The 90-Day Game: How to Get Clear and Take Your Business to the Next Level with Raj Sundra

Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart and we're here to interview the game changers, the future makers, the co collaborators and creators who are here to collaborate with one another towards a better future for all of us. Enjoy the show. We've got a great guest coming up for you right now. Welcome to Make More Marbles. My name is Brad Hart and Today I have Mr. Raj Sundra on the show. How are you doing, Raj?

I'm doing great, Brad. How are you?

I'm doing well, thank you. I have a fun story about how I met Rush. Can we tell the story of how I met Raj?

I'm curious.

Yeah. So if you guys have ever heard of this, it's this desert festival. It's called Burning Man. I don't know if this is a new thing or not that nobody's heard of, but we went to it and we stayed at a camp called mystic. And I kind of got. I was there late because I went to 212 and I was there a couple days late. So I have a little pup tent and they were just trying to stick me places. The first place they stuck me was like in the little, you know, stoner area. This wasn't my vibe. No, no judgment. It's just not what I do. Right? And then a minute goes by and I'm like, you know what? This just isn't gonna work. Like, they're trying to just jam me in here. It's not gonna fit. It's just nobody wants me here. They're already no room at the end. So I went and I find another little place and I basically just started putting up my tent. Alright, it's gonna be fine. And Raj steps out of his tent. He's like, you supposed to be here. So we worked it out and it was fine. But the thing I loved about Raj is that he was on it. He was really on it. Like this camp, I mean, it's a big production camp. You got multiple domes and different events and things are going on and it's like real high level stuff. And you're out in the middle of the desert and it's an unforgiving place. So Rogers running around with hammers and just whacking things and he's like recruiting everybody. Basically recruited me for two days to do a bunch of work. It was great. We got to really know each other. And what I really appreciate about Raj is that once he sets his mind on something, he. It is undeterable. Undeterred. Like, he just, he's going to do the Thing, reality be damned. So it's, it's super fun to have you on the show and talk about some of the things you do in real life, you know, outside of the Burning man universe and additionally how you help people grow massive businesses. Like, you know, a cell phone company, a case company that did what, 22 million in revenue, I want to say.

Inside a year, three years. We built up to that.

Yeah, right on. Yeah. So, Raj, you tell it better than I do. Kind of give some people, you know, I' shared my color about how I met you. I think it's really fun. But give people listening at home just a little bit of the coordinates about who you are and why you're so wonderful. And we've obviously spent time in other ways, but yeah, I just want to get people clear on who the man is that we're talking to.

Great. Brad, well, thanks for that wonderful story about how we met. I remember that vividly. I was leading layouts, so my question was valid. Brad, what are you doing?

And then we decided, get out of my space, bro.

You should just be there. And you were right next to us. Gabby and I so worked out. Yeah, yeah. And now we see you up at our property regularly. Turns out you're a good friend of one of the people that lives here and one of our great friends, Jennifer Love. That's right.

Love Jennifer Love.

Jennifer Love. So a little bit about me. So, you know, my main focus right now is my business consultancy, Transformance. And that is a made up word that integrates transformation and performance. So I've always been somebody that loves to maximize what's possible from our human beingness and whether that's in the realm of, you know, business or sports or music relationship. I love exploring and being able to continually expand and up level and, you know, my career path ended up being in the mechanical engineering realm. I went to Cornell University and got a master's there and ended up moving to California to play soccer, of all things. I was always doing mechanical engineering as my primary thing when you know, my love light in performance. I worked sort of 30 hour week job with a company in the Bay Area and then kind of stopped playing soccer and migrated into the product design world. I had no idea I was landing in the mecca of product design, Palo Alto. And I walked into Spec Design, which was one of the leading design consultancies at the time. And they spun off their own company doing their own products called Spec Products. And it was me and one other guy, good friend of mine, Tim Hickman, who hailed from Netscape days, and we hired a shipping person and off we went. I remember being sent off to China over Christmas the first year, getting ready for the first Mac World show when the ipod came out. You remember that big clunky thing. And we got, you know, thousand cases made, and we sold a lot at the show, and off we go. So you guys are relatively early, too.

The cell phone case gamble, $22 million.

Yeah, we were. We were in kind of the top maybe five at that time, you know, and even then, though, that was challenging to get, get into the retail stores, get an Apple store, get into all the top consumer electronics stores. But, you know, Tim was great at that. We got into that. I managed the product and manufacturing, and we were an awesome team, and we continued to grow, and I learned a lot. I learned a lot about scaling companies. We studied with Fern Harnish from Gazelles.

Gazelles, yeah.

And, you know, I really took what I learned at spec and also what I was learning through some personal development work that I had been recently introduced to, a lot of landmark work through spec, actually. And I started integrating business practices and personal growth.

Yeah, you hit on a really amazing piece there, is that, you know, the systems, the strategies, all that doesn't work unless you've got your own stuff sorted out. You know, if you can't implement it, if you don't have the emotional capacity. And Raj, if you haven't noticed, we're on the opposite sides of the wealth dynamics spectrum, right? He's more of a lord mechanic type. I'm more of a supporter star type. I love high energy and extroversion and waving my arms around if you're watching the video. But you know, what I love about Raj is that he's like the incredible process guy. He's like, okay, cool, let's take all this disparate information. Let's make it make sense where I'm all over the place and I'm on fire. He's more that steel, you know, okay. Process systems and focus. And that's what allows you to go from a really good idea to a really good team to now a really good process that can ultimately add value to that many people. And it's no joke to go from 0 to 22 million in three years and be in the Apple store. I mean, that's not something that happens on accident. That takes consistency, planning, forethought, tweaking, iterating. And Raj has that in spades. So, you know, if you're struggling in that area, you want to hire somebody like Raj or Just hire Raj, honestly, just go hire him to help you.

With that kind of thing.

Because honestly, this is something I struggle. And what are some of the clients you work with now, Raj at Transformance?

Some of my clients, sure. New law business model run by Ali Ashanti, Alexis Neely. So they're based out of Boulder and I just finished up a gig with a company called Living Light Culinary Institute. They're all about educating vegan and raw food chefs and transforming our conversations around food on the planet. Those are two current companies that I'm working with and I love working with companies that are making a difference. I essentially get to scale my impact by helping companies that are making a different scale. And you know, one of the other things that's very dear to my heart is helping people transform their lives by coming to work. As you said, people are at the root of a company's success. You know, even if you have a great idea, great systems, etc. If the people aren't working, the company's not working. And so it's a total no brainer to create a culture where people's personal development and growth is part of the equation. Because if that's the case, they just show up to work excited. They attribute their growth and development, their life working, to the company that they're working for. And plus they're way more effective, they're way more productive. And you know, one of the greatest expenses for early stage companies is salaries. So the more output you can get over a sustained period of time serves you. And so I mean, I emphasize sustain because, you know, a lot of companies will burn out their teams, burn out individuals, and they go through this continuous hiring and firing cycle. But we really create the conditions for people to shine sustainably, which is awesome.

Yeah. And I don't know what I'm allowed to share and divulge sometimes, but I have a lot of conversations with big level consultants, you know, from all the way from the top, top, top, like Deloitte and those types down to like kind of, you know, more mid level shops. And they're talking about all the problems that really exist. Like for one, you know, major social media network that you've heard of, there's a complete department of just people that scan through, you know, content and look at it like it was reported as graphic or nudity or whatever. And it's so traumatizing to this department of people. There's actual people that have to look at all this content, see if it, if it fits the criteria or not. And they're looking at these horrific images all day long and naturally they have people PTSD like symptoms. I wonder what that's all about. So now it's like up to these consultants to come in and like fix the problem. The problem is you're torturing people, you're making them sit and look at horrific images all day. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure this out, but apparently it's just not quite getting like, it's not sinking into the skulls of the, of the people that are in charge. So it's really funny that you know, when you get to a point in your success where you disconnect the people from the process, what can go wrong and how we can actually create more problems than we can solve and that ends up toxifying an entire company culture. I'm sure you've seen this in a lot of different ways. But you know, the more I hear about this, I'm like, well, you know, how did we get to a point where the incentives were so perverse, where the economics around it were so perverse that this is the norm now and people just have to seem to deal with it and is there a better way?

Yeah, yeah. I recently have been digging deep into what I do and how it's different. And one of the things that I saw is that in large part companies scale the mess that they create when they're smaller and it gets increasingly difficult to untangle that mess. I really helped companies to create a solid foundation both culturally and with systems so that they can scale cleanly and really hum along instead of building on top of the mess that they created when they were smaller, which they had never fixed or never had time to fix. I'm really fascinated by that, you know, what it takes to actually tune the company to the problem at hand and then continue to tune that as they scale instead of putting all these patches and, you know. Yeah, yeah.

So what do you find? Maybe the one to two to three things that most companies, you know, especially like visionary types and extroverted types like me, we just kind of brush under the rug and becomes a big problem later.

Often visionaries, people with a lot of energy are excited about what they are creating in the world and they don't have a lot of energy or bandwidth to create a well functioning system to actually bring that idea to fruition in a way that scales with ease. And you know, it happens with any company. But those individuals who are more excited by the idea than the process and systems of getting that idea out into the world can really struggle in this area, you know, any issue that a CEO has is one of the highest leverage issues to address because it trickles down from there. You know, if you look at how, you know, things that aren't working in a company can trickle down, the most impactful are from the CEO because that hits everything from the top down. Yeah. And so really looking at, you know, both what needs to be handled to scale an idea sustainably and with ease, and also just belief systems and habits of the CEO are also super important because everything that comes out of their mouth trickles down and gets expanded at each level. So that's one of the things that I've really been looking at in supporting.

That'S so important to understand. Yeah, you're not supporting it, you're more trying to avoid it at all costs.

Yeah.

But I've seen this in my own organization is like, you know, things are steady as she goes and there might be an information disconnect. And by the time the information has gone from a minor problem to a major problem, I'm only hearing about it when it's a major problem. And that's been one of the big things I've been drilling in my team is like, if there's a problem, kill it when it's small. You know, let's, let's kill the monster before it becomes a monster and eats the whole city so that these don't become issues.

Right.

I don't need to wait until the last minute when we're in crisis mode and my hair's on fire and I got a million other things I hadn't planned on doing this now. And now there's like a 24 hour cycle of disaster we gotta fix. So, you know, having seen that from my own place, like, how do you really get like people to grok that, hey, you know, we should be actively promoting and looking out. Like my current working theory is, it's very difficult to incentivize people when it's not their own business to keep their brain on outside the hours in which you're paying them. It might be just having a very narrow viewpoint, but I'm just finding this to be harder and harder. Like as the entrepreneur, you think about this 24 7, you think about it in the shower, when you're running or when, you know, these breakthroughs come through. But it's really hard to find people who are aligned with the mission when they're not partners, when they're not, you know, sharing that upside of that mission. So, and I get it, it's just a Very intractable problem that I hope can be solved at some point. Maybe it's just my own failing as a leader.

Well, one of the things that we do to support that. Right. One of the things you addressed was the rest of the team not feeling the level of ownership and connection and commitment to the vision or purpose of the company. Right. And in that, how do you get them to show up the way that you need them to, to be highlighting things that aren't working, to be the source of them not working from the start. Right. And that doesn't necessarily mean working harder. It just means being inspired and connected to the company. And so one of the ways we help solve for that problem is we set up these 90 day games. We also set up a year long game that the 90 day games feed into. And in that setup, people are clear about the trajectory of the company, what they're out to accomplish in the year time frame and each of the 90 day cycles, and then their contribution to that and through the clarification of that and also their clarity in what they're doing to support that and then incentivizing people based on their actual performance towards those goals. People get way more involved, way more interested in what's happening in the company. It becomes more than a job for them. You know, they really have a, they feel like they have a stake in it. They're not just someone that comes and sits down, does their thing and goes home.

Right. So you're basically creating a game structure for them to then opt into as far as, okay, this is interesting, exciting. I get the rules, all I gotta do is play by these rules and we're good.

Yeah. And then feeding back and giving them feedback on how they're doing and awarding and acknowledging them for their accomplishments. Yeah. There's skillful ways to solve these problems. It's just mostly business owners don't. They even might know a lot of these things, but they don't know how to tie them into a cohesive offering that they can just do in addition to running the business.

What I'm realizing, somebody told me that, Brad, as good as you are at putting the right people in the right places, you're horrible at managing them day to day. And I'm like, you're right. I really like it gets. It grinds my gears. When I have to tell somebody something 50 times that I feel like it's just, you know, I've said it enough at this point. Like how do I, what what's wrong? Like how do we fix what's really Wrong underneath what, you know, me saying it's not working, so how do we do something better? And I get that I have to take responsibility ultimately for whatever happens. So this is just a part of my growth as well. And I feel like you're hearing things that business owners that you work with are like, oh, yeah, totally, I get that. But I'm just now realizing how important it is to know what your strengths are and to have systems for everything else, you know, and ideally be outside of that system. It's not a bottleneck through which you need to figure it out.

Yeah. And really having systems that draw forth not only your strengths, but the rest of the team's strengths. There's an expression that I've been working with lately that you should make the system your bitch to produce the results you want to. Instead of being bitch to the system, which often happens with a lot of systems out there, we start really resisting them and being irritated with the systems instead of being like, this system rocks. This is totally helping me fulfill on what I want. And you know, with the right systems, you can, you can really be supporting, leveraging different people's strengths because they vary, you know, Even in the CEO role, different CEOs have different strengths. So you just got to figure out how you draw forth enough that helps things work.

I love it. And I've heard so many people in my community that know you and have worked with you, you know, just loving the 90 year, the 90 day game and loving what you do and what you bring to it, not just from the Gazelles Vern Harnish systems process oriented side, but also the personal development, the communication, the landmark kind of in flavor. But then you know what you also bring just from yourself and what you've learned and how to integrate these things and transform it. So I'm just grateful that I could kind of help people draw out some of these key nuggets through my own lens and my own experience. What are some of the things that I haven't touched on that you think are integral to the process that you do, that maybe some people could find some actionable key points on and if they want to explore them further, certainly reach out to you and do that?

Yeah, Well, a lot of it starts with clarity. And so one element of clarity is the market potential for your business idea. The clarity of market potential for your idea is one thing like, hey, do we have a good idea? Do people want it? How much desire is there for this product? How much market potential is there for it? And that is one thing and then there's another thing of how much of that market potential do you want? Because Running like a 2 to 5 million dollars company is way different than running a 20 to 50 million dollars company is way different than Running a 100 million dollars company and upwards. So both understanding the market potential of your product and then what part of that do of a company do you want to be? And this is what I talk about. There's the, I like to say there's the systems of the company and then there's the problem that you're putting the systems towards solving. So the systems include everything from, you know, the different areas of your business, sales, marketing, product filament, etc. To the teams you know are. The team is a team is a system, it's a system of people. But you both look at like the elements that are not people related to the team. Like what are the systems that the team is using. But you also look at the people in the team and are those people within the team working well together? There's that stuff. But you know, where you grow your systems and people depends on the problem you're solving. So if you're solving a 2 to 5 million dollar problem, that's a different team and different systems than if you're gearing up to solve a 20, 30 to 50 million dollar problem. And of course there's, you know, there's different stages that a company goes through. They go through initial stage and then that next stage. But if you have in mind where you want to go and have people sort of aligned with that and then set yourself up so that you're your systems again, all the different systems and what a company is, you can start tuning to meet the problem. And then what I mean by tuning is you want to look at all those different things, right? You want to look at the departments, the systems you're using within departments, the teams and how they're functioning, the individuals, how they're functioning. And you want to see if they're either a match for the problem you're solving or they have the growth potential to grow into that problem. And if any systems within the company aren't a match to that, you want to figure out what systems and people are. So you want to be setting yourselves up for success from a systems perspective to match the problem that you're solving. That starts with defining the problem you're solving, right? The next thing is you want to know what are the measures of success, right? What are the critical numbers that show we're actually succeeding at the game we're playing that can be top level company metrics as well as area metrics and individual metrics. And if you kind of have that landscape clear at the sort of three year time frame, you know, as sort of what's the future we're moving towards and then the one year time frame, what are we doing this year to move in that direction? And, and then 90 days, what am I doing in these 90 days? To actually move towards the one year which will lead us to the three year. That level of sort of thinking and breaking things down allows you to organize your team most effectively around what to do. Because a lot of companies are just kind of like, you know, Stephen Covey has these four quadrants around how you spend your time. Non urgent important, urgent important, non urgent, non important and urgent not important. And so a lot of times companies spend the majority of their time in the non urgent. Sorry, in the urgent important. That is like putting out fires, meeting deadlines, etc. A lot of those fall into the sustain of the business. Right. We're just trying to keep the business running. Those are urgent, important things. To scale the business you need to do non urgent, important things. Those are things that don't need to be done today, but they need to be done in the next 90 days to get the company to the next level of scalability that we want. A lot of companies have a challenging time balancing sustain activity, the urgent important and the scaling activity, which is a non urgent important. You have the problem you're solving, you're matching your systems to those problems and then you want to look at what is the most potent combination of sustaining work and scaling work I can be doing in these next 90 days. And then you want to measure if that work is producing the result that you want it to be producing over the 90 day time frame.

Yes.

So, you know, it's interesting, I love to use sports analogies because it's a game. People will often ask me, what is a 90 day game anyway? You know, sometimes people think that anything with the word game to it is like, you know, like this fun thing. Again, business isn't fun. Right. That's. That can be often a conversation that like a game. What is this game thing? It diminishes the importance of business or whatever. But any game is essentially a set of rules with clear outcomes of winning. And you have individuals and teams using systems and processes to win the game. Right. And as you've noticed, in any kind of game, especially in sports, maximum creativity expresses itself in that container. And you would think that that container is too constraining for creativity to emerge, but in fact, it is not. By setting up a clean container with systems and clear goals, etc. You actually create the conditions for maximal performance and creativity to emerge. And so while system structure may seem overwhelming to some people, it actually, if you do it right, creates the conditions for ease. I like to say that well functioning systems lead to sustained, easeful success. And sustained, easeful success is not normally what we experience.

Yeah. And I just think of it like, if you are an Olympic athlete and you're trying to be an Olympic athlete at, like, the best training facility, with all the systems worked out and all the right equipment and all the right trainers and they know exactly what to do at any given time, or you're trying to be. You know, I just look at like, Rocky 4 versus Rocky. You know, it's like you didn't really have a whole lot. He's like, in the middle of the snow drift and training with, like, whatever kind of is around. In reality, he would get killed by Ivan Drago, but it's a movie, so, you know, it was a little bit different. You know, Ivan Drago didn't win the day that time. So you just think of it like, what are the stories we're telling ourselves? Like, we can just be the hero and it's enough to just show up versus having the very best environment and the very best systems to support you and being your very best. And also limiting options. I think that's a key piece that people get wrong all the time, is they think that there's a million options out there. Yes, there are. And that's the problem. You have to limit it to a number that's actually really realistic. Get some referrals, get some. Some input, and then limit your options to maybe two or three.

Right.

Because you could do a million different systems. I say just pick one and roll with it, because any system that you stick to is going to do better over the long term. And, you know, if this is something you're just terrible at, like, I know I am. I just want to hire people and work with people and partner people that really get this piece and live there and love it. And, like, literally get excited when the system's working well. Like, that's something I've never said to myself, is like, I'm so excited. This system's amazing. I've made it myself. Like, no, I've never said that to myself. I'm like, a system is something I want to do once and never look at Again, you know, it's painful, so. But I understand why that's such a limitation. So, Raj, how do you.

You understand what, you broke up just a little bit there.

Oh, I understand that that's a limitation for me. I understand that that's a reason that my growth is sometimes constrained. And even though I pull off some pretty amazing feats in the business world, it's kind of despite myself and not because of these things. So I think my next journey in entrepreneurship is going to be all right. You know, I've been successful. I want to be more successful. I have to get out of my own way and just eat that and let my ego go and be like, okay, how do I do this? Right. And not just the way I've been doing it.

Yeah, that's great. It's great.

Yeah. So how do you normally get people where I'm at that are kind of on the fence to realize how painful it is to stay where they are and to gain enough of a pleasurable outcome to make the switch? Like, how do you give them a little bit of a taste of what you're working on? I think this will be helpful because a lot of people that are attracted to what we're doing are people that are similar to me in the sense that they kind of. They have a desire, a burning desire to do something, but they're not really 100% of the way there. They got something that's working, but it's running their life, and they would love for have somebody like you that's walking in, but they're going to need to get knocked off the ledge. How do you knock them off the ledge, Raj?

Right. Well, I love to jump on a call with people and just get a sense of first what it is that they're up to and what problems are they facing in getting there. Just by having initially that conversation and helping people distinguish what is not working, what is in the way of them moving from where they are to where they want to be. If nothing else, they can see things that they haven't necessarily seen before. You know, potentially you saw something. I don't know if there's any space for me to show a slide or two, but there's.

Please do. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, you got them handy.

Let's do it.

Yeah, I'll do that in just a sec. And through, you know, the conversation of, hey, what are you up to? And what's keeping you from doing that and how do you want it to be? I get a sense of, like, what they're dealing with. And I found over the, you know, 15 years I've been doing this, that there are a lot of commonalities. And when people start seeing the commonalities they're like, oh, I'm not the only one. And then you actually show them, oh, here's how we fix that problem. You know, out of the different problems they have, here's how we fix that specific problem or here's a way to go about fixing that problem. They, they feel like a sense of relief because they're like, oh wow, someone can actually fix this for me. This thing that I've been like suffering over three years and didn't have any way to fix it. You know, even just showing them that whether they end up working with me or they have some new distinction or visibility so they can go and fix it themselves. I love to do that. And so I can give, you know, people URL they drop into or my email so they can reach out to me as well and just see if they want to get on a call and have some insights about where they're going and what's getting in the way of them going there. There's actually two case study videos on my landing page and the guy who did those with me did it specifically for the reason that it is hard sometimes for business owners to take the leap of trusting someone to come into their organization and work so in depth with them. I like doing at least two 90 day game cycles with companies because when I'm working with a company I'm training them on a methodology of scaling sustainably over time. It's not like it can be done as a one shot deal, a 90 day deal where you clean up a bunch of stuff, fix a bunch of things and then go do it however you like. But what I'm really after is working with people over a certain period of time so that they can embrace and learn the methodology. And this guy Andy Drish, who was the co founder of the.

I love Andy.

Yeah, Andy and Dane Maxwell, he said, dude, I want to come over and I want to film some case study videos with you because it's really hard for people to say yes to this, but I want them to say yes because it's awesome. So on the landing page there's two case study videos, you know, 5ish minutes long that both give an overview of what we do, but also from, you know, a user's perspective. He uses mind blowing about 10 times in the course of five minutes.

Sounds like Andy. Yeah, it sounds like Andy for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go Great. So you had asked me something along the lines of how do people even explore doing this work together? Is that what you asked before? Yeah.

And then we got on, we were talking about how Dane and Andy had used the 90 day game to help scale the foundation, which I know Dion, I know that whole crew. Like, I love all those guys.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's obviously been very successful for them. So they were just, they wanted to help. So they basically made a video for you guys talking about how well it worked. So you can see that video where. What's the URL for that?

It's gotransformance.com so G O in front of the word transformants.com I imagine you might have some show notes or links.

Yeah. That'll be linked below this video and on the, on the show notes as well. But I want to make sure people get eyes on that because sometimes a video is worth 10,000 words, as they say.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And also one of the things that I like to do with lead teams is giving them some top level training on how do you create the conditions for sustainable scale. And so that's an intro offering that I do. And the, you know, the number of different ideas that a lead team will come out of just with that is, as Andy says, mind blowing. You know, the word distinction, like if we can see things more clearly. You know, when you have those moments of clarity where all of a sudden, like something that may have taken you an hour takes you like a minute and you just can see everything. One of the things that I endeavor to do with companies, especially the leadership team, is give them greater distinction around elements required to scale a business. And when they can start seeing all those different elements now, they can start doing something about it instead of it just being a blur. And so in addition to having conversation with me, I can also do some initial trainings with lead teams just to help them see more of what contributes to scalability with ease.

I think that's so important.

Yeah, yeah. So I was going to show you something that is pretty near and dear to what I've been working on. So can I do a screen share real quick?

Please do. Yeah, go for it.

Yeah. So one of the things that I was saying earlier that companies do is they scale the mass. Right. They just get so busy with handling the urgent, important items, the running of the business. They scale on top of things that weren't previously working instead of fixing the things that weren't working. Right. And so often with companies, one of the things that I do in early day games is clean up the mess so that they can start building on top of a clean foundation and scale with greater ease. Because if your automation systems aren't working, if your communication systems aren't working, etc. It's just hard to move quickly and with these. Right. And I went to an Eben Pagan training a number of years back and he talked about success as an emergent property from well functioning systems. So the general idea here is that success is not guaranteed and if it were guaranteed, then everyone would just follow the steps and be successful. Which if you're someone in business, you've probably followed some business steps before and sometimes you're successful and sometimes you're not, right? So you can't really guarantee success. What you can do is you can set up the conditions where there's less obstacles that get in the way of what you want versus things always getting in the way, you know, where you can have sustained quality performance over time versus a few moments of awesome performance which we've probably all experienced in business. And that eases presence instead of stress and strain and challenge which can. I don't know about you Brad, but that can be a common experience for business owners. Stress, strain and challenge, inconsistent performance and things getting in the way regularly.

Yeah, I can feel the head nods coming. I can, I can feel them agreeing. I know, I've been there for sure, right?

Where all that you really want to do is like love what you're doing, you love your idea, get it out there to scale and we start hating our ideas, but because they come along with all this stuff, right? And so what we're trying to do is set up the conditions for sustained useful success to emerge. Right? And so that's what you can do, you can set up the conditions for sustained useful success to emerge. So the question is, how do you do that? Right? How do you set up those conditions? Because you know, wouldn't it be great for sustained useful success in your business rather than stressful, anxiety producing, you know, up and down, da da da. So you set up those conditions by creating well functioning systems. Okay. And a well functioning system is one where each part of the system is functioning well on its own. So this is sort of a definition and then also with the other parts. So that's a well functioning system. So let's look at a couple well functioning systems here. I would just ask actually as a schematic, so if you have multiple parts to a system, you can see starting here, each part working well on its own and then part one is working well with part two, part two is working well with part three, etc. And then like this, this actually shows every part working well on its own. And then with the other parts, okay? So that's just conceptual, right? And from that, sustained useful success can emerge. Now, to actually make this tangible, a car is a mechanical system. And each part needs to be working well on its own. The tires, you know, the, you know, the chassis, the brakes, right? But then also with the other parts, if the drivetrain isn't working, then it doesn't matter if the motor is working and the tires are great, right? So when those conditions are present, then sustained useful success can emerge. And, you know, to put the systems theory into action, I was talking about this before. You have to have a system. You have to have a system like a company made up of people and teams and blah, blah, blah. But you also have to put it to work on something like what is the game you are playing. And when you do that, then you can tune the system to the problem that you're facing and you can make sure each part is working well on its own in the context of that game and with the other parts in the context of that game, you know, over. I'm gonna not share that. But you know, any company is made up of department teams and individuals and systems, and you want to make sure each department is functioning well on its own and with the other departments, each system is functioning well on its own with the other systems, each team is functioning well on its own and with other systems, and each individual is functioning well on their own and with others. And you can probably look at this in your own business, Brad, and be like, well, one of those systems is working well, but it's not working well with the other systems. And therefore ease is not present. One of my teams is working really well, but maybe not with will with the other teams or, you know, like, you can look in here and you can find holes in your business, whether it's within a specific department, whether it's between departments, you know, and by doing this analysis, you can actually set up how you're actually going to move from things not working or not functioning well to well functioning. And so this is a little bit hard to show just in words. So I just wanted to show visually, and again, you get clear on the problem you're trying to solve. And then you tune the systems so that they're well functioning in the context of that problem, both individually and with the other systems. So talks like this and more built out help teams see things that they were not able to see before and then they're like, oh, there's something not working. If I don't get that working, then ease is not going to be present and we're not going to be able to scale. Let's go fix that.

I like it.

So this is what we do. I love leading year long games with companies where we start at the beginning of the year. You can start at any time in the year, but if you start and commit to a year, then you're clear on what are your objectives, what are our measures of success, what do we need to do to get to well functioning in each department, each system, each person, each team, how do we drive towards that while sustaining the business over 90 days and then what are we doing in the next 90 days to meet our year long objectives? So it becomes fun because you're breaking things into beginning, middle and end segments. You know, every week, every 90 days, every year. People love closed loop. They love closed loop. They need to see if what they're doing is actually leading to something they love to be acknowledged. We have a lot of incentive structures. We have a most valuable player award every week. We have a 90 day game completion bonus. My wife and I actually met each other through a completion bonus at spec. We got tickets to Cirque du Soleil as a company and we could ask somebody and I went, oh, that's beautiful. Yeah.

Not just systems, but love too. I like it, but love too.

Yeah, yeah. So you know, it's you, you can't blame business owners for not knowing how to do this stuff because there's a lot there. And even if you know how to do it, to have a system that handles it all for you, that that's what I offer. Yeah.

And I think for me the pain had to get great enough and I had to see enough things that could have worked, not work, in order to be like, okay, now it's the time to really do that. So for me, for me, for one, I think I'm going to be hiring Raj here pretty soon when it makes sense to really go deep on the next level of transformation in our company and really getting clear on what that is. Because I think life is creating the room and the space to do that. And as much as we're succeeding in some areas, we're miserably failing in others. And my general strategy has always just been to succeed more than you fail and everything will be okay. But it would be nice not to have so many failures. They do suck up time and energy, attention and create dis ease within the organization could otherwise be used for productivity and higher service and all that good stuff.

Yeah, yeah. Life is too short to suffer.

Agree 100%. Okay with that. Raj, what's the best way for people to reach out for you to you if they are in need of your services in their company? Whether they be a 1 to 5 million dollar company, a, you know, 10 million dollar plus company or $100 million plus company. How do they reach out to Raj?

Yeah, shoot me an email@rajotransformance.com I don't need to spell that right. We'll have that.

That's R a j at g o r a n s f o r m a n c e dot com. Did I get it right?

You got it all right.

I had to close my eyes and visualize it. I'm a little bit dyslexic otherwise. And I'll transpose letters.

Great. That's great. Yeah. And you can go also to the website. Just throw www in front of that@gotransformants.com and you can check out some of those case study videos. We also have what we call the culture equation cheat sheet, which gives you seven of the top cultural principles that you would like to have shown in your company.

Well, Raj, you're a man I love very dearly and you're a man that anybody would be lucky to have in their corner. I appreciate you very much and how can we help you move to the next level? So besides obviously more business and all that good stuff. But you know, I always talk about, and I always voice this on people at the very end, like make more marvels is about a community that helps people. And the way we do that is through connections, resources, opportunities, people and systems. And how can we connect you to those things so that you can move your mission forward faster. Obviously we talked about the business side, but what's some other areas in life we can help?

Yeah. Well, I'm currently looking for two coaches to bring on to both learn the Transformants 90 day game system and then be able to go out and coach companies. It's a great model in terms of leveraging both, you know, the ability to coach. Right. It's one of the big things we do. We coach in addition to supporting companies, getting clarity and moving towards their objectives. So it's a really fun gig. So that's one thing. I'm also up leveling my software platform. Transform system to transform the way business is being done. We do Personal games with employees, in addition to setting the business goals and, you know, really work to support people having great lives. So anyone that has good software resources, we're also looking for investment capital into the software platform. So anything in that realm is awesome. Awesome.

So if you want to reach out to Raj with any of those things, he'd be grateful, and I would be, too. Raj, thank you so much for being here, for taking the time to explain kind of how you look at business and the way you've scaled companies from nothing basically to eight figures and sold them and all that great stuff, because that's just so important to understand. I think that's really the point of all this, is that we don't have to struggle and scarcity. We can create the systems to win at the game of business. And it's not a hundred percent. Nothing's guaranteed. But if you're willing to put in the work, you have the right people on your team and the right systems, it's certainly possible. And we want more people to thrive and be leaders. And I know that's in your heart, too. So I appreciate you being here and thank you so much on the behalf of everybody at Make More Marvels. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here, and I hope to have you back on the show again soon.

You got it, Brad. Thank you so much for this platform for people like myself to have their voices heard and propagated out in the community. Lots of love to you, Brad.

Thank you, sir. Thanks so much for listening to the Make More Marbles podcast for more tips, hacks and strategies to create an amazing, abundant life in your health, wealth, relationships, whatever that means to you. Head on over to makemoremarbles.com, check out our cool explainer video about what we're about, and join our community of entrepreneurial game changers. We want to help you level up your life in every possible way. And don't forget to subscribe to us on itunes, Stitcher or Google Play, wherever you're listening your podcast. And please do leave a review. Thank you so much and we'll see you on the next podcast.