between space like if there's something i could create create my own business on my own terms this would be ideal and in that discovery mode i had been working with one on one with a coach in both life and business that was anna anastasia my now a business partner my best friend i had been working with her for several years and she was coaching me and she had seen me through a lot of challenging seasons of work and family life all the that because advocacy efforts it's my small business she was my business coach so she helped me to kind of embark on that process really of healing from very intense burnout through a lot of those stages and in the transition it was so much of like shedding who i used to be to try to figure out who am i meant to be now who am i becoming and that was like a deeply internal journey and came with a ton of identity shifts but from that space of like letting go of a lot of the old was where i felt like my passion just started to emerge into much more clarity on this new season which ended up basically leading very naturally to one day we're having this conversation i shared with her brainstorm google doc of like this is what i want to bring to organizations and to other women leaders this is the kinds of things i'm passionate about and where i wanna serve which is basically strategic consulting and i kind of wrote up that would look like and she's was like oh my gosh i need this like i knew know what you can bring and and it was kinda funny because we had just never explored that part of me outside of military it was just all directed in that channel in that direction and so now i was like wow i can make a business out of this so we quickly began collaborating and became really close and then a number of months later we've c founded apostolic group which is our consulting business now and so i now primarily serve as the lead strategist for business owners that we work with and she does more of the holistic leadership and mindset and emotional while being coaching yeah and we in the very early stages of working together i began eyeing video deal certification because i forget i even had heard about it exactly but it was essentially what i was doing informally with her and though i was supporting her as i think many people come into it if you know you you tend to already be an integrator in some form or another whether or not you have a formal name to it mh and this you very clearly became the right choice and it was the best decision that it could have made both to invest in my own growth in our business and and the current and future clients so yeah that's more of the the context yeah i of course i'm always so curious and i know other people are curious about what brings you here but it's not even what brings you to the certification it's all that good stuff that you shared with us it's way before then you know as you put that mirror you look through the you know connecting the dots backwards is always so much easier than trying to project with the dots are gonna be forward that's why it's like a a very non linear line but i think there's in the reflection of who we have been our passions and what you shared with us is which is so real and is people i i find that people want this to not be the case but it is absolutely the case our passions are gonna ebb and flow but there is always a through line in experience and passion and anytime when we experience massive burnout or massive highs or massive lows those are definitely going to happen and that really when we look at this from a professional perspective you know we all have i mean all of us have had low level jobs you know entry level jobs whenever we were emerging and maturing right i think back to working in a dress shop and i think back to working in a car dealership i think back to being you know i've had just like everybody else we've had all these crazy random up jobs and then i've had very professional jobs of being in nurse and you know working in hr and being an hr executive and there's a through line in all of those and that's where when i had the same opportunity that you had to really look at myself and say what do i wanna be when i grow up now yeah because who i wanted to be at eighteen when i was entering into college was a different you know i was at at a different stage of my life and i couldn't see what i could see today which is what everybody has the opportunity to do and i feel like we can reject ourselves by trying to impose something that isn't you that isn't authentically you but when you take the time and i have had that you've had that to look at okay where are my gifts and passions because i can make a business out of these gifts and passions like i remember thinking the very first thing i did out of corporate when i was making my own business identity i wanted it to be as natural as possible so i didn't want to start selling jewelry because i don't have a deep passion there and i didn't have any experience with that but what i did have that's an example and the funny funny story actually but of one of the things that i was looking at was like what is the most natural thing for me to be able to step into because i'm gonna be able to be confident talking about it i'm gonna have a process and i know i know for me i needed a process that i could articulate easily and execute easily and so that's what got me into my very first opportunity which was doing project management through the lens of event management i never expected to be planning events for online entrepreneur that was never i didn't even know this online world existed at that point this is ten years ago but i remember thinking i'm still doing project management i'm still doing the thing that comes the most natural for me and i've always had this lens of curiosity which was like oh i can fit event management into project management and tada here we are today fast forward a million lives in these last ten years but there's that through line of operations which you have been able to see for yourself and what i love about your story is pulling out the gifts and also the nuance of the variety of things that you have done to get you to this point to realize this is who megan is today this is where i get confidence this is where i have a lot of clarity and these are my undeniable strengths i feel like the younger we are the harder it is for us to see our own strengths which is why even my pursuit megan i was relying on other people i went out talk about market research i went out to all the people all the leaders that i trusted colleagues and c friends and you know just everybody my family like what do you see good about me you know like what is and i'm not talking about adjectives i'm talking about what do i and i remember people would come back to me my friends were coming back to me saying you're a great party planner i was like oh my gosh party planner i don't wanna be a good party planner right mh but i had to say deeper what was it about the party that was great was it how they felt around me was it the experience and then you know you did that through so many people but this is all coming back to just the through line of operations and nobody tells you natalie meghan you're an amazing operator you think so strategically you're able to find gaps and turn those in to action to solve like nobody talks like this right these are things that we and we can't even identify for ourselves and so all of this comes down to the powerhouse operator that you are today and a soul searching that you had to do the experiences that you went through to get to the point to really walk you into identifying as an operator to then find the ops authority and of course the rest is history or actually we're writing your history as you move into this next version of yourself and that version has come as you being an independent entrepreneur now being in partnership with anna and what you guys are creating and collaborating in your independent strengths and pulling those together to really serve in a very comprehensive holistic way for the lucky people who ask you to serve them so in that world of thinking about operations do you remember i i don't know if it's always a pinnacle time for you but what made you identify as an operator i know you use the word strategist and there's a difference in strategist as an operator and maybe they combine for you but do you have anything in your journey where you're were like yes meg i am an operator yeah i have a few things that come to heart so like i said i've always been a strategic thinker but i always really love to bring a vision to life and that i think you had described it i believe in the info session natalie i felt very seen by this but you connect dots between like past present to future i was like that's that comes so natural to me and i didn't realize how much of a gift that was until anna had reflected back to me i don't think that way like i was like oh okay so that's one piece i really feel like i've always been vega are and identifying possibilities drawing out unrealized potential and i think a lot of people would resonate with that like you just described seeing gaps and identifying those needs anticipating needs and meeting them of other leaders bringing order and clarity and slow and sequence and a systematic approach to change and to change processes always optimizing teams creating sop when nobody was even thinking about that at all and so those are the kinds of things i was just naturally intuitively doing and taking the initiative on in every team at every level i've been a part of and that included in military and and beyond even you know as a division individual and volleyball player i was doing the same thing on my team in different ways and so i see that as one thread and another example i had this really incredible mentor who just had such an impact on me in the military and she was a mentor of mine before she became my supervisor i got lucky enough to get station in the same place as her and work for her wow and we were just it was such a great collaborative partnership and she in many ways i felt it reminds me of me in anna partnership but she brought me in right away and was like i want you meghan to just attend all the meetings for these first two weeks sit back observe listen share with me what you see what the gaps that you're noticing where you feel you could best contribute and make an impact with your gifts and i was like oh this is so good to receive that kind of trust because that's where you know i'm able to then see the unrealized potential and i so much of what i also noticed in the way my strengths play out relative to other people and what i can see versus other people might miss is where are we being way to reactive and where can we create much more spacious and proactive from planning to execution but also even the research analysis piece like behind is the plan right do we have really solid analysis going into why we're creating this particular plan in the first place to solve whatever the problem is and so i've always been a researcher an analysis all the way through the strategy and the planning through like seeing it through and i have a lot of that perseverance understood like see it through in the discipline that i help bring into organizations i think so that's who some of the other ways that i feel like it's taking shape but i've never before the information session for the test drive for the deal certification that i have never before been so like seen and affirmed and validated in my gifts because you give a name for what i never had a name for i was like this is me this is absolutely me and i imagine there's a a lot of other people feel the same way when they first hear you start to talk about being an operator or being the integrator and what even that means because it doesn't come natural to a lot of people but yeah we've never quite been given a title around it or any kind of language for it god that's i think about myself truly as you're talking through this you know when did i identify as an operator because it wasn't even when i started my business we were not the ops authority we were natalie gamer dot com because i didn't know what to call myself i knew that i had really i was stuck in this word of project management this title of project management which is not even a title ever had a corporate so i didn't know what to do and i started thinking about corporate structures again started analyzing and reflecting and doing all the things that we naturally do as operators to really mind map out how do i describe myself and then when i came up with operations or operator i was like oh this is actually really hard to articulate to people how am i gonna sell myself as an operator and then i started to hide behind it now this is a whole other episode but i started to hide behind it because i didn't want to be too elevated i didn't want it to look too corporate i didn't want all of these things wanted it to be something simple and you know what i realized was when i started talking in simple terms i wasn't finding the kind of work that was actually challenging fulfilling work it was really entry level work which led me to you know doing or looking at things like being a virtual assistant which nothing against it man that is part a significant part of a lot of people's journey but in my words that's administration and i had done a lot of administration in my life i still do a lot of administration but the reality is i knew i could serve at a higher level and so it was like oh where is this bridge from you know and my terms now being a virtual assistant to being a director of operations and so much of that is in skill and then the other part of that is in the acquisition of the people you wanna work with it's messaging it's lang it's communicating in a way where you're showing them what's ahead and that's just my own journey but a lot of people are the same way but when you talk about how do you know you're an operator i think about i didn't call myself an operator ten years ago when i started this business and truly where i got the clarity was when i was the chief of staff and this fortune one fifty company i sat under the umbrella of operations so when i started to dissect my own skills it was like oh you're a great project manager where where would project management sit in a large corporate structure and so luckily we have those structures to reflect on and kind of reverse engineer but that's really how we got to the ops authority and i know that that's a crazy windy story and most of us don't have an operator title when they find me right i have to do a lot of that explaining and so i'm so glad that you were there that day to receive that and that it spoke to you because it's speaking to somebody else right now that's listening to this and it's important to know that we are given a lot of titles throughout our lives and then we are a lot of titles are projected onto us they don't actually fit us or we're not fueled by them and we accept them and another episode but you know i work with females exclusively and we tend to allow other people to give us labels and to believe those and that's a a whole other mindset of conversation but i want to be that vehicle that helps people to interrupt that and to accurately depict who you are and who you wanna be i believe that god has given me the gift and the calling to help women step into their next best selves and i didn't fully know that this was going to be the way i was gonna do that and i feel that responsibility every single day i talk about this freely and openly but i don't care if it's my daughter's friends that i'm impacting if it's you know volunteering at an entrepreneurship at the high school if it's a non nonprofit that i'm working in it is always my mission for those people who are around me to help them see what is your next best self i didn't realize that this was a gift of mine back in the day and i've been given this opportunity my entire life it was never it sometimes it was labeled then sometimes it wasn't but you know through the lens of operations that's where i have merged those two things and so understanding authentically who you are and where you wanna go and and giving yourself the permission to fully bring things together just like you are and what you're doing today you know i mean you've got a great history i'm sure there's bumps and bruises and pride enjoy as you reflect on those and things that we don't wanna go back and do again and then there's this great opportunity and vision that we see for ourselves that's like whoa i'm still on fire to pursue these things whether it looks like what i'm doing today five years from now or whether it looks like something completely different i know that operations will be the line or that string or that thread that holds all of these pieces of natalie and pieces of meghan through this it's a new month and that means a new podcast recommendation if you're listening to mine you probably are listening to others and so i wanna give you one that has caught my attention it's called mentors and it's hosted by julie meyer and jimmy edge and it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the reason it caught my eye is it's all about mentorship and if there's one thing that's been consistent over my entire professional and personal money me it is my passion for mentoring people to become their very best so the focus of their podcast is to explore different ways to augment and to refresh the mentoring movement so if you find yourself in a coaching position a strategist a right hand i think that this would be really fantastic because part of what we do as high level operators is a lot of mentorship we're leading up and we're leading down i think this podcast can be of a great benefit to you go ahead and listen to augment mentors wherever you get your podcast it's that time the director of operations certification is open we are accepting applications if you are ready to up level your operations if you're ready to gain the up level skills that you need to be that next best level of yourself the time is right for you if you're ready to step into strategy and out of the exhausting implementation the time is right if you're looking for community for support for guidance leadership mentorship this program is what you need all of those come together to help you elevate to your next best self to find the right clients the best clients to help you turn your prospects in into clients the time is right and we have the perfect solution for you the director of operations certification program is enrolling now please apply we will get back with you very soon and we cannot wait to welcome you into our growing program let's kinda transition into i mean i feel like i could talk to you for a year and not get tired but for the sake of the listener who's here today who is probably intrigued by your story and definitely inspired by your story i mean we've talked a little bit about what led you here but what made you believe that working with us was going to be the right solution for the meg the next best version of megan yeah so i think i very clearly saw that it would help me translate quickly the soft and the hard skills right those experiences and areas expertise and a lot of those gifts that i was naturally wanting to have a space and sometimes honestly felt s in you mentioned that two of not always being seen or valued in what you can bring and i think sometimes we have this like we have a unique zone of genius that doesn't have space yet to forest and like find a an outlet for and so i was naturally doing that in the that advocacy work whatever anywhere else but that was out side of my normal job right and so i was like longing to find the context in which my gifts could be best suited and i very clearly saw that this would help translate i mean the frameworks the tools the processes that give more structure to those skills that i had been developing over but also the credibility right so more tang to what i had tang and then the credibility of having the certification and that just that kind of accreditation of it before these the knowledge for the strengths for what i was already doing get home my gifts and behaviors and so and i'm always i'm such a continual learner and that's a huge part of just who i am and i think probably with so many listeners as well and so just always wanting to hone my skill set and deepen it to better serve that i'm working with and my clients and yeah to be able to support my family more so that was i would say the core of the decision i love it of course i love that so having gone through the five and a half months of the certification all of the content which is heavy rich and broad and specific all at the same time you know what aspects of your experience with us or maybe it's a particular piece of the content that you received do you feel like benefited you the most in our time together i wanna actually speak right before i jump into that i wanna say one he seat that i had experienced so i was about to have a baby at the time but also i mean it's a big investment right and so most people have come in are are looking at you know wanting to kind of have a career that's on their own terms they wanna grow their business they wanna support the family they wanna share that gifts but i think the emphasis on the return investment from the very beginning natalie was something that gave me a huge amount of trust right away because you guys did not shy away from talking about that or directly mh supporting us in that and so i think the program is very intentionally designed to support us in moving into action right away so the way i benefited from that immediately was the strategic mapping model i mean that you probably you know everyone probably says the same thing there but it was so immediately actionable and i i remember even before we fully learned it i was already implemented it with a client and like half capacity you know because i was doing it a bit of a longer more like a quarterly planning with her and i used like the structure of strategic mapping to be able to do that and then i learned the rest of it and i then immediately like thought about okay who do i know that would benefit from this and i started reaching out and i got momentum going in that and that gave a significant amount of confidence right away you know brought in some income was able to yeah i did receive my roi through the program or more i think definitely more through the duration but that was huge and it's such a it's such a need for businesses and what i've noticed in the businesses that i've been supporting in that is like it forces you to ask the hard questions that you don't necessarily take time for or like have an outside view of when they're so in the leads they just they know they're you know hitting capacity walls they've got the bottlenecks for the next stage of gross but they don't see the shifts that are needed when you can come in as that strategic partner and hold that space for them and ask those hard questions sessions and that objectively show them it's like it becomes so clear what those transitions are that are needed in their business and everyone that i've worked with and this is at one of those major inflection points so it's just been such a valuable tool and i think i've executed now six strategic mapping and then another one i'm about to do this month as well or more this month and then we also did it internally yeah with me and anna like yeah and this was an interesting thing because i had to decide like what am i wearing when i'm doing this mh for her and i took off the business part of hat and i was more like d to ceo type hat but that was huge and then some of the other pieces i mean i tried to implement almost everything that i've learned that is like relevant in any way to my clients or to our business internally we have been able to go through a full essentially almost the team organizational analysis process the hiring process yeah onboarding for clients developing really key operational foundations for them inside their business key performance indicators the financial assessments i mean really just a lot of communication frameworks with leaders have been huge for just helping keep them on track for major decision points and where are they even going and how do we keep the big picture of the business in mind so that again they're not so either scattered or blue side or where they wanna go in the first place yeah well thank you so much for sharing all of that roi is huge you started with that and i didn't expect to dive into that but that is always going to be my heart i actually have plenty of wounds from being a d at the very beginning of my journey and those wounds came from working with people usually when we come into businesses we're supporting people and there's a big emotional support part of what we do right the overwhelming of the burnout the big big goals intangible goals that they are and maybe unrealistic goals which bring emotions and so you know i've supported people at that stage and that's just part of the role like i'm not gonna say that we have a band aid for that that is part of the role and we give you plenty of frameworks to help you find the right people who support you and you know there's a whole emotional part of this but that's where you're meeting people and the reality is in my own we'll call them wounds today but in supporting people in that way i found that there was a lack of integrity in some of the people that i was working with because we would be putting together systems that were not for the greater or good they were either for their pocket book and i'm here to tell you businesses for money and businesses for financial transactions people are in business to make money that is absolutely not something that i am saying that you shouldn't have because i desire that megan desires that you should want that for the efforts that you're putting in but there is a part where that becomes ic right where it is i'm gonna this but i have no idea how we're gonna deliver this right that is the in authenticity that never felt good to me and i was seeing that and sometimes you know i had to do some lot of work around you know the patterns of people that were the kinds of people that did that and so i could protect myself from going into partnership with them but how did that translate into the story that megan shared about my intentional around roi is i took a long time to stand up the certification i wanted to make sure we had every tea crossed and i dotted before we ever said go or buy or join us because wanted to make sure that there was a very clear understanding of expectation from the very beginning i know from the other side for me to hand over money i've gotta talk to my spouse about this it has to feel like a good investment i want there to be roots i want there to be you know as many routes as there are limbs and very very clear expectations and i wanted to make sure that i could get somebody their full return on investment because this is a conversation that they have had with their partner that this is a conversation that they have mold over themselves to make sure that they're ready for it time resources emotionally having this space to do that and so we look roi from a lot of different ways and of course financial is the number one way because i know that that's you know probably the biggest toll that is going to go into your decision to joining us so thank you for pulling that out i would greatly value that and then strategic mapping is you're right you said it you know that is typically the number one way that people are the thing that they pull out we put it very early in the program so that we can help you to get your return on investment but also it is the foundation that i see that truly transformed me into low level into truly being a strategic partner and i needed to define that framework myself me just like you and lots of other people are already strategist you're already working in a leadership capacity in a partnership capacity but we don't really have a good firm foundation and so i went to work myself into figuring out what that foundation looked like so that i could put that into my clients businesses and the way that i worked and now i'm able to share that in license that with all the other people who come through our certification so thank you for pulling those two pieces out and and sharing so freely i think i've what we can wrap up here with is i think i have a good understanding of who you are today and the listener does too but when you look at the vision that you have for yourself what is the next best version of what you're holding for you or maybe it's ua anna maybe it's you independently and very interconnected with anna mh yeah i would say i think just continuing to build our business in such a way that i can work for about twenty to twenty five hours a week really have these high value strategic engagements with clients where i have a really deep impact and can be a great sounding board for them and decision making for their team bring them clarity direction helps them with planning that honors their real humanity and their capacity we are all about people first growth and that's been a thread of all the efforts that you know in all the stages of my life but i think it's really incredible to be able to meet careers where they're at and continue to grow alongside them and so i'd say for this next stage that's a very tangible piece we wanna continue to increase our income we want to continue to grow our team we have several team members who are in support of anna and i and i are the primary on delivery to clients but we are building our team and we wanna continue to grow that and be even more supported ourselves in being able to be in our zones of genius and help mentor others into their gifts in the same way so i think our overall vision is that like our families are able to thrive the families of those that we serve are able to thrive and the families of our team are able to thrive and everyone is stepping more fully into their gifts that god has given them and god just really life giving regenerative work in that way yeah because so much of the work that we do and the women that we serve and the businesses that we work with they all are you know participating in some form of restoration in the world and healing for the world and you know they are also on their own healing journeys too and so we hope that the way that we support them can help facilitate that at the same time as doing operations or whatever it may be right both the internal and that external that matter so yeah i think longer term you know my husband and i were just talking about how we'd love to like for my business income to be able to support him potentially transitioning careers at some point out of the army whenever we decide that that's the right choice and create stability during that transition and flexibility for him to do what he's passionate about without you know worrying about whether our families needs are going to be met financially and so yeah just allowing that to not be disruptive and just being able to truly be present for our family and all the ways that they need and letting that ebb and flow in the seasons of life as our family grows or changes and yeah they go through different transitions yeah we rooted likely in that you know what i term as legacy just you know making sure that i can be as present as i can for my growing family i'm almost set aging family because my kids are before we hit record today i was telling her like oh my goodness here some parenting advice as i look backwards man if i could only you know have done this in your you're at a a newer stage than me but anyway it's truly rooted in you know my transition and what really led my life's work was understanding what i truly wanted out of life which i was not getting in my corporate i can't even call it a nine to five i call it a nine to nine yeah which feel generous yeah yeah but it it really came from that that deep rooted ness and wanting to serve my family first and knowing that i had gifts that the world still needed that were outside of the home but every gift i have starts in the home and and will touch the home so being able to be my whole self and the fullest rushing of me which is where i'm the most fulfilled and so it it wasn't for me from my story it wasn't leaving corporate and coming home and solely serving inside of the house it was really doing in a holistic way and this what you guys are hearing experiencing and seeing from me as well as meghan is that that is where our journey has led us and this crazy line of operations is is the thing that probably holds our families and supports our families both financially and internally in the home structure as well thank too yeah oh yes oh yes oh ironically my husband is an operator as well which is very interesting and that that is not always the dynamic but it is definitely the dynamic here that we're both operators and we see that inside the house in varying capacities but i think that knowing that it starts there and it serves both of us as we continue to grow i see all of us because in my mind i was thinking your family of five and five family four and you know held this structure has helped us internally as well as professionally is something that i hold very very dear and i find it in a lot of people inside of our community so if this is a story that resonates with you you know just listen closely i tell you to listen closely i know that at this stage in our world in our economy and in your life's journey the gift of operations is something that is often unseen and this is something that from my heart to yours is something i ask you to just take one extra look at this is not coming from the lens of a sale and i want you inside of our upcoming twenty seventh round of the certification this is coming from a place of knowing your next best self where your opportunities are both internally and then where you can partner with me or with another organization even if that's the right thing you know megan has talked about becoming a certified mindset coach and that piece in her journey was important for her to become her next best self so from natalie to you you know really examine in your journey in if you take nothing away from you you'll remember me as an operator you'll remember me as an operations educator and that is great but what i really want you to remember me as is the person who helps people to become their next best self whether that's through the vehicle that i have for you or a vehicle that you can explore on your own and maybe this is the right time to join me and to partner with us and maybe it's not and i'm totally okay with that i want you to know that everyone has the ability the gift and the opportunity to become their next best self sometimes that's internal work and sometimes it's external partnership and i want you to explore both of those i'm very grateful for you megan for trusting me in that journey and for identifying it because i i really feel before you can say yes to the ops authority and yes to the certification you have to say yes to you and explore what that is for you but i'm very grateful that our paths have crossed i'm very grateful again today that you've taken the time to share your story and i love hearing these stories not from a selfish perspective but just i think about the listener on the other side who is just craving understanding that they're not alone understanding that they have opportunity being able to cast a vision of what they can experience for themselves whether it's through the certification or whether it's through the advocacy work that you have shared today i i really don't care i really want people to understand that you know your next best self is really really it can be tangible it is not a dream it is not just a vision it is up to us to make it but if we don't see that for ourselves and take the time to identify what that is it doesn't ever come true and i know through your work through the hundreds and hundreds of women who have said yes to us we have had the great benefit of being able to see what their next best version was and the beautiful thing is the ops authority is able to partner with them in one small slice that really can make a very big impact in the goals that they have and sometimes those our financial sometimes those our professional and honestly we get to see a lot of personal goals met through this one lens of coming in and supporting them through the certification so megan thank you so much for being here and for sharing so openly i know that your work has interested people who are listening today and we are fact finder we are researchers and we are curious and so i can't close up today without having you share a little bit about where people can find you and the work that you're doing today yeah you can find us at epic apostolic fruit dot com and then we also just launched about a month or so ago apostolic fruit podcast so you'll find us there every week so that's been exciting and then on instagram at apostolic underscore fruit we're just getting started on linkedin so thanks natalie advice we'll be yeah i don't think i had touched this since before i was at west point so yeah so it's it's the next stage here so so grateful natalie to just have a conversation today and hopefully this is inspiring to others for thinking about taking action and i know so much of my journey has just been like just moving forward with what i've got it doesn't have to be perfect because i think it's so easy to fall into that kind of especially if our perfection over analyzing or just taking in all the information but it's really where ever meets the road is really in the action where you can gain the confidence always always always and we're such good action taker so don't sell yourself short in that action but know that there's a higher level of the action by doing the action you get the clarity we always say action creates clarity clarity creates confidence and boy once you've got confidence you are unstoppable if you are interested in becoming a director of operations i invite you to attend our test drive which is exactly what meghan did probably a little over a year ago and that is coming up if you head over to the ops authority dot com forward slash test drive you'll be able to register and get all of the information on that we've got our twenty seventh round that is going to be enrolling here in just a second what does that mean that means that we are quickly approaching our five hundredth person to join us in the certification and have the opportunity to transform who they are and help them to walk into their next best self through the lens of operations and educating them to make an impact in their operations career thank you again megan for being here and for all of you listeners thanks for hanging out with us today a little bit longer podcast but i think it's one that we all got a lot out of so you will hear from us very shortly and head over to test drive join us today and you will really benefit from this info session that we have coming up thanks so much for hanging out with us today thank you for investing just a little bit of time to listen to this episode of the ops authority podcast i am so grateful to be surrounded by real action takers like you who are invested in growing their business through operations will you have one more action to your to do list today visit the ops authority podcast dot com where you can join our community of business owners and other ops experts you're gonna hear from me in a week and in the meantime new big things on the backside of your business

if you're here in you're a business builder then you are always in pursuit of clients and what's behind client acquisition it is a sales cycle cutting it in half sounds pretty impossible right well that's exactly what sandler training did with hubspot and they used their tool hubspot tool an ai tool called breeze it tailor every customer interaction without losing that personal touch which is so important and ai is doing amazing things like this we already know but hubspot hasn't it built in their results were really incredible their click through rates jumped by twenty five percent their qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing page if you're interested in this you wanna go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help you grow your service based business this is the ops authority podcast where my mission is to break down the backside of your business so you can take the right actions to grow and scale hey i'm natalie gin a small business operations expert and i'm gonna give you a front row seat to real solutions that will help you reach the vision that you have for your business all while equip you to put out those inevitable pesky fires and those fears that pop up listen in for strategies to grow your team craft the systems and processes that you need for your business and establish business foundations that you may have skipped over i know you're ready to do really big things so let's do it together hey hey friends it's natalie welcome back to another episode of the ops authority podcast i'm so excited that you are here today and listening in with me as i share a little bit of something that i don't typically come here with but my team encouraged me to come here and share this with you guys and i know that there's a lot of people listening that are business owners as well as operators and have the aspiration or are currently building a team i've got something that is really unique and i didn't intentionally get to this place and i really never thought i would be celebrating this but the thing that is so incredible today that i wanna just open up the book and share a little bit of behind scenes on is how i've been able to cultivate a team who has stayed with me for over actually the average tenure on our team is three plus years and you know as i was growing up in corporate that really wasn't something that was i mean everybody wants retention nobody wants turnover and i ironically worked in human resources for quite some time and our goal was always to bring in the most qualified people who would hopefully stick around and here at the ops authority i've been blessed to bring a lot of my own skills and leadership as well as you know the learned behaviors of my previous experiences is to be able to build a team that sticks around and i'm sharing this and it does feel like a soft brag but really it is such a gift and it allows us to be really best in class here at the ops authority it's not me this is really a collaborative effort of all of the people that work alongside me and as i have we all have navigated really twenty twenty till today which have been some very po years in business especially in small business we've seen ups and downs in sideways and a lot of question marks in business and my boxer which includes lots of my peers we talk a lot i can tell you if my boxer could talk that's what i tell people sometimes times like wow if my boxer could talk you would be amazed at the struggles i hear when it comes to team sustaining teams building successful teams and then the inevitable turnover that just will happen in business but this last i would say the last eighteen months to twenty four months we've seen a lot of struggle i have heard a lot of struggle with businesses really needing to expand and contract when it comes to their team and i hate to hear it because i know the most momentous a business can be is when the leader is surrounded by a team of people who are on the same track who have the same mission who are excited who are fired up who come in here to serve and to deliver with their whole hearts i know that that's how businesses can really elevate and get to the next level so we've been able to do that here at the ops authority and today i wanna tell you a little bit of a story and give you some pointers if you're listening hearing and you have the goal of building a team or you're reconstruct a team because i know that that can be a season two but i wanted to share a little bit about our team how i have had success building it and then also some strategies for retention as you look to move forward in your business career a little bit about us here at the ops authority we have twenty eight years of combined experience here at the ops authority i know twenty eight years but i've only been in business and i've only been building a team really for about eight years here at the ops authority but we have eight core team members and we have six employees including myself at the ops authority we have some full time and long term contractors that go that twenty eight years but i'm really really really proud of that we have on our hiring side of our business we have of diana who has been serving here at the ops authority for more than five years in one capacity or another so blessed to have someone so invest and i could say the same thing i'm not gonna point out every single person here because that is i mean i would tell you a lot actually maybe i will but alex gabby and lynette they've all been with me for more than four years yes four years in small business online remote business is pretty wild and so i am so proud of what their dedication to me we have adrian we have sky we have jess all of them have been here for three plus years and then again on our hiring side we have lindsey who's been with us for two years so this is our core team and collectively they bring twenty eight years of experience here inside of the ops authority so when you're looking for consistency obviously you want people to stick around so i looked at the bureau of labor statistics and it shows that forty seven percent so forty seven out of one hundred people or employees are going to leave their job on an annual basis now feather in my cap i feel really really really blessed to have people who have stuck around and to beat that statistic but this is why leaders have to truly be leaders if they want to build a team that is going to have her retention and honestly morale at the end of the day so i wanted to share a little bit about how i've been able to do that first of all it starts with values values values i have been very clear and intentional about doing the work many many many years ago ten years ago when i was standing up what it was that i wanted to build at that point i was a solo so i had to really envision what do i want this business to look like and today we are living that right now and it all started with understanding what my mission what my vision and what my values were so values when i'm looking at team team and who i attract and who i'm able to retain i see the highest correlation when it comes to values so what does that mean for me as a leader and for you as a leader you have to look and dig and see okay who is it that i want to work with who is it that i want to build this business with what are the values what are the characteristics that work and compliment me and i did that work and guess what i'm only able to attract and retain these amazing high autonomous performers because we overlap we're not the same i don't want you to confuse yourself with wanting to hire many means i hear that a lot like i just need someone to be just like me yeah you might need that for a little bit but that usually won't sustain you and allow you to go into a growth state so yes values are so so important but you don't need to build a homogeneous team we don't want that we really want independence and individuality different experience is a lot of diversity and we've been able to cultivate that here at the ops authority but really understanding what my values are and then complementing that with where i want the business to go i can tell you if you're just now starting to build a team values is the only thing it's the one that's the singular the most important the highest priority of what you need to be very very clear on that allows people to understand who you are and how you are so they can see themselves in your space in that role i would say the next thing that i really lean into is building a strong job description if you hung around me for a while you're probably exhausted from hearing about values and how you really need to show up with those in your job description all of my job descriptions are very accurate are they long yes sometimes are they too long yeah sometimes but you know what i wanna give the person who's applying to work at the ops authority a full picture of what it's going to look like what is our goals down the road but also what does it look like in the day to today in the implementation which is part of the role here i want them to really be able to envision themselves in that place so making sure that the job description is comprehensive and definitely accurate the other piece here the next piece after we are able to attract those people these amazing high achieving big bright stars in the ops authority the next thing we do is look at our onboarding process and our onboarding process requires me this is something i didn't do especially in corporate and i hope it's a tip that you can take away but it requires me the leader or whoever it is that they are going to be reporting to to be vulnerable you might not have expected that but when i am pulling someone in and we've already gone through a pretty comprehensive job interview experience and we have said yes to one another but when they come in to doing our onboarding process the very first thing we do is get to know one another one layer deeper we've already you know gone through the formalities of interviewing which of course we strive to be very open and it's an exchange it's not one way that's also important for me but when we get here and we're onboarding it's like you're already in i am trusting myself that you are the right person for us and you're doing the same thing but something unique i think that that is unique and i've tried to stress with many of my peers is when you're onboarding i am very very vulnerable i tell somebody hey here are the behaviors that you're gonna see from me when i'm stressed i know that i can be avoid sometimes here's how to deal with me i'm literally coaching them how to coach me and i don't care if this is someone that is isolated to our social media i don't care if this is somebody that is our director of operations and is going to be in my ear every single day talking me off the ledge on the ledge encouraging me really d prioritizing things whatever it doesn't matter i really don't care one of the things that is so important is for me to be a vulnerable human being something that i have seen my entire journey that has really helped me is to know that i'm going to be leading from the front but not from above and that's the culture that we bring here we are a collaborative culture and someone like me someone who is more of a coo than a ceo i know where my deficiencies are i know where i struggle i'm gonna need a team that collaborate together that i trust that i can lean on because decisions are slow for me and as much as i wish i could fix that and change that i'm not your typical you know visionary i require people to be around me to be bright to be intellectual to have emotional intelligence to be experts in their field and that's what we hire for here so in that i know that i need to be able to lead from the front but not from above it's a new month and that means a new podcast recommendation if you're listening to mine you probably are listening to others in i wanna give you one that has caught my attention it's called mentors and it's hosted by julie meyer and jimmy edge and it's brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the reason it i caught my eye is it's all about mentorship and if there's one thing that's been consistent over my entire professional and personal journey it is my passion for mentoring people to become their very best so the focus of their podcast is to explore different ways to augment to refresh the mentoring movement so if you find yourself in a coaching position a strategist a right hand i think that this would be really fantastic because part of what we do as high level operators is a lot of mentorship we're leading up and we're leading down i think this podcast can be of a great benefit to you go ahead and listen to mentors wherever you get your podcast are you ready to shift gears in your operations career if so then it is time for you to join us for the test drive the d this is an event where you're gonna get a real behind the scenes look at our director of operations certification program you're gonna be able to discover the strategic mapping model and how that's transformed the careers of over nearly four hundred and fifty ops professionals just like you this is gonna be your chance to peek behind the curtain and really understand exactly how our program can elevate your ops career we've done it a lot and we're ready to do it well alongside you join us live reserve your spot today at the ops authority dot com forward slash test drive we want you to stop dreaming about success and drive it join us today another characteristic that i think has been a game changer for myself and that i want to help in instill in myself in in other people around me in my peers is to know that you are going to need to have a heart to human leadership that's what truly works after we start with values after we do the onboarding and i'm vulnerable and i'm really helping others to understand what it's like to work here to work with me to support me we lay really really clear thought out expectations for every single role it's truly the success metrics and how this person's going to soar once they get here but it comes back to that heart to human leadership it's really how i live my life but it shows up in the work that i do here and that allows people to come in here and to be autonomous they know what we're like they know what i am like they know the expectations for the role and they know that they can trust me because i'm gonna see them as a human incorporate it was all about getting like butts and seats butts and seats like come in here have a great skill do your job and be managed or micro managed i don't have time for that here i'm going to attract people i'm going to work with people who have the ability to come in here and to be their best self they know the skills that i need obviously i trust that they're bringing those skills but i'm gonna see them more than just for their skill set yes they have it i'm gonna make sure that they have it but that values first attraction is going to help me to step into them to lean into them for them to lean to me and to truly embrace a heart to human leadership style it's not just me to them it's them to me as well and that allows us to be a high performing team it allows them i use the word autonomous earlier and i'll use it again autonomy is everything to me we're a remote team i don't know what they're doing i don't know if they're taking a lunch break i don't know if they're working through their lunch we are not clocking in and clocking out i fully trust that i have people on my team who believe in the mission we give them plenty plenty of points in time where i can assess that but they believe in this mission they believe in me and they know that i am for them if they have a life event going on i mean i told you we have twenty eight years of combined experience here in leading at the ops authority with these critical team members i can promise you we have all gone through life events we've gone through hard things like things but it doesn't even matter at the end of the day we are human and it is so important for i believe if you're listening to this and you aspire to build a team always in the back of your mind be thinking heart to human leadership i do have the get of empathy but i don't think you have to have that i know that when my people are going through something i put myself in their position how would i prioritize this project this day this work my role with where they fit in their life i couldn't do that if we didn't have a team of people who are ready to jump in to support that person who may be going through something but self led and autonomy is extremely critical here at the ops authority and it's a value that my team really loves and leans into so i'd really come here to tell you that some of this is intentional and some of this is just because i do lead from the heart it is a vulnerable place to be and it's also a risky place to be it's not something that everybody has the ability to do the last thing i'll share with you that has helped us to be successful is that i hire people who will come in here at the implementation if you've heard me talk about the levels of talent implementation is at the bottom management strategy and then envision i hire every single person here at the implementation level and collaboratively we find a growth path for them all the way as high as they want to be as high as they desire to be and that's one of my gifts is i'm able to partner with them to understand and to assess where their strengths are where their gaps are but most of all where their opportunities are going to serve them to stay here alex is a great example she came in here as an ops coordinator she's been able to move into an ops manager and she continues to thrive we collaborate to understand where she can continue to grow here there have been stretch exercises there have been stretched years and i am so happy to share that she has recently been promoted to our director of operations but she started here at the implementation level why is that so important she starts at this implementation level and she's able to see me in all of my stress successes all of those things but she's also able to see how the business functions from a full comprehensive view now this has happened for every single person here we have you know expanded and contracted as the economy has as our opportunities here internally have and i just always want them to know that i even if it doesn't benefit me i have helped people exit the company that really wanted to grow in a way that we could not support so knowing that you as a leader need to look at people as you know where is their growth potential and does it fit you or does it fit them externally either way is completely fine with me i know that everybody has an opportunity to be able to expand and for the most part here in our company we've been able to cultivate roles build new roles gabby came to me not that long ago and said hey i see an opportunity for myself here can we build it it required me to invest more in gabby and guess what it has been a blessing to us but that's because we are able to collaborate i know that i've worked in environments where there was no way i could bro my leader and say hey can you basically give me a raise to do a different job here it works for us because we are all extremely heart centered and again that heart to human leadership she was expressing that to me because she saw not only an opportunity for her but how it could be a benefit to the organization and these are the ways that we have been able to build this business to retain high performing talent to continue their growth as leaders in their operations profession or in their profession in total the last thing that i will point out is we don't have we're a super small business we're a nano business in the land of small businesses we would be considered a smart a smart up maybe that's a freudian and slip but we are considered a startup up and on top of that we are a very very very lean team everybody here shows up they contribute the most that they can contribute they want the greatest success for myself for the entire community our community at large and for the brand as well as for themselves of course but one way that i'm able to give back to them even though it is so lean and so small is through looking at benefits that serve them and so i wanted to share that if you're building a business and you're not able to provide you know medical dental even wealth benefits or retirement benefits there are other fringe benefits that our team really leans into and the primary one is time off paid time off to do what it is that they want to do and when they do that they're free to literally not be here one thing i didn't share is i have very very very strong expectations that we don't work nights and weekends when i'm with my family i want my team with their families or doing whatever it is that builds their hearts and so i like to think of us as a nine to four team we are going crazy we're a launch based business so yes there are times when we are all gears clicking everybody is here but for the most part i want people out of their boxer i want people out of their emails nights and weekends and i compliment and i truly mean that and guess what i don't get boxer from my team's nights and weekends and they don't get them for me because i'm busy doing the things that fuel me so that when i'm reporting to work my whole heart is here at work that has been something that i did not see when i was supporting other teams and so it's something i'm very proud of and it's a value that i put on myself but our entire team it's reciprocate back to the benefits thing so we don't have formal structures for benefit plans here but i know that time off and space is incredibly important so just to give you a little view of what our benefits look like that everybody bow use here is we have monthly mental health days i pay my team to take a day off every single month i don't care how they use it it is a day to fully check out that's twelve days out of the year that they get for themselves in addition to that we have eight paid vacation days we have ten paid holidays we have seven to ten additional paid time off days most of the time we're using that at the end of the year for our two days off so my team is getting over forty days of paid time off they get to do their jobs they get to do a job that aligns with them so it should be a challenge but it also is something that complements their natural strengths and gifts we're intentional about that then of course you know if you're an employee here on i'm buying your equipment i'm making sure that you get a reimbursement for office supplies and then lastly if you're going to contribute to an organization that has your heart i'm going to match you in that and so that is up to five hundred dollars it's not a ton but a lot of us are mission focus in mission centric and so if you've got an organization or something around you that you're really invested in and you put your personal money there i wanna help support you we again coming back to that human that heart to human leadership that is so important to me so i just wanted to take some time today to kinda pull the curtains back and share with you what i have been able to do and has been really natural it's been an organic path for me to be able to retain top talent to pull in and attract and hold on to these all female squad here who is all invested in the ops authority in our mission and what we do and most of all that support you the listeners our community it starts with you guys and because that is our brand that is what we are and who we are and of course selfish officially they support me in being able to bring that vision to life so i hope that this has been something that inspires you and helps you to see that this is possible it is possible to have people that stick around for three four five plus years with you in a time where remote autonomy and this type of work online is actually possible i've seen peers really struggle with us and so i wanted to pull the curtain back and share with you how i believe i've been able to do that what has made us unique in keeping our team intact and really looking from a growth perspective as my company has grown and shifted just like yours has and will mine has done the same thing yet we've been able to keep a team completely intact and growing as we do that so i wanted to say thank you so much for tuning in today i will be back here with another episode in your ears to help you do this ops journey this ops career in the way that best suits you friends have a great day and you'll hear from me soon thank you for investing just a little bit of time to listen to this episode of the ops authority podcast i am so grateful to be surrounded by real action takers like you who are invested in growing their business through operations will you have one more action to your to do list today visit the ops authority podcast dot com where you can join our community of business owners and other ops experts you're gonna hear for me in a week but in the meantime do big things on the backside of your business