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The Digital Utopia Podcast Episode #26

EOS & RevOps: Business Management Frameworks

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About the podcast

The Digital Utopia Podcast is for SMB Marketers and Business Leaders looking to align their Marketing, Sales, and Service departments so they’re part of one powerhouse growth team.

Each episode will dive into the strategies, philosophies, and tools that will change your approach to organizational growth, give you renewed focus and clarity, and allow you to build a brand that not only helps you stand out—but win.

The Digital Utopia Podcast is produced by Digitopia and hosted by Frank Cowell and Joseph Freeman.

Episode transcription

Frank
In the business world, sometimes people hear operations and they think that means kind of like overarching over the whole business. But in another segment of the business world views operations as the product, which is what EOS aligns on. So when you hear us say, operations, we mean, whatever your product is, that's operations. So when I say that, I mean, focusing in your operations and figuring out how to make that world class in what's working, what's not working. And then if you have people wearing multiple hats in there, you know, people are stretched thin. You've got a, you've got a model problem. That's a business model problem. You have to fix that.

Intro
You were listening to the digital utopia podcast, a resource dedicated to helping b2b leadership and executives gain clarity and focus in a chaotic marketplace.

Frank
Hey, gang, welcome to the digital utopia podcast, Episode 26. I'm your host, Frank Cowell. And I'm joined by my co host,

Joe
Joseph Freeman

Frank
Joe, I heard you and Arianne this morning. kind of scheming about what today's show is going to be about. And so I'm, I'm kind of excited because I heard I'm not gonna let let you let the cat out of the bag. But I'm excited about what our topic is going to be today.

Joe
Yeah, well, this is a treat for you because it's it's touching on something I know you love, which is

Frank
EOS? Oh, my goodness. Yes, Eos. So for our listeners. EOS is the entrepreneurial operating system. It's a business management framework, as taught in the book traction by Gina Whitman. And essentially, what it aims to do is bring a a streamlined version of a lot of management frameworks that are out there. Another popular one is scaling up by Vern harnish, which I really liked that system. But I think it's a bit overkill for you know, businesses under let's say, 1015 20 million range. And for those businesses, then I think EOS is just a great model to run. It's not perfect, but it definitely streamlined some things and it makes managing the business much easier from an entrepreneurial point of view, which is why it's called EOS. And so we we run that at our organization. And so yeah, I'm super excited to talk about that. And any parallels that has with Rev ops Yeah,

Joe
so if you're not familiar with it, you might want to check it out, if you like process, and if you like having kind of a playbook for operationalizing your business. And that is what rev ops does for you as well, but in a different way. And so as we run us here, and as we, you know, develop strategies and processes, within the world of DevOps, we start to see these parallels. And so we picked out five different not principles, but five different components components of Eos. And we we saw that there was a lot of similarities in some of what you're doing in rev up. So if you're already running EOS, so if you're thinking about running it or if based on what you've heard here, you want to go check it out and do start running it. The transition to adopting rev ops to help supplement that should be pretty comfortable. Yeah, because there's a lot of similarities. wildly different reasons why you use each one. We'll talk about that.

Frank
Yeah, one's not a substitute for the

Joe
other. No, no, they're totally different. But because there are some similarities, if you are already familiar with this type of process, Reb ops is going to be a no brainer for you. So let's dive in. We got five things you want to cover here. So in EOS, there are 90 day cycles, we're going to talk about how that kind of maps over

Frank
the rhythms are, are really, it's a really big theme in EOS is right getting on that 90 day rhythm.

Joe
Yeah, so we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about the EOS scorecard. Yep. It's a big one leadership team, and how that kind of equates to what you would need on a rev ops team. Yeah, the people analyzer, and what that looks like in DevOps world and then just process in general. So the process that us brings in the process that rev ops brings in how those marry together. Okay, cool. You ready? Yeah. Let's talk about it in 90 days cycles. So what's the 90 day cycle?

Frank
Well, more specifically, EOS uses the word rhythm. And so they're big on what they call their meeting rhythms. And so if you're listening today, and you already run iOS, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The rhythms are the 90 day rhythm or the quarterly meeting rhythm, and then you have your weekly meeting rhythm, which is the level and so we know we said 90 day rhythms, it's probably best if we just say meeting rhythms in general is a great parallel with what you should be doing in rev ops because that that same 90 day rhythm for your quarterly planning and that same weekly meeting rhythm, for getting your your weekly pulse and what they call the level 10 meeting, you should be doing the exact same thing with rev ops. So rev ops. You also want to be in 90 day cycles. You know, I hear some organizations run six month cycles when it comes To implementations and whatnot, and that's just too long to wait for the results and to change and shift your initiatives. So a properly run Reb ops program also runs on 90 day rhythms. And then you should be having a weekly rhythm to touch base on the scorecard, which we're going to talk about in a moment, as well as just status update on the various initiatives, but highly recommend that that same exact rhythm is happening with your rev ops team.

Joe
Yeah, so why 90 days, 90 days is anything, it's pretty typical in terms of marketing, campaign planning, a lot of marketers will will plan out their different campaign initiatives over the course of 90 days. And I think that this was probably something we adopted from there. But it works really well. Because a lot changes in 90 days in a business a lot can change, right?

Frank
Well, EOS there, they talk about 90 days for the reason they emphasize an idea exists two things, it's enough time to put something in play and see change, see something happen as a result of initiative, that doesn't necessarily mean a KPI is going to go up. But if there's some sort of foundational project that you're working on in 90 days, that will eventually improve the KPI, you should be able to see if that project completes to a major milestone, if you will. It's also according to EOS, it's kind of the longest you can hold a team's attention on a particular effort on an on an initiative, that beyond 90 days, the focus on the initiative starts to wane. And so that's why they established the 90 day rhythm when it comes to initiatives or what EOS calls rocks, right. And I would suggest in your rev Ops, you're going to have something very similar happen, you're going to have an analysis of your scorecard, which we'll talk about in a moment, you're gonna have an analysis of that, you're going to find out where your bottlenecks are at. And then you're going to deploy initiatives for the next 90 days to address those bottlenecks. Right. Okay. And then along the way, you're going to check in, how's it going, were we out on this initiative, okay, boom, boom, boom, everyone's got the pulse on everything. And you're checking the scorecard along the way. And the other 90 days, you should have completed that initiative. And you'll do a kind of a post mortem, you'll do a review, which is what you do in the EOS 90 day rhythm, right? You know, when we run it, one of the very first things you do near the top of that agenda is you're doing a review on the past quarter. How did we do not only from a score carding and KPIs and measurables standpoint, but the rocks, the initiatives that those special projects that you implemented, to try to blast a bottleneck, you know, to try to make an issue go away forever. And so that's why that that rhythm is important, you're gonna do the same thing with rev ups, right?

Joe
This is also really important, because if you look at our growth matrix, there's a lot that can and should be done to properly implement rev ops. And it can be overwhelming. And quite honestly, it takes a year, two years, it can take companies a long time to get it all dialed in. And once you have a baseline for each of the different, you know, suggestions that we make, you're going to want to go back and make them better over time, too. And so the, it can be overwhelming, the best way to do it is to chunk it down into 90 day cycles. And even though we do actually create 12 month rolling, basically roadmaps that have at a high level, what we expect is going to happen, or we're going to accomplish in terms of Reb ops every month for 12 months. But we review that every three months. And we break it down in a really granular tactical sort of, you know, week by week playbook every quarter, every 90 days. And, you know, you'd be surprised at how often what you thought you were going to do six, seven months from now, when you get there, it's no longer relevant, or it's no longer the bottleneck.

Frank
Yeah, so that reminds me just to do have an analogy here. So when I was in the Marine Corps, going through basic training, or combat training, I forget which one it was. But one of the things they taught us how to do is like, if you were trying to map to a particular destination, on the map, what you would do is you would look at the the map you had, and you would try to identify in the landscape that you see out, as far as your eyes can see, you would try to identify a point and then orient the map with your compass and whatnot. And so what you would do is you would say, okay, that's ultimately where we're trying to go. But, you know, we can only see so far. And so we would, we would click, you know, visually, onto a point on the map, and what we could physically see. And then we would set a point that we would, you know, we would march towards. And so what you would do is you'd march towards that point, and then what you would do is you would stop, and then you would look around, and then you would recalibrate. Right. And so what you end up what ends up happening is it never never ends up being a straight line, right to the destination. It ends up being these like little zigzags because you end up every you know, recalibrating at different points and because you look up, you look up and say okay, let's reclick let's let's recalibrate, on on what We can now see. And to your point, like, yes, you you map out this 12 month roadmap, but your granular details really only 90 days, because things change. And there's just it's absolutely pointless to do annual plans that have granular details beyond 90 days, it's just so pointless, you're literally wasting your time.

Joe
You know, I like your example. And I think any travel aside from maybe an actual car ride on the road that's very prescribed, you have to follow the road that was laid out before you. Any travel requires that, you know, sailing requires that you had your coordinates for a while, then you have to get out the charts and you have to recharge and you have to make sure you're back on course. And flying is the same way. And I think that this is kind of like that. This is like a long travel with some unknowns, a lot of unknowns. There's a lot of slipperiness, in business, a lot of things change, there's unexpected things that come up, and you need to be able to pivot. And so rather than making big long plans, you know, maybe map out a rolling 12 months, but be prepared to be on the rhythm of 90 days. Couple other rhythms. You mentioned the weekly meetings. Yeah, so we play around a lot with this. But I think what seems to be working best is to have a strategic check in every two weeks. So get in the rhythm of every two weeks, you're doing a strategic check in with the stakeholders, right? So that would be not necessarily anybody doing the actual work. But the people who have a vested interest in seeing the results of the work, you're checking in with them, making sure that you know, at the top of the month, you are all in alignment in terms of what's going to be executed that month, and then halfway through checking to see if one progress is being made. But two, is it still relevant? And two weeks doesn't sound like a long time. And it's actually not really long time. But there are some campaign type initiatives, especially on the marketing side of DevOps, that you do need to be checking in saying, Is this still relevant? Are we poised to hit what we thought we were going to hit in terms of KPIs? And if not, let's pivot quickly. So those strategic check ins, the rhythm is two weeks, or every two weeks rather, tactical check ins every single week, right? tactical check ins should bring together some representative from the sales team, from the marketing team, and hopefully from the service team, so that you can all say, Are we all focused on what we should be this week? And what kind of progress have we made to whatever it is create a new campaign create a new set of assets or docs? You know, you've got to be on a weekly cadence for that.

Frank
Yeah, that's important that kind of like sprint mentality, right? Hey, we're, we've got this initiative We're marching towards for 90 days, you know, what are we doing this week? And are we holding each other accountable to that?

Joe
So rhythms in EOS, there are rhythms that should be adhere to in rev ops as well?

Frank
Yeah. Because it's not enough to just say, Hey, we like the idea of rev ops. Let's have a rev Ops, you know, analyst. And that's it. Right? You know, that it's definitely, very, very much parallels EOS, which is why I like this topic.

Joe
Right rhythms. Let's move on to the scorecard that us score.

Frank
Yeah. So in EOS, you have a scorecard, which is meant for a weekly review. So this is largely what's being reviewed weekly. And in the, in the bi-weekly meetings as well. you're reviewing that scorecard. And, and in EOS, which you're measuring, you're measuring? here's the here's the thought experiment of, of what best describes the scorecard, the thought experiment is, okay, if you Mr. or Mrs. entrepreneur, or on an island with no communication. And, you know, someone arrives once a week and hands you a piece of paper, of things that have happened in the past week in the business that can be measured, what numbers would you want to see? And so it's a combination of snapshot numbers. cash on hand, for example, is not a it's not necessarily how much cash in the set past seven days, it's like, what is the current cash on hand? That's like a snapshot number. And then some of it, some of those numbers are what transpired in the last seven days only, like, how many new appointments did we get? How many new customers did we get, and so on. And so whatever those numbers are in your business, you want to make sure that those are on your scorecard. And they need to be a combination of both lagging indicators, as well as leading indicators. And that's the difference between KPIs and metrics, by the way, like your KPIs are going to be the numbers you take to the bank. Those are like the currency within the business. Like if you're in sales, the currency is either going to be number of new contracts signed, or it's going to be value of contract signed, whatever is important to your business, there's like a number or two no more, and that's the currency for that role. And so those are your, your KPIs, and oftentimes, they're lagging indicators. Now, your leading indicators are more often metrics. Those are the things that, you know, they're not the currency. They're not the thing you bank on. They're not the thing that you actually like. You can say, Hey, I made 37 You know, outreaches this week, like, who cares, but it's an important indicator, because that lets you know, the likelihood of the KPI being hit. So your scorecard is going to be a combination of both leading and lagging indicators. And rev Ops, no, no difference, you should have the exact same thing for rebels. In fact, what we recommend is to make sure that it aligns with the life cycle. Marketing, the life cycle driven component of rev ops is, we recommend that you break that down into relationship stages that your buyers have with your brand from stranger all the way to fan. And you have KPIs for each one of those stages. And then supporting metrics. Those are the things that need to be on your rev up scorecard, if that makes sense. So for example, when we say qualifies is a relationship level. What are the KPIs? Well, you might have two KPIs in there. You might have mq ELLs, you might have SQL, but then you might have supporting metrics, right? And your supporting metrics might be, you know, how many, you know, what was our conversion rate, from one stage to the next? What was our number of

Joe
downloads or whatever you're watching,

Frank
right? Like you people would exactly, there's so many other things that you could be tracking that would clue you in as to whether or not you're going to create an M QL. Correct, and so on. So at each of those relationship stages, you want to have the one or two KPIs that are the currency of that stage, the biggest outcome of that stage, then everything else is the metrics. So that's how you're going to do the scorecard and Reb Ops, is by the relationship stages.

Joe
And by the way, you can go back and listen to one of our previous episodes, I don't know the number, but we do talk about all of those KPIs, all of those metrics, at least as a recommendation. And they're going to be specific to your business. But that would be a really great start, but goes getting into DevOps and you want to create the scorecard.

Frank
But those relationship stages are we define those very specifically. And so to your point, go listen to that episode, because we'll talk about the KPIs as examples, and it might change for your organization. But those relationship stages We absolutely do have prescribed. Oh, yeah, suggested way that you measure that within Revlon. Right.

Joe
Okay, so that's a scorecard. Let's move on to the leadership team.

Frank
Yeah, so in EOS, it, you know, they make a recommendation that your initial leadership team is kind of the integrator, and someone who owns marketing sales, someone who owns finance admin, someone who owns operations. So the kind of minimum leadership team that they define in EOS is four people. Now, as that grows, the leadership team sometimes is the marketing sales roles broken out into separate sales, separate marketing, and then finance admin, sometimes it's broken out into separate finance and separate admin. And then ultimately, eventually, the integrator is broken out to visionary and integrator in the early stages of EOS, especially when you're a small company, you don't need a visionary, dedicated role. Most small companies need very little time spent on the visionary side, they need to like, roll up their sleeves and execute, right? sub 10 million, definitely some time spent in visionary, but not nearly as much as when you get to, let's say 20 million and 50 million. Okay. So that's kind of the how EOS starts out defining the leadership team. So in rev Ops, very similarly, you're going to have people to find a cost strategy, content, engagement, and platform, those are the four major role areas that we define in our playbook to Rev ops. And so in the Strategy Team, I'm not going to go through every role, by the way, but in the Strategy Team, that's going to be your rev ops champion, or your rev ops integrator to kind of draw parallel to, to rev Ops, or that might be the the Reb ops visionary if you will, right, if we're drawing parallels to Eos. And then you have, you know, the head of the business, you have the head of marketing, head of sales, head of service, that makes up the Strategy Team. And then in content, you have people who are strategist, you have people who are producers, you have subject matter experts on your team need to join the content team, you move into engagement, those are people who mobilize content and offers make sure that the information is in front of the right people at the right time. So those are advertising people, those are email marketing people, and so on. Then finally, your platform, people in the platform people are those people that will implement a lot of the technical stuff that is being produced by either the content or the, you know, engagement teams. And so they'll they'll implement a lot and also be a right hand by the way to the rev Ops, strategist. In that, they'll be setting up a lot of the analytics, the rev ops analytics that that scorecard that we just talked about, they're the ones that will help make that come to life, technically. And so it's really important you have someone on that side who understands all the tech who understands all the tools, who can really be the glue for the rest of those three functions.

Joe
But one of the things I see people getting most excited about from that role is their ability to create dashboards and maintain In desperate, yeah, because dashboards are one of the most important things for an executive team to understand whether or not rev ops is really doing what it's supposed to be doing. And, you know, just like EOS, US outlines, and he touched on this, but different levels. So as your business grows, you have different makeups of this team. And in the beginning, there's a few people that are wearing multiple hats, and they're kind of maybe categorical, they're, they're doing similar types of roles that apply to, you know, their discipline or their department. But right, but it's multiple hats. And as the, you know, as the company grows, you start putting those hats on individual people who are dedicated to those roles, very similar in rev ops. You know, I think if if we were to make a recommendation of somebody just getting started, that doesn't have all the resources and only maybe a person or two to do this, maybe you have someone who's running the strategic side of it. And then maybe you have someone who would align with our platform area that actually can pick up all of the other tasks in engagement in content as well. So it'd be a real like, probably a marketer, jack of all trades,

Frank
but but definitely leaning more of a technical person.

Joe
Yeah, like a martec.

Frank
Yeah, that's probably I agree with you that that's definitely if you were to, like, want to, like start with a streamlined team, you need the Reb ops champion, slash director, slash strategist, you

Joe
need someone who can speak business speak,

Frank
and have and help help understand what the data is telling them and to help define that next analyst. Yeah, right, exactly.

Joe
And then you need someone who's just rolls up their sleeves and get it done and knows how to do a little bit of SEO and a little bit of paid advertising, a little bit of video editing and content creation. I mean, they really, they're not going to do all of it perfect, but they're going to get a little bit of everything going for you. And as you grow, you can start to put those hats on, you know, an actual dedicated SEO person and a dedicated Google Ads person, you know,

Frank
exactly. And I would say that the bulk of their time should be spent supporting the rev ops strategist from a dashboarding analytic standpoint, getting technical implementations done segmentations of workflows, you know, things of that nature. And so if, if you need content produced, this person probably isn't going to originate content, but they can help mobilize it, they can help edit it, they can help do some of those things and get it published. But But those are probably I would agree with you those those two hires right there, if you don't have them, that's where I would start. I'd start with those two people. And there's a number of ways to get that done. Here's a lot of toot our own horn right to like shameless self promotion, that's kind of what we do for companies is we kind of provide fractional people for those two roles. Right?

Joe
Yeah. And kind of going back to one of our earlier points that we made back to rhythms. If you've got those two people, then the strategic person, the analyst, the business focus person is meeting every other week with you know, whether it's the CEO or any of the stakeholders, and maybe at the head of each department, whereas that more integrator implementer person to jack of all trades, is in on the weekly meetings doing more of the tactical updates, presenting what was built, the numbers that are coming in that kind of thing. Yeah,

Frank
yeah, exactly. Great. Okay. So

Joe
let's talk about process, the process that EOS brings and the process that rev ops brings. Okay.

Frank
Yeah, so I mean, one of the things like if just to clarify what so when EOS talks about process, they don't necessarily mean like their process for Eos. They mean, you need to have process in your business. Like, that's the big thing that they're saying is EOS says, You need to have your processes defined, like that's one of the major components of EOS, yes, EOS has a process unto itself. But in this context, they mean, you have to define processes in your business, right? If you want to be successful. So similarly, with rev Ops, you it's not enough to just have the analyst and like, that's it and then have this mindset that, okay, where we're doing DevOps, and we're looking at complete lifecycle data. That's one piece of it, the process for how you're going to go about engaging buyers across the entire lifecycle, how you're going to go about identifying where the bottlenecks are, how you're going to go about very specific meeting rhythms. Those are the processes that you have to have inside of RevOps for it to work for it to function. It's not just hiring a person who says, Yes, I'm a rev up strategist. Like that's not that's just a people component.

Joe
I mean, if you're a business person, and you've ever had to work in any software like Salesforce or Marketo, or you know, any of these kind of go to sort of business software's. I think you've probably had the experience where they sell it to you saying, hey, you can do everything, and it's the magic bullet for a lot of, you know, what you're trying to accomplish in your business and the truth is, it can be, but once you get in there, it's the Wild Wild West. You have to make it your own. You have to have process Have your own to put in place to make that even work. And I think that that is, you know, big frustration that I even hear with HubSpot all the time. We're big HubSpot fans. HubSpot sells this software that can do everything and they promise the world. And it can. But most people buy it and open it up and say, I don't even know where to start, because it's kind of like a blank page.

Frank
Yeah, I mean, I think we've used this analogy before, right. But like, you know, if I handed you a fighter jet, like that is a like, highly technical, highly capable piece of machinery. That is just like mind boggling at the capabilities. But you're without a trained pilot, without a plan as to what you're going to do with that thing. It's kind of just a hunk of metal sitting there. And that's what a lot of these softwares are. They're just kind of like a hunk of an investment just sitting there. And they themselves don't do anything. And so you can hire the person. Okay, that's another component. Right? So you've got, you've got the software, which we bucket under platform, now you hire the person, now you got people, but then you need process. And that's the thing that makes it all work together,

Joe
I'm going to use a different analogy. Yeah, this is I like think of it more as like a erector set, or Legos, where you see the picture on the box. And it's a really cool castle, and you get it. And it's just a bunch of blocks. And you can have a person who loves playing with Legos, and you can have him putting it together. But unless they have that instruction booklet, right, with the process outline on how to get from a whole bunch of blocks up to that castle, you will build something, but it might not be the castle in that box. It'll be something Frankenstein. And I think that's what that we're talking about here. Right. You've got your platform, maybe your Salesforce, your HubSpot, whatever it is, you might even have the people who kind of know how to tinker in there. But even if they're actually really good at it, if they don't have a process, a business process to emulate in a software world, it's just not going to do anything for you. Yeah,

Frank
exactly. Yep. Yep. so critical to having success. And that's why you'll hear us talk often about process platform people, it's those three things, you have to have considerations in those three areas, if you want this to function, if you want this to go. And I would actually suggest, no matter what you're doing in business, whether you're running rev Ops, you're running EOS, you're running, you know what, name it, process, platform people, those are the three areas you have to consider and have to have your good answers for and good solutions for.

Joe
By the way, there's a lot of process that is, of course, customed, to individuals, businesses, but there's a lot of process that doesn't need to be reinvented every single time. And that's what we work through with a lot of our clients. Over the years, we've seen how a lot of businesses operates. And we see the differences and the similarities. And we pulled out what's similar. And we've put together processes that pretty much any business can pull plug and play with a few tweaks for them themselves, but they're ready to go. And that's, you know, a huge part of our methodology.

Frank
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Joe
Cool, I want to wrap it up with the people analyzer. So this is number five.

Frank
Okay, people analyzer. So in EOS, again, this this episode today is for people who are familiar with Eos. So you know what people analyzer is, it's where you're looking at your people on a regular basis, it's either quarterly or semi annually, whatever your rhythm is in there. And what you're doing as you're analyzing what EOS calls that gets it once it capacity to do at GW C, and you're also then measuring each person against your core values. So those are the two data sets, if you will, that you're you're measuring on each person. So similarly, in rev Ops, you need to be looking at your players on your rev ops team and saying, Do we have everyone we need in the right roles? And is each person providing the the outcome that that role is supposed to be generating? Right? Like, it's not enough to just say, Oh, we have someone who's a subject matter expert as part of the content team. Okay. What does that mean, in terms of the value they're supposed to provide? How do you measure that. And so you need to be doing that with every single person on your rev ups team to make sure that everyone's contributing, and everyone understands what their outcome is supposed to be. If you're not looking at that on a regular basis. You know, this will just be like any other effort, and it'll just, it'll wane. And it'll fizzle out. And you'll wonder why you didn't get anywhere with it. Right? So the measuring your people part is really critical component to rev ups, just just like an EOS.

Joe
Yeah. And I think doing it, again, back to rhythms, doing it on some sort of regular cadence is important too, especially to as your business is growing. Because, you know, when we talked about earlier that you might start with just a couple people wear multiple hats. You've got to be checking in regularly to see when is it time to pull a hat off and put on someone else because otherwise you're also going to get burnout. Again, there's a lot, a lot that needs to be done to properly implement RevOps over time. And it can be real easy to just say, Well, they've got it but there are They're burning out.

Frank
Yeah, by the way, I, we may have discussed this on a past episode. But I am a huge non fan of the multiple hat concept and non fan. I'm a huge detractor from the idea of wearing multiple hats. I realized in small businesses that just has to happen to some degree. But as much as possible, the business model should be built so that way multiple hats aren't required. Because I think what happens is, I think small business owners, when I say small business owners, I'm talking like, you know, kind of run 10 20 million and under, I think small business owners often wear the multiple hats thing is like a badge of pride, like a pride, you know, that like, Hey, we wear multiple hats, we roll up our sleeves, we get stuff done, and, and we're scrappy. And I think that's cool. But I also think it's an excuse to not focus and also think it's an excuse to not make tough decisions that need to be made and improve the business model. So where possible, once you grow beyond a certain stage, maybe, you know, a couple of few million bucks, like this idea of multiple hats really shouldn't be a cultural thing in your company. And you need to be building a business where multiple hats is not required. And so what that means is, if you can't afford to hire all this separate hats, then that's your clue that something about the model is not right, whether it's the model of the on the sgma side, how you go about selling and supporting the offering, or whether it's the offering itself. And so that those are huge clues that something's not working.

Joe
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I know that the response, I could imagine a lot of people feeling or giving, because I've heard it many times as well. I mean, the money's just not there, right? You just don't have enough money to put all the right people in the right spot. So what would you say to that? You can't always control that part. No,

Frank
but I would say you have to go back and look at your, I'll go to the offering side the product in operations, right? I think you have to go back to whatever your product is. And you have to figure out, you know, are you just merely generating revenue? And just to sustain like, this beast? Where there's really no like net surplus? At the end? Are you just really just feeding a beast? Or where can you actually look to refine the offering refine the product such that it becomes world class, and you just do that thing? Right? Because so many times organizations just get caught up in feeding the beast? Yeah. And it's like, oh, yeah, we don't have enough revenue. We can't afford to get additional people, we've got all these people doing all these things. Well step back and wonder why you've got all these people doing all these things?

Joe
Yeah, I mean, sometimes you are keeping on staff, full time people that are servicing a very small and insignificant portion of the business, right. And if you were to get rid of those staff, yeah, you'd also have to get rid of that portion of the business. But you might be able to free up funds to double down on what is actually creating real growth for you.

Frank
Yeah, we talked about this in the last episode, but I believe where most organizations go wrong is they don't obsess about their product enough. And obsess about making it the very best thing on planet Earth. Because if you do that, then your clients, depending on your model, they either buy again sooner, or they'll stay longer. If you're on a recurring model, your margins will improve your efficiencies will improve, you'll have better results for your clients that idea of customer success, which means what they're going to tell a friend, there's your referrals, they'll respond positively when you ask for referrals, they'll happily participate in case studies, what are case studies, that's content to go get more customers? Right? They'll leave you reviews positively on websites, what's that, that's another inbound opportunity to bring new new awareness to your brand. So all of those things happen as a byproduct of obsessing in operations, before you obsess in sales and marketing. Right. And again, just to clarify, so they're in the business world, sometimes people hear operations, and they think that means kind of like, overarching over the whole business. But in it, another segment of the business world views operations as the product, which is what EOS aligns on so when you hear us say operations, we mean, whatever your product is, that's operations. Okay. So when I say that, I mean, focusing in your operations and figuring out how to make that world class. Yeah, and what's working, what's not working. And if you have people wearing multiple hats in there, you know, people are stretched, then you've got a, you've got a model problem, that's a business model problem, give to fix that. Okay, and so again, when you're a few million and under, you're going to have multiple hats. It's kind of inevitable, because it's just you're not big enough to have all the right like, the proper infrastructure of an established business. But beyond that, there should be no excuse. why you've got a culture of multiple hats. Yeah. So highly encourage you to if you're doing that, take a step back.

Joe
Awesome. Alright, we covered rhythms, right mapped rhythms from EOS over to Reb Ops, we talked about scorecard Kind of the leadership team and the rev ops team, we talked about the process and the people analyzer. So I think at the end of the day, all of this culminates in, if you are a process minded person, or if you are looking for ways to not just be fighting out there in the wild, wild west, us is probably already on your radar, if it's not good, check it out. And rev ops is going to help you with that in a huge way. So if you haven't, you know, dived any deeper than this podcast, it's time for you to do that.

Frank
Yeah. And especially in EOS, right, they have what's called the marketing box, and certainly Rev ops is bigger than marketing. But that's probably the the place where he would like, if you were to pierce a hole in that box, and then say, what's under that? And what's the world underneath that this is probably where rev ops is going to come in, mostly write down your V to write that marketing box. Most organizations don't have an answer for like, okay, what's the, what's the implementation of that look like? Because on the VTL, remember, like when they say marketing, it's less marketing. It's more about strategic positioning and whatnot. For our non EOS, there's what is v2, that's the vision traction organizer. And so, a one page document two sides, that allows you to, at a high level, establish your vision. And then on the other side, which is your traction, the plans for this year in this quarter. Okay, and it really valuable document. We use a version of it here at our firm. But that marketing box on the vision side, it's less about marketing. It's more really about like, positioning and digit brand positioning, if you will. And so oftentimes people who are running us don't really have an answer for how do you go about doing that? How do you make that come to life? That's where Reb ops comes in.

Joe
Hmm, yeah, I love that. Awesome.

Frank
Yeah. So look, if you're, if you're interested in this idea of like, Hey, you run Eos. And, you know, what would it take to run rev ops in your organization, we'd love to help you out. Just get in touch with us. We've got some links in the show notes. You can also just email me direct frank@digitopia.agency frank@digitopia.agency, we'd be happy to set some time up with one of our strategies to help you identify, you know, who could be your rev up champion who could be your implementer just at a basic level, if you want to get started, Who could that be on your team, and we'll help you identify that no hard sales pitch at all. But if you'd like some help like that, get in touch with me and I'd be happy to set you up with a strategist on my team. But until next time when we get back to you with our next episode. Have a great one and we'll see you soon.

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