How to Build Business Operations to Live Your Dream Life

If you're there with your team and you're all struggling, the best way to replicate the worst kinds of struggle is going to be in a physical capacity. If you're burning yourself into the ground when you hit that wall, since you're the leader, your team is going to suffer. Your team's going to hit that wall too. We have egos, we think we're the best. But eventually you're running a business and the people that are on the front lines doing the thing, they're better at it than you. They spend more time there.

Hire people that are smarter than you all day long because they're going to take you so much further than you can go. Welcome back to another episode of Integrator Secrets. I'm here with Joey Y Johan and one of the topics that I've just been getting asked more and more about that I figured we'd dive into here together is like what is the team structure look like for a successful high ticket coaching program?

Think about like the structure of a high ticket coaching program. It's really like any business is you have departments and then you fill the holes in those individual departments at a bare bones. It's delineating figuring out what are the departments. For us, the structure that we use is marketing, sales and fulfillment, fulfillment operations. I think you guys do it like this as well, Andre. That kind of gets lumped into one product and, and the team on the back end, you go into those individual departments and you figure out what you're doing in each of those. So you think of marketing, right. Traffic generation and traffic conversion. Right. There's different individual departments, individual things going on. Sales, you have appointment setting, but you also have closing on the back end. You have actual fulfillment, but you also have things like finance, things that not a lot of people talk about, especially in this space. So you have to break it down in individual departments and then determine the needs. And that's the structural part of the equation there.

Yeah, exactly. I always break it down the same way. Joey is like you have marketing, which is to generate. Generate traffic. You have sales, which is to convert the traffic and then you have fulfillment which is to deliver on the promise you made through that process. And if you break it down that way, it keeps things really simple and it allows you to focus in on whatever your skill set and expertise is like. For me we have a business partner that's really good at marketing, so he focuses on that. We have someone that's really good at sales, so he manages the sales team. I'm really good at the fulfillment and back end side of things. So that's where I spend most of my time. And I feel like when everyone is operating in, if you call it, you know, like their zone of genius, that's what helps to drive the business forward the most and establish a culture that is very, like, positive. Like, people love to show up and work every single day because they're doing things that they're enjoying and also really good at. One of the questions though is like, as you have all these different departments, a lot of the guys that work with Client Ascension and also with you guys at Default Kings, they're remote. So how do you manage the communication between each department and between each team member when working remote?

The mindset I always try to take is I try to replicate brick and mortar in a remote setting as much as possible. My experience in the fitness world is I started as an in person personal trainer. So I looked at what we were doing in a gym setting and I was like, how do we replicate this online? So we had a regular team meeting. We had regular daily things that we did together as all the trainers in the gym. So it's like, how do I replicate this in an online setting? I was listening to your guys podcast with Tai Lopez and he's talking about that, like, efficiency frontier. Like, you can go too far in one direction. The knee jerk is meet with your team more, but don't meet with your team so much that you push past the point of too much and then you're actually tanking productivity as the unit of the business as a whole. But there's a sweet spot in there. And the sweet spot that I found was probably one to two team meetings a week, depending on the size of your team. And the bigger that your team gets, the more you probably need to coordinate with them, which I think probably 95% of listeners here are still in that range of like sub 10 employees. If you're meeting one to two times a week, that's probably gonna be plenty to make sure things are coordinated while also making sure that the culture is good and everybody's bought in.

And there's conversation happening all throughout the week as well, through Slack. I love that you said that as well, because the knee jerk reaction is to say, just meet more with your team. And then the question becomes like, what do we talk about? Because we run the things to talk about and it's just not productive anymore. And I feel like that's where a lot of people find themselves. As you start to develop each department of the business, you can actually start to meet once or twice within each of those departments instead of overall as a team. Because then it's a lot more specific, it's a lot more focused and it's a lot more aligned. Instead of putting all the sales guys with all the film accounts with all the marketing guys once or twice a week, you just put all the sales guys together twice a week and all the fulfillment guys twice a week and all the marketing guys twice a week. And then you bring them all together for like a town hall, once a month, once a quarter type of team update. And that cadence has worked really well for us. And then how would you say you mix in like one on ones from full team?

When we were around 10 guys, we did once a month for a while and we did twice a month for a while. And very quickly after one quarter of twice a month, we were like, that's probably too much. If you think about business as a boat, you have this boat and you have this whole crew. The bigger that the crew gets, the bigger the boat gets, the slower the shifts are going to happen. Right. If I'm steering a big cruise liner, I make a little tweak and it's going to take a long time to change directions. If I'm driving a little jet ski, it's fast. Boom, quick move around. The bigger the the team got. We really didn't have to meet with the whole entire unit that frequently because changes are happening slowly. When we were meeting twice a month, it was just too much going on. So I like what you said is break it into the units. So like our sales team meets twice a week, our fulfillment team meets twice a week. And that's how we did it. And in a one on one capacity, I think it comes down to the layer of leadership that you're speaking with the front line, the doers, if you're meeting with them, if you're still in that managerial level, you understand the layers of leadership where you're just one rung above the front line. I'm meeting with doers once a week in the managerial capacity. But once you go another ring up where you now have managers managing the doers. I'm meeting with the managers once a week, not the doers once a week. I'll meet with the doers once a month and make sure they're doing good and make sure I'm still communicating with the frontline people. But I don't need to communicate with the front line people as much as my managers need to communicate with the frontline people. Once I'm in that more director tier. So I think it totally depends on the layer of leadership that you're in when it comes to one on ones with your team.

And I think like a helpful exercise to start to map this out is literally just doing a company tree that shows like, what are the different hierarchies, what are the different categories, who's in charge of who, who's managing what. Because then you can trickle it down and assign like team department meetings. One on one meetings just become so much more efficient that way. Like your meeting structure. It's the same philosophy we have here at Client Ascension.

Well, that's a mistake I made too, is like once we hired our first manager, I was trying to meet still with the manager once a week and all of the front lines he's managing, you know, three, four frontline guys. So I'm trying to set up one on ones with everybody on the entire team every week. I know it. I have five, six meetings a week on my calendar, one on ones. And I quickly realized I'm like, this is too much. This is not efficient. The entire point of having a manager is for those frontline people to have somebody to go to, somebody to manage them. That's the entire reason he's there. So you should be okay with relinquishing that control and delegating that to him.

It's always hard to let go of like certain things like that you're meeting with a team member every single week and then all of a sudden like that just ends. I think that's part of it. But also like at your guys event a couple months ago in Nashville, that was one of the things that I put there is like things I was struggling with is how do I help more students when my time and energy is limited. Your guys recommendation was just to pour into my team members so that they can pour into other team members. So it's exactly what you're talking about there. It's like a waterfall. That's why I think the team tree or whatever is a super helpful exercise because it just visualizes you pouring into one person that then pours into three other people who then pour into more people. And that's like exactly the strategy to, to take. And your meetings don't always have to be about specifically the work they're doing. So like how do you even run these meetings? Like one of our meetings is a book club and I basically pick a book that's related to the job and the responsibilities and it's just going to spark ideas on how we can improve what we're doing in those areas. And so we're doing a book club and we meet once a week. And in this book specifically it talks about like pouring into your team members so that they can pour into your customers. In this sense, it's a restaurant. It's managers pouring into people that then go out and talk to their customers and treat their customers or wait on them. So I just think it's cool to see how it like shows up in other businesses as well. It's just classic like law of business, if you will completely.

And anybody that's been in the corporate world and works like a corporate style job is meetings are the worst thing ever. Everybody hates meetings. So you have to understand as a business owner that your team is probably not getting all ooey gooey and excited when they see a meeting on their calendar. They're probably like, ah, at least that's how I felt in my corporate experience. And so when you have intentionality around each of them that makes it a little more enjoyable. They look a little more forward to those meetings. And a strategy that I was employing for a while was if we'd have two meetings a week, one would be pure strategy and catching up. It'd be like, Monday, how did last week go? What are we trying to do this week? And then say we met again on Thursday or Friday. That meeting would be specifically tailored to training. So that was a little more fun because everybody knew Monday, it's more updates, Talk, connect. How did the week go? What are we doing this coming week? And then Thursday, Friday meeting, that second meeting of the week, it would be more direct improvement and role play and brainstorming and things like that. So you can have recurring trainings. And a lot of people are scared to do that because it takes time. But ultimately I think one of the best things you can do is constantly be training your team and constantly be sharpening. And we see this mostly in sales departments. When a sales team has constant training and they're constantly getting better and better, your close rate will be higher. But it still applies to things like client success. If my client success team is constantly role playing sticky customer service situations, they're going to get really good at handling them. So if my coaches are constantly learning more about nutrition, more about training, more about how to be more efficient with these workouts and how to cook and things like that, the clients are going to constantly be getting better service from those coaches. So I always think it's worth to have some sort of recurring meeting that is Dedicated to just training. How often you do that, it's going to depend on your company. But at the peak I had one a week on the calendar for training. Training, training, training.

That's something that I'm even thinking to go back and implement because I was. One of the things I was going to ask you about is like in the onboarding, like when you hire someone, a big part of hiring someone is first getting them integrated into your company culture. But another big piece is the training for the role itself and then it kind of drops off. So like the ongoing training, we kind of do it through book club, we do it through role playing and just like throwing them into the fire and having them figure it out and us giving them feedback on it or doing like call reviews. Right. If our student success coaches are hopping on an onboarding call or a one on one call students, I'll have them send it over and I'll, you know, watch it through and give them feedback just like on a sales call, like we'll do with our sales guys. But like what are you doing for ongoing training? You already mentioned a couple of things in there. Is there anything else that was like game changer for you guys and training your team?

I've always thought the best training that you can do is role play. Always. Because it's real situations. Right. It's like the same idea as if you take a guy that reads 10 sales books and you take another guy that makes a hundred cold calls and then you put them on a closing call. The guy that's going to perform better is going to be the guy that actually got thrown into the fire, not the guy that just sat there and read sales books. Guaranteed. It's the same thing on client success or any kind of role. Put them into the fire or try to replicate the fire as much as you can. And I think you were mentioning too as well in the onboard, of course there's going to be a large sum of training in the onboarding process. Right. If you have like a two week onboard process, you might talk to that person five to ten times within that two weeks. But then after that when they get into the flow, maybe you meet with them once a week. It slows down after the onboard and so it's okay to front load a lot of training. Yeah. I think where people go wrong is when they completely cut it out after the onboard.

You don't have to do as much of it, like you said, as you do in the beginning, but you want to have the consistency layer there. It's Even helpful for you as a manager because things are always changing. You're always learning and improving. And so if that skill set and development, if your own personal development is not being fed into the rest of your team, then you're missing out. One of the things I kind of want to veer into is more of like the in person stuff, right? So as you manage a remote team, it's all, you know, slack, zoom, this sort of stuff. But then you have these unique opportunities to bring team members and students in the program as well together for events and retreats. Before this, you were telling me how you guys are all getting ready to do like an ironman. I know you guys also did. I think it was like a Spartan race or something as well already this year. So talk about, like doing physical challenges in person with your team members and how that's helped create like a closer time with your team.

I'm glad that you specifically said physical challenges. If you think about what a physical competition is in nature, it's a struggle together. So if you're there with your team and you're all struggling, the best way to replicate the worst kinds of struggle is going to be in a physical capacity. Like that is the best way to do it. And you know this too, because you were in Nashville with us, going up those stairs, giving guys piggyback rides and doing all kinds of crazy. And it was hard. And that's the best way to replicate that and in those hard situations is when you actually build those bonds. This is an extreme example, but it's always a good example to come back to. And I always pull when I'm talking about physical competition, but when people go to war, it's a physical struggle. It's a mental struggle too, of course, but they become so close because they struggled so deeply together. If we can replicate, in a less extreme sense, going to war by having physical competitions and doing off sites with our team that push each other to the brink of failure, that push each other to the brink of quitting. That's going to build a massive bond with your team. We've only done one off site so far where we did a Spartan race together. But dude, it was amazing.

Yeah, it's such a cool aspect because it is a fitness program too. So even though fitness in general, physical challenges in general are. Are great for team building, it also feeds into like what you're trying to teach and get your students to do. So you're leading by going first and doing exactly what you're teaching them to do.

And if you can't do it in a physical capacity for whatever reason or you don't want to find something hard that you can go do together. This is why you see a lot of like corporate team building events. It's a struggle, you're solving some sort of problem together. That's generally the premise of large corporate leadership training. They get everybody together and you go and you solve a problem as a team. And that's what team building is.

You're getting ready now. I think you said tonight you're leaving to go on 10 day fishing trip with your dad and your grandpa, which is super wholesome. I love that for you. The question here is like, how do you take time off as a leader, as a manager in a business and how do you prepare the team? Because I feel like a big reason why you're able to do this confidently, knowing that the business is not going to, you know, fall off the grid while you're gone, is because you've built a really good team. So how do you kind of rally the troops and get them ready for you being gone for an extended period of time?

Forget who I was talking to about this. I was on somebody's livestream and I was like in the chat talking to about it. He's another ops guy. Anyways, I asked him this basically exact question of hey bro, how do you balance just taking a rest? And the answer he gave me is you are a liability for your team. If you're not at full capacity, if you're burning yourself into the ground, working, working, working, working. When you hit that wall, since you're the leader, your team is going to suffer, your team's going to hit that wall too. So you have to be aware of yourself and know when you need to take that time away. That way you can take that time off, come back, be the best version of yourself for your team. So I think it's important as a leader to do that because if you're starting your own business and you're, it's very attractive to just work yourself into the ground. And I've worked myself to the point of getting sick. But what happens if you do that now? You're out for what, one, two, three days. Again, you're a liability for your team if you're not at full capacity. It's super cliche. You can't fill other people's cups unless your cup is full. It's super cliche, but it's true. I have projects done ahead of time and any projects that aren't done, I've kicked to the team. I've communicated with everybody. I've rescheduled meetings. I plan to hit communicate with your team and I promise it'll be okay. If it's not going to be okay if you're gone for a week, then you have much bigger fish to fry. That's the other reality of that situation too.

Yeah, I remember reading one of Tim Ferriss books and he was talking about one of his favorite strategies in business is to just take a two week vacation every year. Completely off the grid, completely disconnect with his team. When he'd come back, he'd look to see where his business failed and where it suffered. So he knowed exactly where to fix it. Sometimes like you get stuck in your business, you're not really sure where the bottlenecks are or what problems you need to solve. And so he, he just completely stepped away, let his team kind of take the reins. And then when he'd come back and the team is like, oh, like this completely broke or this didn't work or this group of customers are pissed off because of this problem, he knew the exact areas he needed to focus. It's a bold, risky move, but like it'll reveal to you where you need to sharpen up. And I love what you said about like you as a leader need to make sure you're at full capacity in terms of like mental energy and bandwidth. It's just like in sports, our coach in basketball always used to say like, don't try to be the hero. Like if you're injured, don't try to play through it because if you're playing, playing injured, you're going to have an effect on the rest of the guys out there that are playing in full health.

So it's an ego thing, right? As business owners we have egos. We think we're the best at everything. But eventually what you're doing is you're running a business and the people that are on the front lines doing the thing are more qualified now to coach these clients because they spend 40 hours a week just coaching clients. They're better at it than you. They spend more time there. And that's the reality for a lot of cases and especially when you get into hiring. And I know that kind of gets in the weeds but like hiring people with previous experiences at other companies that are doing similar things to you. If you're hiring a role or you're struggling in a certain department of your business, a lot of times the answer might just be you're not very good at this. And you should probably hire somebody to do it that's better at it than you. So a lot of it's an ego thing and you have to have a bit of an ego death there as a business owner to be able to just give the keys to somebody else, which is hard because your business is your baby. When you're an entrepreneur, hire people that.

Are smarter than you all day long because they're going to take you so much further than you can go. The Iron man quote we'll end it with, he says faster alone, own further together. And so it's so true. Like you can move fast if you're just by yourself because you don't have to go through loopholes and the decision making tree. But if you're with a team and you're moving as a unit, you'll just go way further.

Anyways, something I want to open up to the viewers as well is like our DMs are open socials are first name last name on every platform. So at joeyoheim, Joey Yoc Hheim mostly so we can acquire new business of course, but it's also open to you guys to come and ask questions. So I've been doing this a lot of my YouTube videos as well. It's just opening the door for people to man message us on Twitter, message us on Instagram, send these nuanced specific questions to us. That's the entire purpose for us getting on here and having these conversations is to provide that to you guys.

Exactly. I always say this, but like I don't like having closed door conversations. Like I like opening it up and talking in front of a group and masterminding. Essence of a mastermind is to get a bunch of people together, not just one or two. The links are always in the description of this video. I'm on Twitter mostly. Andre Hagel Jr. We also have client ascension.com and the fault hangs.com for your program gram as well. For all those out there that want to funnel hackers, thank you you all. Next time.