How To Scale A Business - Framework

Hey. Today I'm joined with a good friend of mine and colleague, Dr. David Dugan. And I got to know him through some connections, through the key person of influence community and we just clicked. I always seem to have really good connections with people who've been in the Army. Now, I don't know exactly what it is because I've never been in the army, but I think it's because we have systems and processes. It's really just baked into the way that they do things. And our guest today, he started in the Australian Navy, worked his way up to Commander and ended up working with some of the Navy's top decision makers to help them remove barriers to success and help them to really dominate in their leadership positions. Since leaving the army though, he's applied of what a lot of what he's learned through the coaching and built up a company called Abundance Global that's just really been growing like wildfire. He's coached hundreds of business owners and he's got a really cool statistic that the average client that works with him has received a 253% year on year net profit increase in their business. And that's something that's been running for six years in a row. It's no surprise why he's growing so strongly. He even caught the attention of the Australian Business Telstra Business Awards with his company getting nominated twice as a finalist. So his approach, it's very strategic, it's quite innovative and very systemized. And today we're actually going to get him to share the way that he thinks about business in regards to it being a system and what are the subsystems that you need to be aware of to really make sure that your, your business as a system runs smoothly. So I'm really excited for this session here today. Without further ado, we'll welcome Dr. David Dugan.

Hey, g' day Dave. Good to connect with you today. Good to connect with all the moduly fans and I'm big, massive fan of you, not only in this business but in your private previous business or businesses. There's just the way you're able to scale them and have it so you can leverage you and your time and have your team feel a lot more fulfilled. I think because they've got more clarity and that's a big thing for me around why we build systems. And today we're going to go through some pretty cool stuff that was really around helping business owners to get the clarity around what are the right systems for them at the right time. And using our methodology yes, the lot of principles have definitely come from the military. 100%, 18 years in the military, serving in the Navy, all that stuff has been a big part of it. But also, as you said, we've worked now work with 2,100 businesses for over a decade helping them to achieve the goals. And it's a big reason why we actually won the Telstra Vista Business of the Year awards for Queensland in our category this year, which is a big sort of credit to the system we're building and why it works. Let's jump in. Hey, let's. One of the things when David asked me to talk to the team and talk to you around, it was to understand what are some of the things that are really important and how is it that you're able to achieve success. So I've got a little playbook, there'll be a download that you can jump in and do this. And what we believe, and we're big fans of here at Abundance Global is understanding context. Now the context that I'm going to give you today as we go through the master system, which is Six Engine Rooms principles, the big principle is making sure you're doing the right next step for you in your business. Now the truth is you may be in a different place in your business, you may be a different time. So everyone needs to do something different. So what I want to do is I want to give a piece of clarity around what I'm taking you through is for a particular type of business. And the reason I'm saying this is because a big part of what drives us is we're all about helping business owners creating intergenerational wealth. So this is like part of our master system. And to do that, one of the key parts around that is to ensure that you're creating a business that is a self managing business. So for us it's, it's gotta be self managing so that it doesn't require you as a key person to be the person who's doing all the work all the time. That's a highly risky business. So what I'll do is just take you through a really simple overview for people to work out where they should be or where they are right in the business. Now as we just talked about, David, when we looked at when we were in the awards for the Telstra Best of Business awards and going through and being in the judging, being judged and being grilled, what they found, which was an interesting stat, was and in the discussions in Australia particularly, although it does apply to most parts of the world that if you look at businesses in Australia particularly, they're only 0.2 of the businesses that are large businesses. And a large is classified as a business of over 200 people, 1.8% are between 20 and 199. That's classified as a medium sized business, which leaves 98% as micro or small businesses. As a little comparison, in the US they have seven times more as a percentage medium sized businesses. So we looked at these stats and said what can we do around it? What we, what we do in our balanced global is very good at helping people to build a scalable business to the medium sized level. That is absolutely our sweet spot. And what I'm going to take you through here is part of the reasons why that occurs so you people can get an understanding of well I don't need to grow a medium sized business, but at least I know what the pathway is. So if you look at most businesses, most of what we call unsustainable and what ends up happening is the business owner is bringing in a huge amount of work and often, if they look at their hourly rate, their team is often getting paid more than they do, which ends up that they end up running some sort of a charity of some sort. And it's a bit of a race for survival. And that's where a lot of businesses actually are sitting. And it's okay when you're in an early stage business that it can be like that. You got to put the hand crank in, you got to put the effort in. That's totally cool. The next part of that is to create a profitable business. Now what I'm going to go through as I'm doing this is we talk about the three currencies in the business. I'm going to be talking pretty fast here, but this is understanding, okay, what are the principles that you want to build your systems on? So one of them, one of the principles or the currencies that we have is money. So unsustainable moving in a profitable, is it starting to become more profitable now? You actually making money now? As it turns out that's actually not that difficult to do. You got there's a handful of levers, five of them in fact, that if you pull those levers you can make a business profitable. The only challenge with that is that you'll find that people are doing the business and really effectively. They're self employed. The best way that you know that is during the day they're doing all the work in the business and in the night they're Working on the business, what ends up happening, People end up becoming tired. This here is a key person. This is my dentist writing here. Key person dependent businesses. And what we see and why I think systemology and what you're doing, David, is so important is the shift to having a more stable business and a business that can be, when we look at this key person dependent businesses are highly risky. They up and down, someone gets crook the owner and all of a sudden you're low on cash. This line here is what we call the leverage line. And what you're taking people through, Dave, and what you do from in our language is helping people cross the leverage line. So we think of a profitable business and you go, okay, what's the next level beyond a profitable business? It now becomes a scalable business. And it's only scalable when you can remove the founder or the OIC and to IC of the business. And that there is focusing on time. The only way to free your time up is to put in the right systems at the right time for your business. When you do that now, you've truly created a business and there's a sense of freedom. The next stage, and for a lot of people, they'd be happy that this is great, this is awesome. The next stage out of this is a valuable business. And what we're saying here is really what we're looking at here is asset value. The value and the valuation. The business goes up. This now becomes the third currency. The first one is money, second one is time, third one is impact. Your impact to yourself and your team, the impact to the economic community you serve and then the wider community. The more you can make a bigger impact, the more sustainable the business is. And that's how one can create true wealth. So what I'm going to go through here is specifically how to cross across that leverage line. And the only way to cross across that leverage line is through systems and structure. Which is why Dave, you and I get on so, because we do like systems and structure. So I'll go through and do this system shop. Any questions on that, Dave? Anything you want to bring on that? Because there's some interesting reasons why we think in Australia and across the globe people don't cross that leverage line. But did you want to ask anything on that at all?

Look, that maps really well to we've got four stages of business systemisation and it's the same thing like we've identified where that leverage point comes from and where that key person dependency is. And that's definitely we the problem that we focus on is just that piece which is the systems piece, but there's actually so much more that fits around it. And I know that's an area that you know really well because I think the bit that we get incredibly well is capturing what's currently working, making it repeatable. And that almost becomes the baseline. There also becomes a point after you got your baseline and you've removed some of the key person dependency and you've got that repeatability that then you need to actually go to work on the systems. Kind of like first level is let's make sure that the systems work without that dependency. Next level is we go to work on those systems.

Yeah. Love it, Love it. Goal. And for you, what do you think holds up people that are in small businesses, smaller micro businesses, and prevents them for going across? What do you see some of the battles or the struggles or the mindset challenge that you're saying? Because I think that might be a good segue for what I'll do next.

Look, a big part of it is around time and money, thinking about the business owner. They obviously have limited time and where does it get allocated. And there's a lot of swapping of time for dollars as opposed to once you really start to cross that leverage line, you need to think about building up assets and you oftentimes don't see the immediate reward for an asset, which means the business owner tends to focus more on where they see the immediate reward, which is oftentimes the replacing time for money. And it's not understanding the that that really causes a lot of challenge.

Okay, I love it, I love it. I love it. Because that's exactly where, where I want to go through on this and to what you said there fits very well with what we see we call the scale dilemma. And why do people struggle with crossing that line or even though they put the best effort in there to do it? So there's a simple model for us to understand how this, now imagine this here is your being the listeners, the viewers, your current reality. And what I mean by that is let's specifically talk about sizes of team. And I'll just put all size 12 on here. It could be 2, it could be 22. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is, it is whatever your current reality is. But let's just say I shall ask you on this, David, if you look at businesses that you have owned or particularly people you work with, what do you think are some of the mindset challenges that come up that people say I want to grow, I want to get bigger, I want to scale. But then the idea of getting more team, there's a little bit of a subconscious or unconscious or sometimes can be conscious fear that gets in. What are some things that you've seen that people go, oh, I don't know about that because what are some of the things that come into mind for you around that?

Do you think people sometimes think that getting new team members on it's going to just create more work for them?

Oh, so true.

Realize that I'm already busy enough potentially with my existing team members. If I have to babysit and manage new team members, I don't even know if that's going to solve my problem.

So true. And often what we see is that there's more work and there's people doing everything. And then it's like it can feel like a bit of a circus. 100% agree. Here's some other things that we see. People say one is, I'm not sure because it could be a bit too expensive. And that is a bit concerned around the dollars. And what if money goes. Another thing is people feel like that they can't control it. So there's a sense of control that's lost. The alternative is then, okay, what if we go smaller? So what's. If you think of the people you work with and yourself, what would be a challenge or a mindset? Thing is, okay, here's we're at 22 or 12 or whatever the number is. What if we just save some money and what if we go, so what are some of the challenges that come up with doing that?

Do you think you do that and then you just introduce more key person dependency?

100%, the key person dependency goes straight up, which means the asset value of the business also goes down. What else do you think?

I think when that happens, like removing team members, depending on which functions and tasks start disappearing, like you start shrinking. And it's a classic thing. If you're not growing, you're shrinking. So then your marketing starts to shrink, which means you get less clients, which like the flow on of the business shrinks.

You nailed it. What ends up happening is that starts shrinking and the dollars go down. Or another way of saying that is they'll hit a glass ceiling. If they're not already there, they'll hit it much quicker. 100%, you're on it. And the other thing what happens is key person dependent. What we end up saying is people just get tired, they become tired operators. So what ends up happening? You're damned if you do get bigger, you're damned if you don't. And so this is the dilemma. And so what we're doing in the next thing I'll take you through is giving some structure around how people can work through this process in a way that can be done at a place that is right for them. And they can feel like they're not necessarily rushed or they want to go through quickly. They can. But the big part of this is the mindset that we take forward. Because what happens is there's a sense of individual brilliance. That is required to get a business off the ground. And given my, even my military background on this, there's a cement sense of command and control that actually is required, that is needed in the early stage of business. It is not only normal, but it is desired that this is something that you, that you do. Here's the trick though. The trick with it is if we take this thinking of individual brilliance and command and control into the future, what ends up happening is exactly this. It does become expensive. It does end up being more work and people can't control. If we take that mindset into the future, what we're going to go through in a second is something that can help them. Because you can spend a lot of time working on your mindset, which we think is great. Anyone, anytime we see anyone double down their mindset and their health, there'll be three to four months later, there'll be direct uptick in their business. So I'm going to say to everyone, keep on doing lots of effort in that area. Now having said that, what we also found is people can spend a lot of time doing that and not focus on things they need to do in the business. So what we do is we just talk about the business stuff as just do this and what we know. It works, it will work. It will help you to expand the business very quickly and your mindset will catch up. Is the, is one of our principles. So individual brilliance, what we do is move into team synergy. Now there's an exercise we'll do in a moment that is, is all around helping to get the initial phase of team synergy. The next part is going from command and control into leveraged leadership. And the six engine rooms that we're going to take you through are all around helping people to create a structure around how to do this. What we know is they do this. What ends up happening is instead of being key person dependent, they get to free their time. Instead of having this capped cash, they have uncapped dollars there's no glass ceiling. Because once they know the system, they then can go just keep on working the system. And it creates an exitable. Doesn't mean you have to exit. It means you actually create an exitable business. Does that make sense? What I just went through there, the.

Thinking and this is probably why our work tends to work so well together. Like it. This very much meshes with the model of the world that we teach and the way that we look at business as well. 100% spot on.

Good. So what I want to go through now is going through our master framework that we use. It is this is a simplified version and everything, every part of this, we have a six year roadmap that maps these in individual in great detail. And again, people may use slightly different words for this. And what I know is particularly anyone who's watching your work will already know this. There's a really big difference between what people know and what they do. So what I'm going to take everyone through is a pathway that anyone can follow. Particularly if you're someone who's a profitable business and you want to be going into across that leverage line or it's even a scale business, you want to get more valuable. What do you need to do to keep on cranking? What we've, what we've in our research doing this for over a decade and we get a profit, loss and balance sheet from all our members every month. This is based on real data of real things that are happening right now. What we found is there are six fundamental engine rooms in a business. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to take you through the core element of each of these and not just what they are, but the order. So their syntax on the way people do this is as important as what they are themselves. So there are what we see two particular phases in a business. There is a pioneering phase which is for all intensive purposes when we go through this is making sure that each of the engine rooms up and working now as a good guide to get each of these engine rooms up and working to the level that you're out of. The pioneering stage would be for most businesses, most of the times they would have to be in the seven figures to do that. Under seven figures, there's a very good chance that they have not got each of the engine rooms up to the place that they need to be. So the first part here we talk about is vision. That is the very first of the engine rooms. So this is understanding executive leadership. It's understanding how to do situational leadership. It's making sure what we call a grand vision, three, two, one year goals, specificity around that. Now we're big believers in setting targets and goals once you set it, also letting it go and letting the process of enjoying the process along the way. So we're not the big fans of sitting down every single two hours and looking at your goal, looking at goal, looking at a goal, looking at the targets. Like you said it, you've been intentional, your team's on it. And then we run a four month rhythm where we make sure that we're keeping people on, checking what that is, but then they just go head down, bum and they go for it. The second one is product innovation. Interesting enough even from more seasoned businesses. I'm surprised how little energy they put into this one here. What we mean in product innovation is that you've got a product that is what your client wants and that you haven't fallen in love with your product. You fall in love with your client. I'll say that again, you haven't fallen in love with your product. You'll fall in love with your client or your member or your customer. The reason we're saying that is because their needs are evolving all the time and particularly right now with technology. If a business right now in any business isn't looking at technology and what they're doing in their product, in next two to three years, they're probably not going to have a business. So for a lot of people, this is a wake up call. And when I do the next page on this, this could be a bit of an eye opener for a lot of people. But we've got to have a product that serves the client today and also is profitable and scalable. For you. The third engine room is lead generation. How can you have consistent leads that are coming in that you can have a predictable pipeline that allows you to hire your team, put the systems in place, buy the things you need for your business. Our lead generation marketing is another way of saying that we like these words better because they're more action orientated around marketing. No, what we're here is we're about generating leads so that we change the language on that. And there are some just fundamental things, like really simple things that people should have in place to even before it gets a place of scaling. Do they have a dedicated referral system? Do they have a partnership wagon wheel that's set up that is bringing leads in before they go into paid advertising? Then we have conversion and conversion. Out of all the Engine rooms. You can get every one of these engine rooms to a 10 out of 10, and you'll never scale the business unless you scale sales or scale conversion. It's the single engine room that is the biggest bottleneck that we see people in their ability to cross across their leverage line. Until you can scale sales, until you can, and the words we use on this is codify the conversion process, you'll never scale the business. What's really interesting in some of the people we work with or have worked with is when they've come to us, there'll be eight figures, they'll be super solid on their business, and they'll be ridiculously average, slash poor at five of these engine room. But they're an absolute legend in this one here, and yet they're able to still do it. So this is a highly important engine room. Next one here is customer success. Looking at the end of the day, you've made a promise, which is what happens in the legion, and particularly in the conversion step. You've made a promise and it's making sure you're fulfilling on the promise and you can surprise and delight so that a big part of this is you're getting ongoing work and ongoing referrals that comes off the back end. And then you've got the operations of the business. And the way we use operations, David, is not the delivery part of the business. This is effectively the machine that builds the machine. So this is the operations of the business. And so this is admin, this is finance, this is legal, this is for us, technology. These are the six engine room. Now, the founder's role, the OIC two I see of the organization is sitting in the middle. And their role is to be the advocate for the client. Their role is to make sure that we're delivering to the promise. And if we look at these in endurance, the leadership team, what they need to be looking at and in pioneering phase, you go in this order and as we're going through in this order ahead, their job is to unbottle bottlenecks because as soon as, if we simplify this down, what we see is a business will have one of two problems. And that is I need more work or they get the ball work. I need more help on the delivery. As soon as they get the delivery sorted, that I need more work. So it's just this constant battle, or not even a battle, but it's a constant leadership question of making sure that you're just unbottling the next bottleneck. And soon as you unbottle that one, there's going to be another one that pops up and that's okay. So the first part is making sure that you're doing these and you're getting them up and running in this order. Then the second phase to this is scaling. Now this is the interesting fact is when you're scaling, scaling works in the opposite direction. You scale and make it. When we scaling it means you're getting ever more out of ever less. In other words, for the effort you're putting in, you're getting a disproportionately higher return. It also means that it's not key person dependent. So the operations part is the first part you'll take out. Then client success and delivery, then conversion, then lead gen product innovation and vision. The only little thing is sometimes this one, these two here can be done. They need to be done quite closely together. So you'll, there'll be a lot of discussions between these two and they're often happened very closely. When you're unbottling conversion, you'll probably unbottle Legion at a very similar pace. So these are the six engine rooms that we build, Dave. And what we do is behind each of these we have trainings and playbooks that go through deeper. But the big part of this is just understanding that each business has these six engine rooms and each of them need energy that go behind it. So I'm just going to pause there and I put it to you, if there's any questions you want to ask me on this, because I want to actually go to our exercise that will shine the light on how. Because pretty much everybody's listening to this and go, yeah, I get that, I understand it. But do you really understand it when we do the next exercise?

I think what I love about this model, and again, it fits well with the way that we think about your business as a system. And you have the subsystems and the health of your business system is really dependent on, on the health of these subsystems. And it is possible to have some areas maybe that are really strong that are supporting the other areas that may be weak. So for example, you might have a great conversion and then that can help to lift that up. But really for your business to be humming, to be able to scale and grow, you need to have strength and energy in all of these different areas because. And even the areas where you're strong, if you don't have any energy in some of these, it will cause significant problems to the business. It's like a human body. And if your skeletal system or Your muscular system wasn't working, the rest of the body stops working. So we need all of these subsystems to be strong. And I think the, the ideas you've got there around the order in which you work for pioneering and then the order in which you work for scaling makes really sense because the pioneering phase is really about figuring out your best practice. And then the scaling process is then about codifying those so that someone else can step in, make sure it happens consistently so that the business owner can now move on to the next problem rather than solving the same problem again and again. Again, fits really well with our thinking.

So I loved, I just put that in there. I use swap my words to your words, exactly the same thing, 100% the same. And best practice for us means you're building, you've got a proven concept that's working, that's delivering and you've got the machines working. Love that. So this should be not brand new news for everyone. However, it's how well people execute on this is where we see the game that's won and lost. And one of the big things is just understanding that our job as the leader within the organization is to look at these on a regular basis. And for us, we say at least every four months and go, okay, what's the next bottleneck in the business? And then go, bam, that's the focus now for the next cycle and we're going to go unmoddle that one. And then when each time we put our head up, have a look around, boom, that's the next one, then you go for it again. So just making sure that we're systematic in the way that we do it. One thing we found with our members, which is probably indicative of most, if you look at most people that we work with, 76% have high dynamo energy or high creative energy, which means one of the best things around them, they're really good at vision, really good at product innovation, probably good at selling it, but they're really good at adding lots of new things on the plate and the rest of the team can go, oh, what's the next latest thing that's going on? And so what this does, it helps them to have the certainty and the confidence that they just follow the pathway and the creative genius can fly within these realms. So that's a really good sort of context on that as well. Does that make sense? Yeah.

And again, I love putting a little bit of the nuance in around how and where Systemology works in with this methodology. What we've identified for us in that leverage point being the master skill of capturing and codifying is oftentimes a huge area of weakness for business owners and teams as well. So all we go to work on or the problem that we're drawn to as systemology is how do we build up that culture and capability starting with the business owner so that then they can create enough space to then go to work on these engine rooms like you're talking about.

Yeah, love it. Gold. Beautiful. So we're going to do another exercise and usually I would do this, we do this as a group and people will do this exercise. So I don't know if you've got whether you want to play along with this Dave, or not in your business but if you know someone that you can picture in your mind that's a small business, maybe a client, no names, but just going to put that in mind, we're going to go in this next exercise and what I love is a little pre warning on this next exercise, albeit very simple, is very profound. And this may have what I call a little bit of chili powder with it. It may be a little hot, it could sting a little bit and it could be a little bit ouch. With this next exercise for when someone goes through with it, if that's the case, just go hey, it's good. At least I know about it now and I could better know it now than in five years time when you wish someone had told you. We've got these six engine rooms here. Really simple question that we ask is this next exercise is this one here and that is who is the true owner of each of these engine rooms. Now when we mean by ownership think of Jocko Willink Stream ownership. At the end of the day there is only one. And so here are some guiding principles in this exercise. The first one here, even though I know that you that particular people that are watching this are going to be like they're in the top echelon of business owners. Why? Because they're seeking out to learn this. So just the nature of, of the person who's doing this means great. Which means in my eyes that most of those people also have the desire that their team comes on the journey and that they're wanting to do good in the planet. And our big belief is that business is the best vehicle to do good on the planet. So we know that we that you're going to be bringing people in that you're going to give ownership to and you're going to give a self responsibility. However, at the end of the day this is the key part of this. At the end of the day, there has to be ultimately one person that is truly accountable and one person who's truly accountable for each of these engine rooms. Who is that person? Now, common things that people will say to us is we've got three of us that are on it. We're all talking about, okay, if that's the case, if everyone owns it, no one does. And if no one owns it, then you are the owner because you're the leader and it falls on you whether you like it or not. This exercise here is to go through and put the initials of the person who owns it. Now, I'm going to expect. I'll just. Unless you want to. Or we can play along with this here, I'll put my name on here and let's pretend I've got the glass water business just as an example, and I'm the visionary. I kick off, I start business. So I put my name on here as a visionary. Every one of these spots needs to have an initial next to it. What we find is that product innovation is a classic example. No one is actually owning that. And people go, what does that mean? What does ownership means? What are we doing to look at who our ideal client avatar is? How has it changed and evolved looking at our product mix, what's delivering for the client, what's not delivering for them? What's our profitability look like on the back end of this? So we're going to put initials. I don't know if you want to use an example of someone that you know, or we just, we can play along and put it in here. But what the exercise here is to go through and go, right, let's go in, I'll put dd and let's pretend, just pretend it's you and I, I go, product innovation, we go. I spoke to, I had a prospect yesterday who I spoke with and there were two of them that led the business from there. Two of them that are both high achievers and they both brought business into the business. And I said, who owns leadership? And they said, both of us. I said, that's great, but only one person can be ultimately accountable. Who is it? So at the end of the day, let's say pretend on here. This is going to be Dave Jennings. And so the purpose of this now is to go through. And let's go and go, okay, who is actually owning each of these? I'll just go. We got Mary here as an example. And what we call this role. There are four systems and so What I'm going through is the business system. There is another system that we have which is around team and understanding that there are four levels within a team and four trainings and four levels of ownership within a team. This one is a very important one. This is the second one, which is what we call our heroes. This is my military background, so I love acronyms. So this, all this is saying, this is the head of engine room officer, they're the heroes. Or head of department is another way of looking at that as well. But these are the heroes and only there can only be one and one person needs to be fully accountable for it. Now this does usually bring up stuff for people, Dave. There's some things that come up around what if I don't want to be, what if I'm not the right person? The person's in there, I'm accepting a standard that's they're not delivering on it. So another military principle is a standard you walk by is the standard you accept. So a lot of people having subpar players in each of these engine rooms or heading them up and sometimes that person is them, especially the owner. Where they started off, they had to do everything and then they go, I'm doing lead generation problems. They were trained in it and I really don't know how to do it. I really love the delivery and love innovation, but I don't do the rest of it. So this here is a great exercise to get people going and get them thinking around who ultimately is accountable for each engine room. And this on its own is a system like it begins off a system of thinking that is super duper critical. And this on its own, we find, David, is a, a key defining moment for a business in their ability to truly scale and move across that leverage line. So I've dumped a lot of different things in there. Great exercise for people to go through. I'd love to get little insights. Any questions, any comments around this from you?

What I think is great about this is obviously you said it's the start of the system. So I'm imagining firstly we've identified what the key areas are. Then we've started assigning who's responsible. And then obviously the next thing you start to think about is applying the 80 20. What are the key responsibilities and systems and outcomes that these particular people drive. And I think getting that, that clarity, I can almost see the next couple of steps in this system.

Yeah, love it. Cool. So that covers like the bulk of the stuff that there is more stuff obviously we can go through. We could talk for ages on that. But based on this and based on the amazing viewers who are watching this, where do you want to take this from here, David? What do you want to. Because I can go deeper and I just want to be respectful of everyone's time and this can get a little bit granular. This is a good starting place for people to really get some good insights. But where do you want to take it from here?

Always where I can I try and tie it down. My systems brain can't help itself but think, okay, what is the system here about? How as someone's consumed this, then they start to think about what are the steps, what do I take from this and then how do I implement it. And I could imagine someone obviously identifying where they are, which we talked about right at the start, understanding the leverage line and thinking about where you're at in your business and assuming you're in the right area and maybe you've moved through that survival stage, then you start to go, this is the problem that Dave's sharing a system here to help solve. And then you would start to think about step number two would then be to go, these are the key areas and go through the exercise of identifying areas of responsibility. And even just going through the exercise gets used to think about your business in the correct way as far as different departments and areas of strength and weakness. And as you do that and identifying who is going to take over these roles or who are currently in those roles, obviously that's going to be quite revealing for the business owner sometimes if they start to see their name in a whole bunch of spaces and then they go, wow, this business really is dependent on me. And then without going into much detail, maybe high level, it'd be good to just think about those next couple of steps, as I said, potentially thinking about key areas of responsibility and what are some of the systems and processes effectively that are sitting underneath each of these different engine rooms or departments. And yeah, I'd love to maybe just again, talking more broadly where you go from there.

So the first part is, remember I did the beginning, I talked about unprofitable businesses, profitable businesses. And then going through those is, I think what's really important is context and that we don't believe there's one cap fits all. We think everyone has their own personalized needs, their own personalized approach. That's probably a really important part because every business is completely unique. They're all different because every business owner, it's different to the way they do it. We'll have financial advisors, we'll have lawyers, accountants, we'll have construction companies. They'll be almost identical, except the owner is different and the way they do their business is completely different. Even though they go, we're exactly the same area. So everyone does differently. Having said that, as you and I both know, the more you work with people, the more business you work with. Every business is very different, but they're all the same. And if you can go back to principles, which is what we've gone through here, these principles apply across, across everyone. So one of the principles is making sure you're doing the right thing at the right time in each of the levels. That, that's, that's one part of the principle. And then as you're going forward, making sure you're unbottling the right next bottleneck for, for you. So the way we do that. This is now I'm going a little off piece, but I just pulled this off while we were talking. Let's just go through this is we do this as a diagnostic. This is. I just pulled this out of a training, literally.