Simple Operational Framework Ep 212

In the Gym Secrets podcast, the host emphasizes the significance of operations in entrepreneurial success, particularly in the online fitness industry. He outlines a framework for structuring operations by listing desired outcomes and necessary activities, which are then allocated into time blocks on an employee's schedule. He illustrates this with an example of managing a coach's day, balancing tasks like sales calls, onboarding, and client fulfillment. The host also suggests conducting time studies to increase efficiency and accountability, ultimately arguing that operational excellence, though often overlooked in favor of marketing and sales, is a key driver of profitability and business scalability.

• Operations are often overlooked but are essential for a business's success.
• Entrepreneurs tend to focus more on marketing and sales rather than operational components.
• Effective operations are a key differentiator between successful and less successful businesses, especially in the internet space.

"I don't get a lot of questions about operations. They just become obvious that they are a problem within a lot of the people that we help serve."

This quote highlights the common neglect of operations in businesses and their importance in addressing issues that arise.

"The people who are better at operating are the ones who make more money."

This quote establishes a direct correlation between operational proficiency and financial success in business.

"It becomes very clear that typically the entrepreneur has that promotion type of character traits and doesn't dedicate the time to study the operational components of the business, which typically are the reasons that someone is or is not successful."

This quote emphasizes that entrepreneurs often focus on promotion and neglect the study of operations, which is critical for success.

• Start by listing desired outcomes.
• Consider business as a pipeline from 'click to close to resell.'
• Identify clear activities that need to happen at each stage of the sales process.
• Allocate activities and time based on ratios and inflow.

"I think the easiest way to structure operations is, first, list out the things, the desired outcomes that need to happen."

This quote suggests a practical approach to structuring operations by focusing on desired outcomes.

"And so if you have, like with our gyms, a four step sales process or three step sales process that's happening, there are clear activities that need to happen, right?"

This quote explains the need for identifying specific activities within a sales process to ensure operations are structured effectively.

• Determine the amount of time required for each client interaction.
• Use ratios to plan the number of specific activities needed.
• Schedule activities and time for each role within the company.
• Use a calendar to allocate tasks and manage time efficiently.

"So for a typical client, we might know that it takes about two minutes per client per day. And if we know that a coach has 3 hours, like we want to say winner cap a coach at 100, then we know that that coach is going to be able to do that within x amount of time, right?"

This quote explains how to calculate the time allocation for client interactions and manage a coach's workload effectively.

"And so what happens is what you should do when you're creating your company is when you're creating each of the roles that are going to support you. You need to look at a calendar and look at what the times of day that this person is going to be working and what they're going to be doing with each hour of their day."

This quote advises on the importance of planning and allocating specific times for tasks to each role in the company for efficient operations.

• The speaker provides an example to illustrate the operational structure.
• Online fitness businesses operate with a specific set of activities and time allocations.

"Alright, so I'm going to give you an example to hopefully flesh this out a little bit."

This quote indicates the speaker's intention to provide a concrete example to clarify the operational structure discussed.

• The process of running a gym business involves lead generation, lead nurturing, sales calls, onboarding, and ascension conversations.
• Sales calls to new customers and prospects are essential for acquiring new gym members.
• Onboarding includes a nutritional orientation and a walkthrough of the app and technology used by the gym.
• Ascension conversations are aimed at selling continuity to the customers, ensuring they remain engaged with the gym's services.
• Time management and allocation is critical, with a suggested 1.5 hours per week per client for sales, nutrition, and ascension activities.
• Scaling the business requires delegation and the division of tasks among different people to avoid overburdening a single individual.
• Additional activities include recruiting coaches and fulfilling the service, which may involve a few minutes per day per client.
• Scheduling for coaches should be strategic, with time blocked out for various activities and considering the availability of new customers.

care of, right? So if lead gen is being taken care of and lead nurture is being taken care of. And I'm saying that because it'll make the example simpler, but also because that's what we do in our company for gyms, is if those two things are taken care of, then there's really not a lot that needs to happen, right?

This quote highlights the importance of lead generation and nurturing in gym business operations, implying that when these are managed well, the business runs more smoothly.

So first you need to have first sales calls to get new customers talking to prospects. Then you need an onboarding, all right? That onboarding is to be typically a nutritional orientation and also walking through the app and the tech and the things that need to happen.

The speaker outlines the initial steps in the customer acquisition process, emphasizing the need for sales calls and a comprehensive onboarding process that includes nutritional guidance and tech support.

The third thing that will need to occur will be some sort of ascension conversation, which is going to sell them into continuity.

Ascension conversations are identified as a crucial step in the customer journey, aimed at promoting long-term engagement with the gym's services.

Now, every customer is going to have one of these things, right? And so if you're selling, here it is, you're selling ten people a week, then if you're going to maintain that flow, then if you know that your front end sale is 30 minutes, your nutrition appointment is 30 minutes and then your ascension is 30 minutes, then for every client that you're bringing in, you have an hour and a half per week that's going to be allocated.

This quote breaks down the time investment required for each new client, suggesting a total of 1.5 hours per week for sales, nutrition, and ascension activities.

Now you can divide that up between different people, but the keys to scaling is that eventually it becomes too much for one person to do all of those activities and then you start blocking entire pieces of that type of activity to the next person.

The speaker discusses the importance of task delegation in business scaling, indicating that as the business grows, tasks should be divided among team members to manage workload effectively.

The only other activity that's going to be there would be either recruiting coaches and obviously the fulfillment. And so let's say that the average customer is going to take five minutes today. I said two earlier, but let's just say it's five minutes a day, right? And if somebody has whatever it is, five minutes is a lot, let's say two for math's sake. So 200 minutes, if you had 100 clients per day is what's going to be allocated. So that's whatever. There's 3 hours and 20 minutes.

This quote addresses the additional responsibilities of recruiting coaches and fulfilling services, along with an estimation of the time required for client interaction each day.

So you'd look at someone's schedule. Now that's obviously in a perfect scenario, but I'd look at one of my coaches schedules and say, okay, we're going to do 90 minutes in the morning and we're going to do 90 minutes in the afternoon and we're going to block those times out. So just like that, we had 8 hours a day, now I have 5 hours is left.

Time blocking is presented as a strategy for organizing a coach's schedule, with specific portions of the day allocated to different activities, ensuring efficient use of their workday.

What else do I want this person to do? Well, I probably want them to take the onboarding conversations with the new customers who are coming in, right? This is a coach and I know that if we generate ten new customers a week on average, then that's going to take 5 hours per week, which means I can block one to 2 hours a day for that and be totally fine, right?

The speaker contemplates the distribution of tasks, such as onboarding new customers, within a coach's schedule, accounting for the time required based on the average number of new customers per week.

• The speaker promotes their book available on Amazon, which is a resource for the community and a way to build rapport with potential future business partners.
• The book's success is highlighted by the number of positive reviews and the effort put into writing it.
• The promotion serves as a strategic move to establish credibility and offer value to the listeners.

Hey guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book on Amazon. It's called 100 million dollar offers.

The speaker introduces their book, which is available on Amazon, as a resource for podcast listeners who may be new to the show.

At over 8005 star reviews, it has.

The speaker boasts about the high number of positive reviews for their book, implying its quality and the value it provides to readers.

Almost a perfect score. You can get it for Kindle. The reason I bring it up is that I put over a thousand hours into writing that book, and it's my biggest give to our community.

The dedication and effort put into writing the book are emphasized, portraying it as a significant contribution to the community and a testament to the speaker's expertise.

So it's my very shameless way of trying to get you to like me more and ultimately make more dollars so that later on in your business career, I can potentially partner with you.

The speaker candidly acknowledges the promotional aspect of mentioning the book, linking it to the broader goal of fostering relationships and potential business partnerships with the audience.

• Discusses the importance of defining roles based on operational needs.
• Emphasizes the need to evaluate an employee's current utilization and potential to take on more responsibilities.
• Explains the concept of structuring roles by considering customer inflow and the activities required post-sale.
• Highlights the expectation of efficiency from employees and the implications for daily workload.

Do we want this person to create content? Do we want this person to do outreach? Do we want this person to. Gosh, do we want to expand this person's capacity?

This quote reflects the process of determining what tasks an employee should be assigned and whether there is room for expanding their responsibilities.

And so that would be 6 hours a day for a coach. Now, at that point, this coach is handling basically everything post the initial sale, right? They're managing the ongoing fulfillment, they're managing the onboarding activities for these new customers, and they're managing the back end meetings with them. To convert them into continuity.

The quote outlines the duties of a coach in the context of handling post-sale activities, which include ongoing fulfillment, onboarding new customers, and managing meetings to ensure customer continuity.

• Discusses the strategic aspect of planning operations by forecasting customer inflow and the time required for various meetings.
• Outlines how to calculate the time allocation for customer-related activities based on the number of new customers per week.
• Suggests that understanding these factors can lead to a clear definition of an ideal workday for each role.

So if we know each of those meetings takes another 30 minutes each per customer, if we know that we get ten new customers per week, then we know that's going to be another hour. So 10 hours per week total.

This quote demonstrates how to calculate the additional time needed for customer meetings based on the expected number of new customers per week.

And so if you know what your inflow is and you know what your base of customers is and your attrition, you can very accurately back into what an ideal day looks like for each of the roles within your business.

The quote emphasizes that by understanding customer inflow, base, and attrition, a business can accurately determine the ideal workload and structure for each role.

• Highlights the issue of inefficiencies that arise as businesses scale, leading to employees being underutilized.
• Encourages questioning employees about their reported busyness and examining whether their activities align with business goals.
• Discusses the possibility of employees engaging in non-value-adding activities without malicious intent, due to a lack of understanding of what is valuable.

Also, the bigger you get, the more you will find inefficiencies where you're starting these partial roles, they're getting full time pay for halftime work.

This quote points out that as a business grows, it may encounter inefficiencies such as employees receiving full-time pay for part-time work.

Why are you telling me that I need to hire another coach? What else are you doing that is not within these parameters?

The quote challenges the notion of hiring additional staff by analyzing current employees' utilization and questioning whether their tasks fall within the defined role parameters.

• Considers the identification of operational issues and whether they can be resolved with additional processes or by eliminating them.
• Discusses the potential to increase employee workload by refining focus and adding more clients to their roster.
• Reflects on the speaker's approach to operations as a combination of activities, units of time, and expected customer inflow.

But if the thing that they're doing is a core activity, like, I got to check in on these people, I got to add them to this. It takes this long to get the documents back, or sometimes we have these password issues, then you can see, is this something that we can fix operationally within an additional process, or is this something that we can either throw out and then get this person to refocus and then increase how much work they're doing by adding more clients to their roster, et cetera?

This quote discusses evaluating whether an employee's current tasks are core activities and if there are operational fixes that can streamline the process or if tasks can be removed to refocus the employee's efforts on more valuable work.

• Operations are crucial for the efficiency of a business.
• Detailed planning of activities and their duration is necessary for transparency and efficiency.
• The repetitive, often perceived as boring, work is what propels a company forward.
• Operations are influenced by the culture and tolerance of the leader.

"these are the activities that need to happen, and this is how long they should take, then it allows you to account for all the things that need to happen in the business and will ultimately allow you to have a more efficiently run shop."

The quote emphasizes the importance of knowing what needs to be done in a business and how long it should take, which leads to a more efficient operation.

• Operations are a key factor in why the most profitable businesses succeed.
• Companies that focus on operations tend to outperform those that do not.
• The diligence in operations can be a competitive advantage.

"But it is the reason that the people who make the most money make the most money."

This quote links the meticulous attention to operations directly with the ability to maximize profits.

• Business leaders often feel overwhelmed and lack insight into employees' activities.
• Structuring operations properly can provide clarity and reveal inefficiencies.
• Identifying non-essential tasks can improve business performance.

"So if you feel like you're constantly overwhelmed and you don't feel like you have transparency into what your people are doing, you're like, what are they doing all day? This is the activity that you can do that will give you immense clarity and transparency into what their actions are."

The speaker suggests that structured operations can alleviate feelings of being overwhelmed and provide insight into employees' actions.

• Implementing a time study can lead to heightened efficiency.
• Time studies hold employees accountable and can reveal unnecessary tasks.
• Time studies can also uncover dishonesty or inefficiencies in the workplace.

"You are never more efficient than when you do a time study."

This quote asserts that the act of conducting a time study can significantly increase work efficiency due to the accountability it creates.

• Operations should be designed based on desired outcomes and necessary activities.
• Understanding the volume of work can help determine when to create new roles.
• Operations help in predicting and preventing employee overwhelm.

"So that's kind of my mental framework for how I look at operations and how to structure them for different roles within the company is first look at the outcomes that you want, the activities you need to generate that outcome, how long those activities take per customer, per unit, and then you can extrapolate out, based on the volume, based on the inflow, what each role needs to do, and then at what points you will have breaking points where somebody will become overwhelmed and you need to create a new role."

This quote outlines the speaker's approach to structuring operations within a company, emphasizing the importance of aligning activities with desired outcomes and scaling roles appropriately.