Defining the Future of Operations | Co-Founder of The OpsSpot, Jhana Li (Podcast 304)

I think that the diversity of operator in there is what makes the community so strong. We have so many different types of businesses, so many different sizes, different industries, different models. We have operators at all stages of their career. It's the meeting of the minds and the diversity of that community that is what's creating such exceptional conversations already.

All right, you're going to love this episode. This is Jon Ali, who is my co founder of the Op Spot. We're going to be riffing on all things operations and why we started the Op Spot community and why it's an amazing place for you to look at getting anybody who works for you in operations involved. But you're also going to learn a ton. You'll get some really great insights as to why I actually chose her to be my co founder of the Op Spot. She's one of the smartest people I've ever worked with in operations and she's also a prior second Command podcast guest. You're definitely going to want to want to watch this episode as well. Check out our YouTube channel to be able to watch the episode there as well. So, Jonna, welcome back to the second grand podcast.

Thank you. I am so excited to be here with you.

Yeah. And this is actually going to be a really cool episode. What we're talking about today is different from when you and I first met. In fact, when I had you on the podcast the first time, that was kind of the seminal moment for what we're doing together now. Yeah, why don't you tell everybody what we're doing now?

I mean, that was such a game changing moment. We hopped on, had a fantastic conversation, identified a lot of kind of the challenges that operators fall into and run into in their careers. And then a couple of months later you reached out to me and was, hey, I'm thinking about building a community for operators to support them in some of the things that we were talking about. Is this something you're interested in? And it's so funny, Cameron, because I also had it in my product roadmap to build a space for operators to come together and be supported. We had the exact same vision. It was a total no brainer. We had a fantastic weekend in Sedona building it. Here we are today. We launched a couple of months ago and now we're slowly ramping it up and getting it out to operators worldwide.

So it's interesting when, when I had you on the podcast, I'd seen you on media a couple times, I'd heard about you through social media a little bit, had you on the podcast, I was like, wow, she's smart. Like, really ridiculously smart. And I saw a younger female version of me that was really obsessed about operations. Really, really love the space. Somebody that I could vibe with a real good, quick start, like I was. And I'd been chatting with my wife, Ashley, to see if she wanted to help me build this thing out. And when I met you, it just started to spin my wheels into gear and I had to kind of address a conflict with her. She was a little pissed that I didn't ask her to really do this. As she met you in Sedona, when we hung out that weekend and started to frame out the OP spot, she understood why I wanted to work with you, because she got it right away. Right? Like, the energy, the enthusiasm and our obsession for all things operations before we really dive in. The big difference I need everyone who's listening to, to remember is that I have two communities. You and I are building the OP spot together, which is this global community for people that work in operations roles, typically operations managers, Directors of Operations, VP Ops. We've got a few COs in as well, second commands, but it's largely people that work in operations. And we allow more than one person from a company, so you could have seven people in operations or 27 people in operations, or three different managers, whatever. And it can be people that are managing and doing operations for different roles. The COO alliance is only the second in command. It's only one person from a company and you need to do at least 5 million or greater to qualify. Whereas the obs bot, we don't even have qualification. We've got big companies all over the board. Yeah. Why don't you talk about what it was, you know, when we met in Sedona that we got excited about in terms of why were we building this community, why is it needed and who's a good member for it?

What are the major challenges that operators encounter as they are trying to grow themselves, grow their careers and really advocate for themselves in the context of a larger business so that they can do their best work. When we look at, like, what are the root causes behind that, it's a couple of things. Number one, operations is just so terribly understood that operators don't even know what to advocate for for, and there's no, like, global conversation happening around what operations is and what it isn't. And so every operator is out there left to fend for themselves and fight that out with their individual businesses. Number two is just like straight up loneliness, like why do entrepreneurs and founders invest probably like millions by the end of their careers in masterminds in paid communities? Right. They do it because they recognize that putting themselves in the right room with the right people is a massive accelerator to growth. Operators don't have that. There aren't 10,000 communities out there for operators. It's super lonely. And to all of us, it feels like I'm the only person experiencing this problem, like nobody else can help me with this. This is something happening to me. And one of the things I've seen in my coaching programs is that when you break that belief down and you bring operators together and they realize, whoa, you're working on the exact same thing in your business that I'm working on in mine. You're running into the same challenges three months ago and you already solved it. It makes the journey so much easier, faster, and less lonely when you have a community to come together and share these ideas with. Those are kind of the two major reasons that the OP spot is not just a no brainer of a service, but it's absolutely essential to offer to operators so that they have a place to come to tackle those things.

You think about people that work in marketing roles. There's so many marketing conferences and marketing events and marketing meetups for them to go to, and there's even events for IT professionals and finance professionals. But there really wasn't anything for people that work in operations roles. So that was really kind of why we started it. Funny, I did a, a little posting yesterday and, and I said, you know, my boss, my CEO thinks I'm really smart, but I'm not that really smart. I just joined the OP spot. And I think that's what we're trying to do is, is we're trying to give people a place to learn from each other, to make themselves look good in the business. But also for the CEO to say, I would love for you and a bunch of people in operations to join the OP spot because it is your community. It's a place to invest in them and to get them to grow too.

We want to be the secret weapon for operators that are learning faster, growing faster, and are able. I think the final piece here is also bring the most cutting edge ideas and innovations back into their business. There are just so many things happening in the world right now, Cameron, that are changing the work landscape like month by month, AI and Covid. All of these massive changes hitting really fast. The future of operations is being defined in the here and now. Me, it's important that the OP Spot not be talking about what operations was or what operations has been or what has worked. This is a place to come together and talk about and really define what is operations going to be and how do we absorb and evolve and take advantage of the massive changes that are happening in real time and let's be honest, are only going to continue to happen faster. Every business needs to be prepared and be having these conversations and I want operators to have a space to come together and ask the question, what does this mean for me and my team and my business business?

I was talking to some of our OP Spot members and or we call them the spotters, some of our OP Spot members. And I was saying that the only people in operations that have to be worried about AI are the people in operations that aren't leveraging AI. But that's actually a big discussion. I think that was our theme this month inside of the OP Spot was talking about AI and technology and leveraging technology. And you're right, it's happening at such a fast pace. But if you're not ahead of that curve and riding the wave right, it's almost, you gotta be on a surfboard, riding on the front edge of the wave. That's really what we're trying to give people in this community as well.

And you're going to be totally washed away otherwise. And again, there just aren't that many arenas for operators to come together and have the conversation. And that is what we're trying to create in the OP Spot.

So what do you think the difference is between what we're doing and maybe some of the other communities that are online or other free communities or resources that are out there, even though they're, they're very fragmented and all over the place. What is the big difference between what we're doing?

I think the first thing is that, you know, we are for operators by operators. You and I are operators at our core. It is where we started. It is who we are single mindedly passionate about serving. And those are the only people that we want in that community. No CEOs allowed. So to keep it really pure so that this is a place for only operators to come together and be nurtured by other operators. I think the other thing is honestly like we're a little bit weird. We swear we're casual. We're like out on boats and taking seaplanes in Alaska on our vacation days. Right?

Like weird. I paint my toenails. How is that?

I know that we're a weird couple of people. We're here to do serious work but not take ourselves seriously. I think there are plenty of very professional communities out there for very professional operators. If you wear a tie to work and you want really strike like strict and rigid corporate culture in your business, frankly, don't join the ops.

Oh, join another group.

We are not the people for you. But if you want to embrace kind of this new cultural generation of people that are casual and have fun and blend work life boundaries and bring their full selves and full personalities to work and be weird about it and have fun with it, that's us, this and.

We'Re talking about the new generation of operations doesn't mean that you have to be a 25 year old joining. We've got 55 year olds joining 60 year olds joining 45 year olds. It's all about just are you deciding to be at the forefront of what's happening in operations? We're a community that is exclusively for operators by operators. Right. We're operations people. We're not a CEO community that's deciding to start a club for people in operations where really we care about entrepreneurs. Right. I think that's probably why we have so many clients or so many members of the op spot where they're CEOs, is a member of Vistage or YPO or EO or the Genius Network is. We don't compete with any of those groups and nor does my, my other organization, the CEO alliance and even what you run with Spyglass Ops Academy. All we care about is operations people. So we've got all kinds of CEOs that are parts of other groups that are getting their ops people to sign up. Which is what the whole point was. Right.

And I mean Cameron, in the course of your career, like ballpark it for me, how many operators have you worked with, served or coached?

I've played the second in command role three different times, potentially four. I've coached 190 CEOs and second in commands and I mean serious of serious companies. I've interviewed 310 second in commands on my second in command podcast. I've had about 300 COOs as members of the CEO Alliance. I wrote a book called the Second in Command. I think I've got a fair amount of like IP and I'm well probably.

In like the tens of thousands.

Yeah, I'm past the 10,000 hours. I'm the 10 times the 10,000 hours. You as well. I mean for somebody who's younger. You've been in the op space your entire life has.

Well, my entire professional career. Right. Like at the end of the day, this is who we are and this is who we care about serving. We have seen so many operators fall into the same traps, the same pitfalls. We've seen the career paths that go well and those that stall out and the major reasons that differentiate the two. Like we are able to bring all of that data to many operators who their only experience with their operations is their own and they can't see the larger landscape because when have they had a chance to experience that with anybody else other than them in their own isolated bubble? And so for you and I to like break down those barriers and allow for the peer to peer networking as well as just bring our own insights to the table about how to help people accelerate their careers and grow better. There's no other place like that.

There's two parts to this as well. One is, I know that we've got a lot of members of the OP Spot who are excited about being able to work with us and interacting with us and learning from us, which is great, but that's not what the purpose of the community is. Right. The community is there for them to learn and connect with each other. We only launched a couple of months ago. We've already got about 120 operations people from all over the world that are members. It's really the connecting with each other that they're going to get. Amazing, you know, more value than what they're going to learn from me or from you, right?

Absolutely. And the conversations are already so world class and so amazing. I go in there and I learn and it's the most fantastic meeting of the minds in to your point of like, why is it not just for second in commands if that's who you and I primarily serve? I think that the diversity of operator in there is what makes the community so strong. We have so many different types of businesses, so many different sizes, different industries, different models. We have operators at all stages of their career. It's the meeting of the minds and the diversity of that community that is what's creating such exceptional conversations already.

Now the OP Spot is a pure online community as well. We should probably walk people through that. It's not an offline, in person, mastermind event. I mean, I'm sure that there will be some events that people will host. Right. You'll get 50 members in one city. I'm sure they'll have some meetups. But do you want to walk people through how the model works, how the opswat community works?

So it is designed to bring together a global group of people. And for that reason, it's entirely online, entirely remote. And it's also designed to be flexible around time zones, around the fact that everybody there has a full time job and is pretty dang busy. And so it really is a come and play at your own pace. There are real time conversations happening inside of this online community. We host it on Circle and those conversations are always running in the background. When you as an operator have a crunchy question or an idea or something you want to brainstorm, you jump in there, you share that with the community and you get real time responses that are able to spiral into like one on one conversations and one on one relationships. Like we've already seen that happen. We've seen OP Spot members who are really excited about a particular topic just set up a zoom call and hop on and dive deep into it and talk about it. And so it really is that combination of like sharing intellectual resources and learning and growing together while also creating genuine relationships. Like my head of operations is in there. She lives near Denver. She connected with an OP spotter in Denver and they went out and they met up for coffee and now they meet on a monthly basis. It gets to be whatever you want it to be, whatever you have the bandwidth for it to be, month to month, but it is there as a resource in your back pocket, always.

Well, I started laughing when you said crunchy. Two of the terms that I've learned from you and from Natalie on our team, the crunchy conversations and gorgeous. Everything that's gorgeous, but it makes me smile. It's great. And again, yeah, that's what if you want to wear a suit and tie, go somewhere, somewhere else. This is not for you. Long term vision from the OP Spot. When I wanted to build this out, I was a part of a startup community on Facebook that had about 7,500 people and it was all like super engaging and I love that community. That's kind of what we're looking for here as well, is thousands of members that are in operations kind of geeking out, sharing information, ideas with each other. What's your long term vision for what we're building?

I think it is fair to say that I want to become the number one community resource for operators in the world. We want to bring together a global network. That part is really important. We're not unique to any specific location. We want to bring together global people and global perspectives and backgrounds and we want to be the place where the most cutting edge conversations are happening, where the top resources are being shared, where the Best questions and ideas are taking place and where truly genuine and world class relationships are being formed.

That's the key as well, is that the whole global side of things as well. I mean, we're definitely a global landscape in business right now. Right. I don't think I've bumped into a single company in the last two years who doesn't have 20 or 30% their workforce operationally worldwide. Right. Whether they're in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Middle East, Asia. I've been in 23 countries in the last 12 months and I'm learning a ton just from, you know, interacting with different operations, people from all over the world. Core values. When you and I met in Sedona and we were sitting at the chocolate.

The chocolate tree, yeah.

We noticed sitting off in the corner, we noticed a hammock sitting in the corner and we were like, we got to come up with a name for our company. So for fun, we just called it Green Hammock because it was this green hammock and that's become the logo for our company. And we've got a mascot named Hendrix who manages our community. I just saw the Green Hammock as a place to hang out. Like everyone likes to hang out in a hammock. And for me, that's really what I wanted the OP spot to be was a place for people in operations to hang out, connect, learn, be inspired, grow. But then core values came into our discussion as well. Do you want to walk everybody through what our core values are and why they're so important? Because you bring them up all the time. Like almost every discussion, they come out as just part of what you're talking about.

Well, and again, if we ask ourselves what differentiates the OP spot from any other community out there is because our core values are as weird as we are and they really exemplify what we're all about. So we can trade these back and forth. The one that I always come back to is the hold nothing back core value. And there's two pieces of that on one end. It's a communication core value. How do you show up and say it like it is? How do you hold nothing back when it comes to the value you can provide and the information you can give and the tough love that you can give when it needs to be given? Hold nothing back. We do that for each other as an act of love and service and respect as well as hold nothing back in terms of who you are as a human being. Again, we're not for the operator that draws really strict work, life boundaries and believes that their work self is somehow separate to who they are as a human being. We want people to bring their full selves to the table, their vulnerabilities, their uncertainties, their areas for growth and learning. And when we show up from that place of fully vulnerable, we're able to create magic. The relationships happen so much faster and the value extracted back is a hundred.

X. Yeah, I was hoping you mentioned the vulnerability side because for me that's so important that our members of the OP Spot just show up as being real and saying like even typing off in the, in our community online, hey, I'm struggling this week or hey, I'm scared this week. And it's not a social media post that you're wrapping up. It's not like, oh, I'm being all vulnerable by my course. It's like I'm fucking struggling. Right? I don't know how to do this. I've had this like frozen period of time where I've been traveling through Iceland, but I guess literally and figuratively I was in Iceland, in Alaska, so maybe that's why I was partially frozen, but I've been kind of frozen in parts of my business. We need people to show up and be that way with each other to say I don't know how to do this or I'm struggling with this or what are people doing in this kind of particular instance. Yeah, I think that's good. What's the next one?

Bring solutions is we are not here for the social media post of like, here, take all of my problems. I'm just here to rant. We're action takers. Again, we're serious people who don't take ourselves too seriously, but we're gonna get some done. If you want to do the work, if you want to grow, if you want to learn, if you want to really lean into that process, we're here for you. Because we don't accept whining for the sake of whining and ranting for the sake of ranting. If you're bringing a problem to the table, expect solutions back and bring solutions as an act of service to the other people who are bringing their challenges and their questions and their problems. It's an action oriented community. It's not a place for people to just come and word vomit.

If you're showing up to a community like the OP Spot or YPO or Genius Network, wherever it is, if you're in a CEO group, you're going to show up wanting to learn from other people. But if everybody shows up Wanting to learn. Who's there helping you learn. So you need to be able to bring solutions to the table to help other people so that when you have the questions, other people will bring you their solutions. The second thing that is important here is your solution might not be the absolute perfect one, but don't be worried that it has to be so perfect. Don't be worried and have that imposter syndrome that, oh, I couldn't have anything possible to add because it might be your solution or idea plus Fred's solution or idea plus Kelly's solution. Idea. And those three ideas spawn into and make a little idea baby. That's exactly what you were looking for, right?

Right.

You were going to go into our third one which was share, then learn.

Remember we had a discussion around is it like share and learn learn share. Like what were you doing here? We landed on share then learn in that order. Right. Come ready to share your expertise. I think as operators we suffer from so much imposter syndrome because again, nobody has ever defined for us what our job actually is. Secretly none of us actually know what the heck we're doing. And so we don't believe we have things worth sharing. We don't believe that we're the expert in, in anything. And so the OP spot is a place to bring your ideas and break down that belief. In your experience, you have mastered something, you have found some magic nugget. Bring that into the community first, be willing to share first and in exchange you will be able to learn and extract and receive back 10x the value and information that you bring to the table.

They might not be showing up with a question, but they're showing up curious of what other people are asking. What are other people learning? It is good about, you know, being curious around that. Share and then learn.

Saw somebody just drop like a full company wide KPI guide that he just built because he's proud of it and he should be. It's freaking beautiful, right? And where else would you have a group of a hundred people cheering you on for dropping a 50 KPI guide? That's the kind of nerdiness that we love and we celebrate and we want people to have a place to strut their stuff and bring their best things.

And it's cool because you are going to get cheered on from the community because your boss, your CEO and your CEO are probably too busy and too focused and aren't praising enough. But it's kind of nice to get the cheering on from your peer group. And that is part of why we're all here, right? To have fun with it. I think you bring that to the table. And I've always said for years that none of this shit actually matters. Like, we're all going to die. We're just all walking each other home. We may as well enjoy the journey.

Let's paint our toenails, you know, right? Want to see planning in Alaska, Right? Life is too short. Let's have fun. And frankly, everybody in that community is such a dang nerd that operations is fun. A 50 KPI list is fun to us, right? We love that stuff. And your CEO and cfo, I'm sorry, but they probably don't care there. We do. We think that's amazing. And so we get to have fun with it because everybody here finds the same nerdy stuff really, really fun.

What's nice is when you are having fun with it, you're bringing that real strong, positive energy into the workforce, right into your work environment. At the end of the day, like, CEO doesn't stand for Chief Executive Officer, it's the Chief Energizing Officer. But all of us in operations roles, we need to bring that positive energy too. So if we're having fun with it, if we're enjoying the community, we infuse our energy back into the day to day, which makes us better, better managers, better operations people as well.

A student came into my coaching program literally today asking, I am always being called out as being the pessimist. I'm always the most negative person on my team because I'm always looking at the risk. I'm always saying no to the idea. I'm always like the stick in the mud asking, how are we actually going to do this? Instead of just like visionary up the next thing. The lived experience of an operator day to day is that maybe you don't feel super well understood. And it feels like you're always the bad guy and you're always having to shut things down or move things slower. And so to offer a place that totally flips that on its head says, why is operations actually a source of absolute joy and play and fun is frankly necessary because nobody wants to show up every single day and feel like they are the negative.

Nancy, here's a tip for everybody as well. Because in the operations role, we have to be the person that has the who, what, when, where, why and how answers or we have to ask all those questions. So the way I've always approached it is I say, I love that. Can I just ask a couple of questions to understand it more Or I Love that idea. Let me just ask a few more questions so I can catch up with you. Because then we can ask all the questions and the person who had the idea isn't feeling like we're debating them, because we're not debating, we're trying to understand. The other part is to say not now versus no. The idea could be a good idea whose time might not be this week. So let's park it and let's revisit it next month or next quarter. And then next quarter you can look at all the random ideas, all the cool projects, and it can be green light, yellow light, red light. Right, Green light. Let's do it now, this quarter. We'll put it in the project map. Yellow light means cool, but not yet. And red is. Well, it used to be a good idea. Now we kill it. Don't stop the idea in its tracks. Let it live for a little bit. Let's let it kind of percolate for a little bit, and then let's revisit it when its time might have come. Last one before we wrap is cheer others on. That's one of our big core values as well.

And I think we've been really speaking to this one for this entire episode, which is it's your people, it's operators cheering other operators, celebrating other operators, being nerdy with other operators and getting to really celebrate this weird, quirky skill set that all of us somehow have that we don't even really understand that well. But it's what we love and it's what we're passionate about, and it's what we get to be a source of, like, unilateral celebration for each other in that quirky, weird nerdiness.

And you're not showing up in a group filled with entrepreneurs and CEOs, where you feel like you can't talk or can't share and you're not going to a marketing meetup or you're not going to a group of key executives who are in all kinds of different roles. Right? It's your community. It's there for you. You last thing. I think we're also in a stage right now of a business environment where in a bit of an economic downturn or a bit of economic uncertainty, we've gone through a market crash correction. People are worried about interest rates going up. What does this recession time that we're in mean for operations? What are you seeing right now?

I think that history shows that in any recession, all it does is widen the gap between, quote, unquote, like, winners and Losers, right? The people who are able to take all of the chaos and uncertainty and instability and figure out how to turn it to their advantage, double down and use it to slingshot their forward momentum and success. And the people who are just buried by it, overwhelmed by it, made too afraid by it, that they paralyze and they're unable to move. The OP spot, like resources like this are a place to learn how to be in the first group. You have to be talking about these things. You can't bury your head in the sand that we're in a recession, let's own that. Let's get in front of that. Let's talk about how we can flip that to our advantage and how can we ride the new wave of tools and technology and ideas to help slingshot ourselves and our companies forward. Because otherwise you're losing the next year to 2. While this thing plays itself out, you're losing momentum, you're stalling yourself out, and you are being reactive to this thing that is happening as opposed to proactively getting in front of it and using it to your advantage.

The reality is, in every economic environment, there's companies and people out there that are going to do well, or there's companies and people that are not. And you're right that if you get frozen because you're sitting reading the news all day and worried, then you're going to freeze. You're not going to do anything. It's absolutely the best time to get involved in the OP spot. If you're a CEO, get your people involved. If you're a coo, get your operations people involved. Or if you're in operations roles, tell your friends, get involved for sure. We've also got some pretty nice founders pricing involved right now for the next few months. I know this episode will live on for years, but I'll timestamp it as coming out in August of 2023. I would guess until the end of September. We've got a founder's price of only $249. It's a rounding error to get involved in the OP spot. So we'll see you inside the community. John, any founding words or final words from you?

Just said, I can't wait to see you in there and I can't wait to cheer you on.

On paint your toenails. Bye, everybody.

Bye.

I would not rush any type of communication interaction with key employees. I've learned to take time in the old days. Ready, fire.

Aim.

Ready, fire. Aim. One thing to the next, to the next. What happens with that is you lose connectivity and you don't establish relationships.