Part 2 - The Secret Military Tactic That Built A Multi-Million Dollar Business

Welcome to this edition of the million dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. Now, my memory is not always that great, but seems like I remember asking you early on, how did you develop your systems for your team when you started added employees and you said, I think you said you learned it in the military sop, Standard operating procedure, Is that right?

That is exactly correct.

My mind has not gone yet, Roman. Okay.

Early on I was a one man van. And then as the business started to grow, I left banking. I started doing it full time, opened up my first office. And as early as having three people in the office, when something was done more than once and was repeated on a daily basis, weekly basis, a monthly basis, I would just put it down into a Word document and say, hey, this is how you do it. Because I realized that I cannot do everything by myself. So I'm going to continue hiring staff. But the minute that I hire a staff to do what to do, take something off of my plate and say, well, here's a document. This is how I did it, right? This is how I want you to do. But at the same time, my expectation is for you to improve on my process, right? Make suggestions. I don't want you to be a robot. I want you to put forth your opinion to how we can make things better. Until this day we have SOPs and every single department in here.

Well, and the thing is, thinking like that causes you to notice what's happening and to when you write it down, you take the guess. The idea is to take the guesswork out of repetitive processes. And as soon as you can get that down, you can turn it over and duplicate yourself. The quicker you can train somebody else and the less thinking, the less brilliant they're going to have to be to do it. All they're going to do is follow the bouncing ball that you laid out in front of them. And if I ever write a book on it, my first book was Fundamentals of winning the serial winner, how you win again and make it a way of life. The second two books that I've never written, one was going to be how you become elite once you start winning, how can you go to the top? What are things that differentiate the people that are the top? And then the third book was going to be about building the team. But the thing about building, you know, an elite winning team, because you're never going to go Very far without a team. And you've learned that. But you were thinking you were doing a lot of the right things right from the beginning. Roman, where you were, whether you knew it or not, you were setting your. You were organized mentally for success and just things like that. And it served you very well. And coming up, I'm curious, what was your standard operating procedure that you figured out in sales early on, doing all these different jobs, you're getting people on the phone. How did your. I'm sure your mind went into patterns. You know, the first thing, you know, get them comfortable and then find the need and all that. How did your mind work?

It comes to sales. I'm a true believer that a sales person is first born and then trained. If you're not born to do sales, it's not for you. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. There colleagues of mine that were engineers, that were brilliant engineers, but they couldn't put two words together when it came to a conversation. Right. Didn't make them a bad person. Right. It just made them who they are. So I do believe first and foremost, you have to have something in you to be a salesperson, but then you can trade. And the idea behind this, the operating procedures that I put forth was not really how to sell is where's the process from A to Z? Because the number one thing here till this day is, and this is the, you know, we use a lot more bigger, robust systems now, obviously, because we have a multitude of salespeople. But the main thing is stay on top of your shit. If you cannot stay on top of your stuff, whether till this day, besides, with all the fancy systems I have, I still have a notepad. And when. And because we multitask so much at any given time, the minute something pops into my head as I'm doing something else, I just write it down. And guess what? I go down my list, I get it done, and I cross it off. When it comes to sales now, you're dealing with sometimes 500 different inquiries at any given time, 500 different ways of communication. So we put a system in place that helps you with it, helps you keep it organized. But the SOP states that you must do X, Y and Z while utilizing these systems that will make your life easier. At the end of the day, you just can't. If you don't follow those steps, you're not able to do your job properly. Stuff is going to fall through the cracks and clients are going to be left upset because somebody didn't get back to them. It's not about how to sell. You have it, you be yourself. It's what I tell every salesperson. As long as you're yourself, don't try to be somebody that you're not. And educate your consumer first and foremost to a point where they would feel stupid to buy anywhere else besides you, regardless of price within. That's the goal.

Well, that thing that you. I like to make sure people don't let that go over their head. What you just said in the beginning, and that is, you show the pad. Something jumps in my head, I write it down. And what I've learned early in my career, when I have 10,000 things to keep up with and they were coming fast, like bullets, you know, they were coming at me, is like, write it down. Because when you write it down, your memory is not going to be great if you overtax it. And I could have a great memory if I didn't ask it to do that much. And the more things I wrote down, the less my memory had to fill in the gaps. And you can look like you've got a great memory, but whereas most of the stuff you write down and you don't have to just come up when.

You get a little older, as they say. I remember what I did 15 years ago. I don't remember what I had for breakfast. So this is so true. As I got older, I realized that unless it's in here, right? And this is again, just small things, small nose. We still, for everything else, we have systems in place. And this is all automated. This is all sitting on a computer. It's. It spits out reminders, it tells you the task that you have to do for the day. We keep track of our media team, social team, of our logistics team. Everything is organized in an electronic way where we set goals for teams, right? So they need to hit certain KPIs, whether it's social media, whether it's video, whether it's logistics, whether it's sales. And a wise man once said one thing, he said that don't ever set goals results of which you cannot measure. Do you know who said that? I did. But think about what I said. Don't set goal results of which you cannot measure. Which means that I'm a big analytics and reporting guy, right? System is placed in a way where, depending on the time frame that you need, usually once a week, once a month, once a quarter. I review all of these reports and I see, have these goals been met, right? Because if I'm just going to set goals out there, for people. But then I'm not going to measure those results. Meaning I don't have the systems in place to report on the goals that I'm setting or the task that I put forth in any department. It's useless because there's no accountability then. Because without accountability, what do you really have? You don't have anything.

Right. And I want to make sure people pick up the thread of what you're saying. What? Because you're speaking as a person who is running a successful business and has run a successful business and it grows. And it's not by accident. These things are not by accident. And if you go out there and you look at all of the business books, there's common themes that come up and one thing that comes up is you gotta run your business. You can't let your business run you. And I think every leader, CEO, whatever comes to a point in time because there's ebbs and flows, crises, common things. But you know, there's always times where we get behind the eight ball and everything. And you're, you find yourself like your fireman, putting out fires all the time. But that's not the efficient way to operate. And the thing is that if you do what you said, if the end result of keeping up with things, you, you stay on track, number one, know where the track is, you stay on track and then you stay on top of what you're supposed to be doing. You stay on time, then you can think, then you can realize where you're a little bit behind the curve. You can notice we're, you know, our numbers are not where it needs to be. Attitudes are not like where it needs to be. You don't notice those things if you're overwhelmed, do you?

Of course. Listen, one of the things that I also try and do and not do at the same time, I try to find a happy medium between allowing my resources, my human resources that I have here to do their thing. Obviously without micromanaging. This is the hardest thing to do. Especially when you start as a one man band and grow into a company early on especially. But I'm a firm believer to utilizing human resources that you have to the up most of their capability, but also based on their compensation and with an acceptable margin of error. Because early on you cannot replicate yourself. There's no other. Roman and I have plenty of employees that are here today that I cannot replicate them either. But it also comes back to compensation as well. I have an individual that's doing something 2x better than the other one. He's getting paid 2x but yet the job is getting down. The ultimate overall task is getting done as a team. You're never going to have. There's always going to be the best salesperson and, and the worst salesperson, right? Yes. There's a cut off where I put a threshold where I want all my sales people to be at a minimum. But listen, you're going to have your number one football player on the team and you're going to have not your fourth string quarterback. Right? But at the end of the day, the fourth string quarterback still performs the task that's needed of him, but he doesn't get paid as much as the other guy. I would love to have nothing but superstars on my sales team that are doing $2 million in sales a month. But I have guys that do a half a million a month as well or a million a month and guess what? They're still just as good. And the compensation shows it's very directly, it's directly relevant to the abilities of the research or the human research that I'm utilizing and the dream of people trying to do things like I do. That's a patron. It doesn't happen because I'm the owner, I'm the guy that owns the business and I still pop my head in often to ensure that even on the lowest level, down in logistics where people attack in boxes or in social media, I will still pop my head and every so often make sure I have an open door where everybody can come in and freely talk to me and most importantly, get advice. Because I've been doing this for a little bit. I'm a little bit older, a little bit wiser, a lot of kids, young kids working for me and they're welcome to step into my office at any given time without fear of retribution, of me thinking, oh, they don't know what they're doing. I'm going to get somebody else off the table completely. I told every new employee, I tell you, I don't care what you do here because I've done it all. Remember I was a one man band. I did every department, I did every job. Feel free, my door is open. Come in, ask for advice and don't think it's going to reflect negatively on you because you don't know how to do something. It's actually going to reflect positively.

Describe for us your operation. Is it mainly virtual? I mean, do you have a big facility? How much, what do your different people do?

I have a 20,000 square foot facility here in Southampton, Pennsylvania. I'm just right outside of Philadelphia. And I have an office in Hong Kong, a small office in Hong Kong, which we use for logistical purposes. It's a gateway between us and Middle east and mainland China, et cetera. But for the most part, majority of the work is done here. We are not open to the public, but the public does come in once in a while to our office with not a storefront. So, you know, if you're going to randomly come off the street and try to ring the doorbell and I'm going to look at the camera and I don't like the way you look. I just won't let you in. I ask people to make a phone call and say that you are coming. And we do get a fair share of people that come in here, but for the most part it's just me and the team that's out here in Southampton, Pennsylvania.

So you're, you're storing your merchandise there, you're shipping your merchandise from there.

We're an Internet company. Yeah, that's.

Yeah. So you do your, how, what percent of your fulfillment do you do?

A hundred.

You do 100% of your fulfillment?

Yes, of course.

And so how long have you had the 20,000 square foot facility? And what was that like? What was, how much of a step was that?

So that was 12 years ago. 12, almost 13 years ago. We bought this building. Prior to that we had an office that was roughly 4,500 square feet that we also owned. And before that I rented an office that was about, let's say, about a thousand square feet. And prior to that I was in my basement.

Yeah, you obviously are maximizing or optimizing, let's say, your facility now, because I think you've got. You've increased five or six times your gross sales since we were on a couple of years ago. And it's great to be able to do that without having to take on more facility, isn't it?

So the facility, the current facility, I mean, that I bought, I bought it with, in the back of my mind, knowing that I didn't need that much space when I first took it on, because at the time I had 12 people working for me. But I knew that we were growing and I knew that we were going to grow. And the last thing I wanted to do is to make a move and then have to make another move. Because setting up security, setting up logistics, setting up networks and all those things within any facility, regardless of size, gets expensive. We have, before we moved in here, I spent $40 million on security alone. So. And remember, I also have a bank vault inside the facility. That's not a cheap thing to move around. In fact, it's cheaper to have another bolt brought into a facility than to move your existing it's literally cheaper to leave the old one at the old. We literally left the bank vault in the old place. It was cheaper to leave it there and then bring another one here.

Wow.

So it's. So there's a lot of things that are going on right now as far as growth is concerned. We have plenty of space here as far as, I mean, I can get up here. I can get up to 100 employees if I wanted to. So for me, the growth is not going to take place in retail facilities and we're looking to get out and expand our retail reach, not just online, but also physically.

I'd like to thank you for listening to part two of this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. Timing is everything. You may feel that now is the time to get moving forward so you can do something even greater with your life. Now, if that sounds like you, I've got a free training video to show you how that transformation can can take place. Getting introduced to how the cycle of success works has been a major transforming event for so many current million dollar earners. And that's exactly what this video is all about. And yes, it's completely free. Join us at the video@widelonwinning.com and thanks for being part of our community.

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