10: Important Role of the Integrator and The Visionary

Hey guys, Drew Canole. Welcome to another Drew and you'd podcast. Today we're talking about the important role of the integrator in the visionary and how that collaboration can create harmonic music in business and more importantly in your life. Let's go. Alright. For me as an entrepreneur, the journey has been very interesting because at the start of my journey 15 years ago when I was running the first businesses I ever ran, a multi million dollar a year credit and debt sett company over in Tampa, Florida, I did not have an integrator. In fact, I was the visionary, but I was also the integrator. And I know many people are kind of stuck in that state of doing and it doesn't leave them feeling fulfilled. And for me, you know, I just did a lot of self sabotage because I was just taking on too much. So when I realized that trust was the name of the game and I worked on my psychology, my physiology, my biology, I started to shift my ability to perceive things as a threat and have more trust in my life. And if you're an entrepreneur who's struggling with trust, then hiring people, building teams, growing your business is going to be really hard. So let me preface this whole entire thing with how big are your trust muscles? How much are you willing to allow another human being to show up in their wholeness, fully embodied, fully integrated? And can you speak to that version of who they are, the eighth love language before they can even see it as the visionary? And I think that's missing in business today. I think it's all about numbers. It's shifting. Yes it is. But I think a lot of it is about numbers and metrics and what can the person provide for my business, not what can I provide for the people that are part of the company and the organizational heartbeat in the infrastructure of what we're creating and the mission and the impact and everything like that. So integrator versus visionary. I first heard about this in a book called Rocket Fuel. Mark C. Winters writes this book and I've read it multiple times. I've had my C level team and the directors read this book as well, because you can actually build out individual pods of visionary integration in a balanced ecosystem of the business. And the way we test this is by using the Colby B index. In the early journey of building FitLife TV and Organifi, I took things completely different and I had many meetings to get everybody on the same page. I think as the visionary, the bigger the vision grows, the more lightning bolts we can throw. We can go into a business and disrupt the whole entire thing. It's called whiplash, right? When you have one idea after another and you give it to your team without allowing them the time to actually build out the idea that you had in the previous moment. So you gotta give your integrators time and teams to actually get things done. And the bigger your team grows, unfortunately, the longer things take. And that's why I'm a big fan of building the original infrastructure, growing the team out, creating SOPs, creating business systems, all the stuff. But on the side of it, to get the fuel for you as the visionary, if you're anything like me as a projector, human design, and wanting to constantly be in creation mode, it's good to have smaller teams working with you so that you can execute your creative ideas and then bring those, once they get some legs on them, to the overall bigger company and the bigger dream and the vision within that. If you haven't hired and integrated, let me walk you through some steps to actually do that, to find your first person, your first chief of staff that's going to regulate, modulate, integrate your business so that you can take it to the next level as well. So the integrator is the person that's basically at the helm of the ship, right? They're the person that's guiding, they're the person that's directing, they're the person that's setting up the infrastructure in a way, and they're also responsible for allowing the visionary to step in and get on the same page. So the integrator holds it down. Right? For me, my very first integrator in the business of organifi was Jamel Bedejar and he's a brother from another mother. In my life, he's amazing. We're on the same page. I hang out with him outside of work all the time. It's somebody I enjoy being around. He's probably the most self developed, one of the most self developed people I've ever met in my life. He legitimately has one of the biggest hearts I've ever seen out of any man. He's a balance between that divine feminine, divine masculine, and he's just overall a good human. But he happens to be really good at processes and he happens to be really good at following through and he happens to be really good at finding the facts. So in the Colby B test, it will tell you where your strengths are. And Jamel's off the charts in those. Very balanced. He's also got some visionary in him and he's also got some implementer but those are the two things we look for in an integrator. So if you have a right hand person right now, send the Colby B test to them, have them take it, see where they land on the follow through and the fact finding, because that's going to be a key in all of this. In my personal experience, and I think they've actually developed a better test than the Colby B test. I'm not sponsored by those guys by any means. This is just something that I use. Also, another thing is human design, something that you can get for free. The Jovium chart we can start looking at. If they're a generator, manifesting generator, projector, reflector, and how that relates to business as well. I'd love to get into that on a future podcast. I know that gets a lot of attention. People are very fascinated with the work of human design.

So once you have your integrator, and this could be sourced from your community currently, if you don't have one, people that have been following you for years, somebody that knows your methodology, your reason for existence, your mission, and has a pulse on the heartbeat, maybe it's somebody that's a fan or somebody that's been following you for years and believes in your mission and your movement, once you have them in that seat, then setting circadian rhythm of the business is super important. Like into the biology of our body. It's important to have a circadian rhythm in your business. So Jamel and I would meet once a week when he was in that integrator role as the CEO and I was the outside chairman, founder. And what we would do is we would go over families, family stuff, friends stuff, spiritual stuff, physical stuff to get all of that out of the way. The connection points of this human existence, which is far more important than any business, it's relating relationships, the ship of relation. So getting on the same boat in that and then also after that, going over issues, things where we want to get on the same page on. And if there's any disagreement and friction or anything like that, I highly recommend reading the book by Marvel Hendrix and I believe Gay Hendrix, Getting the Love youe Want. So if they're bringing something that you said that triggered them, getting the love you want will actually help you navigate through that as well. Knowing the other person's love languages. Because this is a marriage, you guys, this is a relationship. So it's super important to understand who you're communicating with, not only how they communicate, but what makes them feel good, what do they want to see in the future. If if the business was gone, how could you still have a relations, that kind of stuff. And being super, super connected is the important thing to work on with that.

Part of the integrator's role is to bring on to the visionary the things that the company is working on. And these are what we would call rocks. And this is all broken down in the EOS system of traction. So that's another book I highly recommend. This is going to help you set more circadian rhythms up for the body of your business. And rocks are like the five to seven fundamental things that we want to track. And then outside of that, there's either you can go down two systems. One would be KPIs, which is also in traction, which are the key performance indicators. Or there's okrs, which is a new thing. I think three years ago, Google, some big tech companies use okrs. I don't know as much about that as I do about the KPIs just because that's what we've been using all these years. So that's something you can do. Setting a morning meeting for 10 to 15 minutes every single day where the integrator gets a pulse on the directors, the rest of the C level suite, the direction of the business. We've shapeshifted our actual morning meetings over and over again to create more of a cultural feel, to enroll people into the vision again and again every single day because it's super important. Now we're all remote because we're in California and this whole Covid thing's going on. So it's important to dial people back into the culture and to always have the heartbeat. And that's the visionary's job, you know, to make sure your people are on the bus and they feel, they really feel like they're making a difference, which we are at organifi and you are too. If you're listening to this, use the traction tools to get on the same page. Figure out what your rocks are. Figure out what your KPIs are as well. We appointed a KPI to every single person in the business so that they just have something to track, something that's measurable. If you're not measuring it, it can't be tracked. If you're not measuring it, it can't exist. In God We Trust and all others. Bring the data. That's a great quote. And that's true. Like you really have to start tracking what's going on in your business. And the integrator is responsible for that. In the meeting that the integrator actually has with the visionary once a week. So that's how that breaks down. And if you're the visionary, know that it's not uncommon to have 180 different ideas throughout the week that you're launching at your integrator. That's important for you to continue to do, to be the creative missionary person in the business. But also know that the integrator may not roll with every single one of those ideas. In fact, it actually would be detrimental to the business and what the core offering is. However, one of those ideas is enough to bring the business into a whole nother stratosphere. So it's important to keep the visionary in the vision. And if the visionary, there's another test, the synergist test. If the visionary is a promoter, which most of them are controlling promoters, then what you really want to do is fan the flame of the visionary. That's a great idea. Anybody that's bringing visions in the whole entire company. I've seen so many company fires get extinguished when somebody stomps on the fire of the ideas. So make sure you're fanning the flame of the people that are bringing the visions and the ideas to the company. In a way, make sure they're getting collected. That's a great way. So taking notes in these meetings, writing them down, adding to it, coming up with a lot of ideas. So oftentimes we can get distracted in these meetings. People get loud, There's a lot of squirrels chasing things that aren't really going to impact the business. But the visionary is in charge of coming up with crazy ideas and being relentless in short periods of time to go after something that's making a difference through the trackable results that the integrator is coming up with. So the integrator is the symphony orchestra conductor, while the visionary is coming up with future music that's never been heard, if that makes sense. A couple key things about the visionary versus the integrator. The visionary will always opt for starting a new project. The integrator will always opt for creating better product than what you have right now. So it's currently an intra focus versus an extra focused thing. The integrator is thinking more about the business, while the visionary is thinking more about the world and the industry at large. Right. The visionary oftentimes is thinking about other potential CEOs that are doing big things in the world and how they could potentially collaborate with it, while the integrator is thinking about the directors and the people on the team to make the mission and the movement of the company actually exist in a tangible way. Driving that bus.

The integrator sees things home every time, get things done. Which is why the Colby B. Will tell you if the person follows through, the integrator follows through almost sometimes to the detriment. Right. It's like the person that just can't let it go, go, oh, I can't let it go. While the visionary will start a bunch of stuff and rarely can complete a project on their own without bringing somebody into it. So that's just a few things. The differences between the integrator and the visionary. Right. I've recommended a few books. This is just the intra or intro to this stuff. And it's a test, you guys. This is the dru and you show. So it's all about you. I get a lot of business questions like this, so I wanted to address a common one. The difference between the integrator and the visionary. How to actually find an integrator, which we went over and I talked to you about how I actually did it. I actually sourced somebody from my internal audience and Jamel who completely changed the business. We would not be where we are today without an integrator and without Jamel. So know that taking your business to the next level requires transition. You know, Jamel is no longer the CEO, actually, May Stigler is. So May is currently the CEO of the business. So she's beating the drum of the integrator and also holding the vision, working with me, working with Jamel in regards to what can we do to take organifi to the next level. So there's even. There's an even bigger vision that's getting casted right now with our team. And the goal of any visionary is actually, I believe, to have heart centered people that are on the same mission, that are aligned to the same core values, that are aligned to the same mission on this planet at this time. And they're willing to run to the ends of the earth together as one, not separate. You know, there's no hierarchy in our business. It's more of a circle business and really working on that. So every day we're not perfect. We don't know everything. And we are literally just where you are. Maybe we're a little bit ahead of you, but regardless, it's important to know that you're on the right track. So I wanted to tell you that today when we're talking about visionary and integrator, if you guys have questions, make sure you send me a dm, reach out to me. You can check out the other books. I referenced in the show notes some of the greatest business books I've read. One of them being Rocket Fuel completely changed our business. One of them being Traction. One of them being Thing as well is a great book. It'll keep you focused on that one thing and then check out if you're really feeling the woo woo edge of this. Check out Human Design. Pull your chart. Start to put teams together from how our souls incarnated here and what we're truly here to do on the planet at this time. That would be great for you. And Gene Keys is another thing that I'm super fascinated by. It's like poetry for your soul. It's the science of human design, I Ching. Some of these other ancient modalities, but also rolled into a way which Richard Rudd has these live transmissions of soul science and it's absolutely breathtakingly beautiful, my friend. So check that out as well. We are on a mission to impact a billion people's lives and you're a part of this in a big way. I just want you to know that. Head on over to Amazon. Review this podcast my friend. Welcome to the Drew and you show and let's continue to go in 2021, making this the best year yet. Make it a great.