How to Build Systems So Good… Your Business Runs Itself

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Or let's do a little research. Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart Most people get run by their businesses. They don't run their business. No matter where you are, you are probably one system away from a totally different business. Save yourself time, energy, money, stress. That that's systems. Am I doing the things that will actually drive the business forward? If you have the big core goals and metrics set in your business, all the little pebbles don't really matter. And if you do that, you have a system that actually makes you money, not one that just makes you feel good. Hi, I'm Cody Sanchez and welcome back to the Big Deal podcast. Today, here's the truth. Most people get run by their businesses. They don't run their business. So if you want to follow the advice of Most people on YouTube or online about building systems within your business and here's the thing, you're going to either lose days, weeks or months and money and maybe like your mind. So instead I got tired of listening to all that and I'm going to give you my systems that you can use to start systematizing your business inside of one hour and I'll teach it all to you in less than 20 minutes. Now I know this because I run a portfolio of businesses and I've been in private equity for 15 plus years. Private equity is where we run the most profitable systems oriented businesses that exist. Lots of people can say they're organized and have systems, but do systems make them money? So I can promise you one thing. If you implement systems in your business, the only regret you will have is waiting as long as you did to do it. I think it is the single biggest thing we teach to thousands of entrepreneurs every single year that changes their business outcome. So it's not a vice, it's your system. Let's first talk before I tell you how to do it, let's talk about how most people do it. Wrong. Number one, they focus on creating a process map for individual things they do inside of their business. They do what I call start small and then lose all. It's like saying I want to build the Sistine Chapel. And then you go, the first thing I'm going to do is pick out which candles I want inside of the building. Way too tiny. If you did that and reverse engineered from candles all the way to the foundation, you'd never get the thing done. You got to start with the big parts first or what we call your higher level vision. Then two they obsess on. Perfect and super detail oriented so every single person that they give their systems to can understand it, recreate it and then the real problem, they make themselves do all the work as opposed to their team doing the work. So what are we going to do instead? We're going to follow my process explicitly and we're going to make it so easy that your V1 can have a VA, a virtual assistant. Do it. Okay. So at my company we think you need five things to run a successful company. We call this your clarity, certainty, roadmap. And the five things are you need a vision to see further. It's like your windshield clean windshield wipers. We need your dashboard to go faster. That's like speed limit, gas gauge, et cetera. We need goals to go further. That's your GPS to see where you want to get to and at what time. We need communication so that you can have a smoother ride along the way. That's how you follow the map. It gives alerts, tells you where police cars are. And then we need people to flow the business together so you're not doing it by yourself. The people being maybe the people who work on your car and keep it up and running. The music in the stereo. Now I call when we put all five of these together, our scaling operating system. And we think that if you have this, this GPS for your business then you will go further. So the GPS starts with game plan. We help you set up your vision, what we call your game plan for your company, your life and your team. If you don't have a destination set harder to get there then the P stands for people. We help you surround yourself with operators, deal scouts, capital partners and advisors who've actually bought and scaled businesses, not just talked about it. And then we help you build your team to your plan then system. This is where you integrate. How do we from let's say hire to continue to train to sell. How do you implement an SOP for everything? And we steal ours from 15 years of operating businesses. And so I want to walk you through A couple of things that we think about in this regard. So number one, I want to talk to you guys about peak systems. How do you decide if a system is good or bad? Well, we spell peak like this. P, E, I, C. And what it means is that you need proven, battle tested frameworks. So those are things that have existed for a long time. You need explicit processes. That means like I like a cup of coffee that is black with, with a teaspoon of coconut oil in it and I like it warmed up in the microwaves for a minute and 30 seconds as opposed to I'd like a coffee. We need implementation. So if I want to same coffee every single time for my team, how do I make sure that they know that that's how I like my coffee? Well, you have a system, then you have a checkpoint, then you have continual communication. We'll talk about that. And then number four, maybe you realize eventually you want a little cinnamon in this bad boy and it's better if you have cinnamon in it. And so what's your continuous improvement plan? How often do you check in on your systems to update them? So I think there are seven in every business that you need to add your systems to. You need to have a vision, you need to have models, you need to have tempo, you need to have people, you need to have ops, you need to have marketing and sales and finance. So today I want to talk to you just about the number one system that is your foundation. Not the candles on the Sistine Chapel, but the foundation. It starts with your vision. I believe your revenue is a reflection of your vision dashboard. So if you don't have a 1:3, 10 year vision dashboard, then your business will not know where to go. And let me show you an example of ours. This one's actually live. You can see me scrolling through it as we go. Every single business that I run, and these are many businesses now, starts out with a vision plan. Let's walk through what's in them. It starts with I am a. This is your company motto. So here for us at contrarian thinking. It tells me who, who is a contrarian? Who is the type of person that's going to come and work for me? And I have a little saying like I am a contrari. I ask for no one's money. I expect no one's praise. I've never walked the easy paths. I don't want cubicles and small lives. I'm a builder. I am an owner. I do not do what I am told. I do what is required. These are the type of crazy people I'm looking for at my company. Next you're going to have your North Star metrics. I believe every single business needs a left and a right North Star or what I call a quantitative and a qualitative North Star. I'll talk about those. So at contrarian thinking, our two north stars are revenue and followers. We want to grow our audience base and we want to grow our revenue. Now think about it this way. If you only had one North Star and that was revenue, well I could really increase the revenue of this business if I non stop was spamming everybody all the time to buy our products. But what would happen? My audience would go way down because people would get annoyed. So when I have revenue but I have a collar around it like a dog, that is followers, well I can't just totally kill revenue because I'll kill my followers. I need to balance out the two. The next is I want to have a five and ten year target. So when you're bringing on new hires in your business, you need to tell them not where you're at today. Where are you going? It's the number one question I get asked by our new hires is not what are we doing today but why am I choosing to come with you today? So my life is better in 1, 3, 5 years, am I going to make more money? Am I going to be happier? Am I going to like the team? Then I want you to talk about your end goal. Like when will you say as a company man, we've made it for us here at Contrarian thinking there's a couple big things we have to create. 1 million financially free small business owners. I want that on my tombstone. I want to be able to see a face of every single person. We have helped create so much wealth that it changed the trajectory of their family. That's like my egotistical goal. And then second, I want this business to be a multi billion dollar media and investment firm. I want it to be like the Bloomberg plus CNBC plus like the trusted investment firm of our generation. Then you gotta have your personal vision. You can see that right here. Your personal vision is how you make sure that you don't hate your business. Have you ever accidentally built something that you really hated? Like you know, maybe you set up a business and all of a sudden you realize you have a job that you wouldn't even take if somebody offered it to you. This personal vision is where you lay out that so it tells you what success looks like for you. For me, I don't like remote businesses. I really like running a business in person. I think that, like, intensity of team is so much cooler than endless zoom meetings. So for me, my vision was in person in a big office. You can see some of it behind us, building with a bunch of people that I actually fucking like and that I don't have to have one person at my company I don't like. That was really important for me.

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The next, you're going to have your values. So what does your company stand for? At contrarian thinking, we have 13 core values. Why 13? Because I find when you work harder tends to make you luckier. So we're making our own luck over here. Then we have a motto. What do we live by? This. And ours is dominium, which is the Latin word for ownership. We believe that people should be owners of their life and decisions. Purpose. What are we doing here? We're helping more people become financially free. What's your purpose? And then you saw the portion about I am a contrarian. Now, finally in here, we get to our three part strategy and framework. Now, this part's really important, you guys. It'll take a lot of time. When we do our workshops, I think what we spend more time on anything is our avatars. So. So who are you selling to and your flywheel, what is your unfair advantage? You can see ours here. Why do I get on the Internet and do YouTube videos? You know, like, sometimes people be like, cody, if you're really so rich and you own all these businesses, why are you on YouTube? And it's a totally fair question, actually. Because a lot of people, like, don't do the thing they say they do and they try to make all their money on the Internet and, like, there's nothing wrong with that, I think if you're making money and helping people, all good. Do you? But the reason that I get on the Internet and do all of this is cause it's part of our business model. If I come on the Internet and help other people win, one, that is core to my business. My business's goal is I want to create 1 million financially free people. That's the entire reason this whole thing exists. So that's that. But two, if I help a bunch of people buy businesses, guess what they do? They come to me for investment in those businesses. That's a huge win. When they come to me in my scaling workshops, that means that they already have businesses that they need more money to that maybe I can invest in. And then also, I'm talking about this all the time. So we get investors. We have Contrarian Thinking Capital, our venture capital firm, where we let some large and institutional investors come in and invest alongside us. So from the content, I get deal flow, I get investors, and I get to fulfill our mission. That's our flywheel. Then we get into our avatars. This is really, really important. We could do a whole video on this. Let me know if you guys want a video on avatars. Just drop it in the comments or write it in the reviews wherever you're listening to this platform. But your avatar is the difference between you serving somebody that makes you no money and you don't like, or you serving somebody that gives you so much money it almost makes you uncomfortable. And if you outline your avatar correctly, it should be the latter and not the. We helped one of our members, for instance, in a landscaping business. He had a residential landscaping business that was like 80% of his revenue was houses, right? And he had 20% of his revenue that was commercial. So it would be like coming to my office and cleaning out the landscaping and cleaning out the grass and trimming it and watering the trees and plants and planting, et cetera. This commercial one was only 20% of his revenue. So he was going to get rid of it, focus on the 80%, narrow down. That's what people tell you to do on the Internet, right? Thing is that commercial business had like double the profit margin and they were way stickier. They stayed with him forever so he could spend more on getting more commercial clients. He ended up flipping his entire business. That avatar ended up getting him to his first 10 figures. I'm sorry, not 10 figures. That'd be sweet. His first eight figures in revenue. His first $10 million. And so nailing your avatar is really important. That goes into your vision plan, then we get into your product pillars. What do you sell? So here, if we're trying to help more people become financially free, do you know what we sell? Well, we sell our community. People joining the community grow. We sell our investment vehicles. People taking money from us. We sell our books. You've seen Main Street Millionaire and you want them all in one place like this on your vision because you don't ever want your team to guess. Then you get down below it and it's just a breakout of your products in one paragraph. Can you really clearly iterate what you sell? The most important part though is this. This is your one year and quarterly vision. If you don't run your company according to a one year and quarterly vision, I would assume that your company is running you. So in your one year vision, it's like, all right, what is your one sentence aspirational plan? Ours here is to be the most trusted and followed business name in the world. That is our goal. That's what we want to do. Now we also have our North Stars, remember revenue followers. And then we have the projects that we think each of our teams need to do in order to accomplish them. Here's why this is so important. When you break this down by year and a quarter, do you guys ever feel like things creep on your to do list? Like, you know, at one point you're like, ah, I have like three things I need to do today, this week, this month, this quarter. All of a sudden you've got 50. And so what do we end up doing as humans? Well, we have something in our reptilian brain that likes to check off small to dos. And so you can waste your life through busyness. And what the quarterly plan allows you to do is only focus on the projects that are core. And you ask yourself if the team is actually following through on that. So let me show you what this looks like. If I take my annual plan plus my quarterly plan and break it down in communication over the course of the year, it looks like this. I have weekly check ins with the team. Those weekly check ins take about two hours per week. Then I've got monthly reviews. That's where we look at how are we doing on those quarterly goals. And we just pull it up every single time. Then we've got quarterly sprints where we say, all right, we're about 30 days for the quarter. What's happening next, next? And then one year goals. That takes about four to eight hours for the quarter and anywhere from eight to 12 hours for the year to plan out what you're gonna do for the following year. And if you do this and you do it right, then you start to have a system like this. Look at what our weekly goals look like. Every single person on the team has weekly tasks that are tied to their project. And it also says when they're due. And then you can do what's called scorecard based leadership. So you can have a scorecard that says red, yellow, green. Are we on target to hit our metrics? This is really important. Lots of people say they do it, but they don't actually do it. And so I like a quarterly scorecard that looks like this. North Stars company goals. And then I want to be able to see every single person's project status, whether they're on track or not. I want to see their completion rate. Like, whoops, Mike, zero percent completed. Not good. I want to see who's in charge of it. That's the dri, the directly responsible individual. And then I want to see what status they're at. Like, I'm working on it. I haven't started it. I'm done with this. And if you can do this across your entire business, then you end up being able to see in each division who are your highest performers or for you and yourself, am I doing the things that will actually drive the business forward? And if you do that, you have a system that actually makes you money, not one that just makes you feel good. Forget about the fucking candles and focus on the fact that if you have your big deals done, if you have the big core goals and metrics set in your business and you hit those, all the little pebbles don't really matter. All right, guys, if you like this first operating system video, let me know. I think this will change your business forever if you implement it. And if you guys need help with this, this is what we do. We have quarterly scaling workshops where we teach you how to implement this plan and put it in your business. We have books on the subject. We have a team that'll take a consulting call with you to see if we can help you. So if any of that is of interest, you can click the link. Talk to my team. But just know this, no matter where you are, you are probably one who we might be that who for you and one system away from a totally different business. Because a system stands for save yourself, stress, time, energy, money. All right, see you next week.