Ep #83 – This week on the podcast, I’m joined by my good friend and colleague, Brian Keith, founder of Red Beard Consulting, author of “The Impact Framework,” and an expert in systemizing operations for businesses. Brian helps companies scale their profits and impact through auditing their existing systems and making adjustments geared for efficiency and automation.
In this interview, Brian shares specific examples of systems he sees among the world’s largest businesses, and how he helps implement these types of systems in smaller companies looking to scale to seven figures and beyond.
Looking to boost your business success and push it to the next level? The benefits of having a business coach in your corner. Talk to the Predictable Profits team today for a free strategy session.
Full Transcript:
Charles Gaudet (0s):
You are listening to the Beyond to seven Figures podcast with Charles Gaudet. Welcome to the show.
Introducer (8s):
Growing a business can be hard, but it shouldn’t be a struggle. The Beyond Seven Figures podcast is all about helping you build, grow, and scale a successful business. Learn the stories and the strategies from top level CEOs and business owners from some of the fastest growing companies around the world. Here’s your host, the expert in Predictable Profits, Charles Gaudet.
Charles Gaudet (32s):
Hey ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the Beyond Seven Figures podcast. With me today is a good friend of mine. His name is Brian Keith, and I bring him on to speak with you today because Brian and I have known each other for a number of years, and we’ve worked together and helped our clients make millions of dollars through the culmination of both of our brain efforts combined. Brian is one of the smartest gentlemen that I know when it comes to systems and processes and just simplifying business in general. So, I know many companies have taken their business to a point from word of mouth referrals for one, but also just hard work and grit.
Charles Gaudet (1m 16s):
So today’s conversation. It is all going to be about “how do we get beyond that hard work and grit?” How do we get beyond word of mouth and referrals, and now our business to go to the next level? So, Brian, my friend, welcome to the show.
Brian Keith (1m 30s):
Thank you for Charles. Great to be here. I want to talk about the most recent person I sent you, because when I send you business it’s because someone, they say some things… And they are the questions they ask, or the complaints they have, like this is part of my brain is starts thinking, ah, this is a Charles person. That’s where this person should go, right? And I just thought, Oh, of all the things you could talk about, it’s so interesting to think, “what does someone say, where I go? Oh yeah, that has, that person has a Charles problem. They have too little Predictable Profits in their life.” This particular guy – he had a business that was already at, he’d like broken into seven figures, but he was stuck. He was stuck, and he didn’t know why he was stuck. There was something like a dozen reasons he might be stuck, but it wasn’t clear.
Brian Keith (2m 15s):
And he didn’t feel stuck in the past, but something had happened and he got stuck. He wasn’t sure how to get to that next level. It wasn’t clear. Was it a problem with how he interacted with his team? Was it a problem with how the team interacted with each other? Was he no longer a fit for the market? Was his advertising not working? There’s all these different processes, and he needed someone to go and give that laser view. And when I think about some of the people we’ve worked on together, me and you, that that was again a problem there, like there’s all of these things happening and we don’t actually know what’s working and what’s not working now, and it’s hard to see, “how do you get to where you want it to go?” It’s just not obvious so often.
Charles Gaudet (3m 1s):
Right? And actually that’s the thing. We get our businesses to such a point when we’re starting from scratch. Business is pretty simple, and then as we continue to build and grow our business it naturally becomes far more complex. And that old saying, “you can’t see the forest through the trees,” you have so many trees and so many complexities and so many things that are happening every time you turn around that, oftentimes you just need somebody to say, “Okay, help me kind of sort through everything that’s going on right here so I can see where the opportunities are.”
Charles Gaudet (3m 41s):
And even you and I have worked together on a number of different projects. And you know, one that comes to mind is the client had so many things happening in his business, and he was so focused on lead generation and so focused on sales and the bottom line, that when we started to look deep into what was going on inside of the business, we’re realizing that he had a number of credit cards that were failing and not being processed, just because he overlooked the expired credit cards that didn’t get processed. So he had lots of revenue that wasn’t being collected. He had a subscribers that became disengaged, that with a simple re-engagement campaign could have converted 30, 35% or more back into the funnel.
Charles Gaudet (4m 29s):
There were a manual tasks that he was doing on a regular basis, that if he had automated those tasks, that he would be able to pick up more time to focus on bigger things. Well, at the same time, that automation allowed him to reach more people and bring in more revenue more predictably. But these are the sorts of things that most people get so used to doing on a manual basis, and it’s so much hard work, that they lose focus of what can be automated, what could be process-driven, and where they can ultimately create the leverage in the business.
Brian Keith (5m 5s):
We become slaves to our success. I was writing this morning. I was writing about what is my perfect morning have to look like to get to the next level of my business. And this came about because I was coaching my fiancé, who has her own business, about where she wants to get to a financially and it’s an audacious goal, right? How are you going to get from where her businesses now to over there? And I said, “Okay.” I have all the questions we asked. This was the most important one. I said, “What are you willing to sacrifice to get to that next level?” And there’s all kinds of simple things like “I’m going to get up earlier,” or maybe you’re going to sacrifice time with your family. Like a lot of people do that. Maybe not intentionally, let’s hope, but there’s so many different parts of what we can do. And one thing she said, that she needs to just not be on her phone at all until 11:00 AM.
Brian Keith(5m 52s):
And I thought, “Well that’s so good.” Sacrifice the warm fuzzies we get from new information before, in her case, love, and I said the same thing for me. I need to have none of my information sources coming to my brain, except for books. Books are fine, but electronically, no information sources. And part of how I’ve operated… I’ve been in business since 2012. It’s 2021 now, so a little while, and I have my habits of my new information that have gotten me to a place that I’m happy with. And so looking at those and saying, “Well actually, maybe responding to people that have messaged me on Facebook, some of whom might be leads, maybe that’s not a good idea. It’s how I’ve gotten here, but I actually have, right now, I know I have a message from a lead in my Facebook inbox and I want to go listen to it, but I’m pretty sure that when I’m calm and relaxed and not looking at the exciting thing…
Brian Keith (6m 41s):
I’m pretty sure the having the discipline system of, for me, no new information before 11:00 AM, except for books that expand myself. Like right now, I’m reading tiny habits by BJ Fogg about habit change and environment design. Like that book is good. I can do that, but I don’t get to go… Nothing else. So, that’s a sacrifice that I probably need to make, though in the moment, I don’t want to make it. Why? I love the dopamine. I love the newness. I love the connection with friends. I love people. So giving up on that and saying, “I need to let that be in the past.” And then sacrificing.
Charles Gaudet (7m 21s):
Yeah. I like where you’re going with that. What we’re always trying to do is find more ways to bring more intentionality into our lives in that of our clients’ lives. And what you’re saying rings true. It’s very important because if you look at the average person, the average person is checking their email all the way until they fall asleep. They’re laying in the bed with their cell phone by their head, and the last thing that they do before they go to bed at night, is they check their email. And every once in a while, you’re going to get this email, and it could be completely just, you know, benign, nothing, but it requires a reply and you don’t end up replying because it’s a long reply, then that whole night you’re tossing and turning because you know you’ve got to get back to them, so it ruins your night’s sleep…
Charles Gaudet (8m 12s):
And then the next day… But then again, most people turn around before they even get out of bed, they’re reaching to the nightstand to pick up their phone, they’re checking their emails, and they’re doing this seven days a week. And so they’re constantly reacting to the different events, the communication, and so forth, and it doesn’t allow them to be operating at their peak mental state. And so, I know for myself, and I could put better rules around this, but I know for myself that I won’t check my email at all on the weekends. At all, at all, at all. I have a Slack channel specific for my clients that doesn’t go on my cell phone. The only time I respond to my Slack channel is going to be on my computer is on…
Charles Gaudet (8m 51s):
And my computer is only on from Monday through Friday under normal circumstances. Right? I won’t check my email until behind my desk and my to do lists are already outlined, I’ve created an intention for my day… After that, that I can check my email. After when I’m done for the day, at night and my computer gets shut down, I will not check my email. So, that’s it. At the end of the day, let’s say I go to meet the family for dinner at 5:00 PM, that’s it, no emails will be checked or responded to until the following day. And so we set these rules and these boundaries that allow our minds to expand and to think about how we’re going to solve different challenges or new opportunities or whatnot… That becomes prohibited when you’re constantly reacting to putting out fires, because you’re actually working for the fire, not working for the opportunity.
Brian Keith (9m 49s):
How many of us do not have these go-to systems in place in our personal lives, and yet magically believe that we’ll be able to have discipline to business lives, to take advantage of all the opportunities with that level of discipline, if we’re not willing to, in my case, take Instagram off my phone? Because Instagram… I’ve thought about my energy I spent on Instagram, which is not my main lead source, Facebook is my main lead source… But even Facebook, unless I’m at a convention, Facebook is not on my phone. Messenger is not on my phone because the ROI from time spent there is horrible. When I actually look, it’s entertaining as all get out and connecting with people has its own value, but I just had to take those apps off my phone, and my phone is almost never on. People call me and say, “I got your got your voicemail” because my phone’s off.
Brian Keith (10m 33s):
‘Cause it’s always off almost, because that is almost always going to distract me from something more important. And if listening to someone who wants to call me randomly is more important than something else, I wasted my time. Like I’ve not scheduled things, right. If whatever I’m doing is not more important than my phone.
Charles Gaudet (10m 51s)
And here’s what I found funny… So I’ve traveled the world studying centi-millionaires and billionaires and whatnot. And I’ve learned that you can almost look at how important a person is by how dependent they are in their inbox.
Charles Gaudet (11m 15s):
And the, the least successful people are in their inbox nonstop. They’re checking their email every 15 minutes, sometimes, you know, even more frequently than that. The centi-millionaires and the billionaires that I met, they don’t even go into their inbox. They have somebody else managing their email. There’s one particular person who is worth several hundred million dollars, he does have an email account, but there’s only a handful, maybe two handfuls of people that actually have that email address. Everything else has to be filtered through his assistant.
Charles Gaudet (12m 0s):
But they’re very, very disciplined… I had a mentor of mine that told me, “What’s the difference between you and Elon Musk?” And I said, “Well, for one I named my kids normal names,” and he’s like, “No, no, no, what is the real core difference?” And I said, “Yeah, I guess, I don’t know.” And he said, “Elon Musk has a natural Pareto brain. Elon Musk is always focused in on the most important activities that are going to drive the biggest amount of results and everything else he eliminates. And he’s extraordinarily disciplined. So, when we look at our lives… I start my day asking myself the question: what is the most important thing that I need to do today? And then I write it down. And at the end of the day, I have to answer the question: what is the most important thing that I did today?
Charles Gaudet (12m 51s):
And you know, that helps me stay a little bit more in that Pareto type of mindset. But if I was to ask most people, which, you know, I’ll ask my coaching clients, “What’s the most important thing that you did today?” In the very beginning, they realized, “man, I really didn’t do that much that was really important to move the needle on my business.”
Brian Keith (13m 18s):
Here’s my favorite tool for that. If you limit how often your working… Because some people, they treat… They have their core work time and they have their core family or other obligations time, and they let work sort of slide on over whenever it feels like it, they whoop, “I’m not doing anything this Saturday that I have to do. I’ll just go…” And I’m guilty of this, sometimes. “I’ll just go finish building the course on Saturday. No problem.” But instead of saying, “Well, what is the least I can work either this hour, this day, this week, this year?” Okay well, here’s the fun thing… Given where you want to go, and take however many hours someone is working right now, let’s say 60 hours a week. And say, “Okay, so if you have the same objectives, but you only had 40 hours, what would you either focus on or what would you stop doing?” Because sometimes you don’t even need to focus on what’s important. You can just, what you’re doing that… Like what, what would you cut off? Or an easy way is to say okay, well how many days a week do you work right now? Let’s say it’s five. Okay. So what if you stop working on Wednesdays, what would you do? What would change?
Brian Kieth (14m 27s):
Or what if you stop working on two days a week, you only work three days a week. You can work as many hours as you want, but you only have three days a week. What would you do? And how would you organize those three days to increase your chances of being successful? Another thing I’ve done sometimes is 2:00 PM. 2:00 PM, all technology gets shut off. I didn’t do it for a very long, it’s sort of hard to do as it turns out… For a little bit I thought, okay, 2:00 PM, phone’s off, computer’s off, laptop’s off, everything’s off. I can get up earlier if I want to, to get to work, but 2:00 PM it’s done. Whatever I did that day, it’s off in the world. No technology until the next day.
Brian Keith (15m 4s):
Oh no! I immediately realized that I’m screwed because I only have like six or eight hours or something like, oh, I have no time. Like there’s no hanging out with the fiancé having tea. That’s out. That needs to be planned for some other time. There’s no Instagram for goodness sakes. There’s no time for that. There is no time for random inbox any second. What’s there time for? There’s time for delivering with current clients. There’s time for selling new clients. There’s time for some content creation. Which we all know, that’s all you’re supposed to be doing anyways. Come on! But there’s only time for those things. Because as soon as you say to 2:00 PM it’s done, you have to look at yourself and say, “Oh crap, what was I doing after 2:00 PM?” It’s not flattering.
Charles Gaudet (15m 44s):
Well, it’s the same reason why there’s been study after study done that shows that student athletes actually perform better in school when they are training for whatever sport they’re in than when they’re off season. So in their on-season, they do better than off-season because that forces them to then prioritize “Where do I focus in the limited time that I have?”
Brian Keith (16m 7s):
I have two people working on my team in my Red Beard Accelerator, which is my membership program helping businesses deploy the right systems. Both of them have small children, and in some cases, one or both of them are just on mute and their video’s off during meetings for the whole team, with all the clients, because they’re actively taking care of their small children, because I find the ones with small children are the most organized people. And they’re both also technical experts, but their project management skills are off the charts.
Charles Gaudet (16m 38s):
My wife definitely accomplishes more in one day than I do in several days. She’s juggling the kids, she’s supporting me, she’s keeping the house, you know, alive, the dog, the whole bit, And then she takes on her own projects as well at the same time.
Brian Keith (16m 59s):
So the great question is how can we constrain ourselves and our businesses? Because the difference, to some extent, between a $1 million business in a $10 million business is there’s all the like, “Well, what kind of systems do you have deployed?” But it’s in how focused is the leader, but also the leaders? Over the top five leaders are in the companies that I’ve worked with that are in that kind of range… It is universal that they get distracted on projects that are not the right thing, that they throw 10 projects out there, and some of the work on some of them don’t. And the reason they got to that place in the first place is because there are really good at doing 10 things at once and enough succeeded that they made their way to a million dollars. But then to get to the next level, at some point, the “I’m going to go and just spend more of my life energy and more hours than the office. And it’s going to work because I’m smart. I work harder, smarter, but also harder than everybody else.”
Brian Keith (17m 56s):
At some point you can no longer out-work the level of your distraction. We should write a book on that: you can not out-work the level of your distraction. And that’s where the whole coaching thing comes in. And that’s why I referred the last lead I did to you because I thought, okay, this guy has so many good things going on and he’s had so much past success, which of course he’s a slave to, understanding how to focus – that’s one of the key skills, more so than marketing or a sales letter. Tactics are cool, but focus and understanding what distractions to cut out of your own heart, and to leave that behind you… It reminds me of Steven Pressfield’s book, Turning Pro. Are you familiar?
Charles Gaudet (18m 36s):
Steven Pressfield I’m familiar. He wrote that one, what was it, The War of Art? That’s a great one.
Brian Keith (18m 40s):
That was the first one, there’s five in the series. The War of Art. We have Turning Pro. We have a few other ones on this topic, and it’s designed for writers specifically, but it applies to all the business and part a Turning Pro is he talks a lot about the amateur turning into the pro. And what does that mean? What does it look like and what are you leaving behind? And who do you have to be? He writes a lot about a sacrifice in that book, you’d to enjoy it.
Charles Gaudet (19m 0s):
I’ll have check that out. Let’s actually talk about something real quick. So, you know, part of goals, and I’ve been talking about this a lot recently… The formula is technically “actions plus resources equal goals,” but I like to look at it as “actions times the resources equal goals” – that it’s a multiplication factor, not in addition factor. So, resources – this is something where you’ve got a particular zone of genius in being able to find ways to create more leverage, in particular businesses, largely driving that through systems. So, for every seven figure business and eight figure business, what do you believe needs to absolutely, positively be systematized and automated in every one of those businesses?
Brian Keith (20m 0s):
You’re going to love my answer and I bet it’s not what you expect. Meetings.
Charles Gaudet (20m 8s):
You’re actually, believe it or not… And I’m interested to hear your response to this. You’re the second person who has told me that the last two weeks.
Brian Keith (20m 15s):
Oh, I wasn’t gonna to be original. Crap! Let me change my answer.
Charles Gaudet (20m 19s):
The first one was Ari Mizel, who has actually said all meetings should have asynchronistically and happen through Voxer.
Brian Keith (20m 31s):
Voxer has some huge advantages and some huge disadvantages. We can talk about that in just a minute. The reason meetings should be automated is because… By automated, I mean highly scripted. And I saw this in a client that was a substantial size and the beauty of their thinking, that I’ve now deployed that in other clients because it was so good is things like, “we have five minutes for this, we have three minutes for this, then minutes for this.” You know who is going to be there. Everyone knows in advance what they need to bring, what the specific deliverable is of the meeting, and we keep it a completely consistent. Like every Monday, 10:00 AM, these five people, and it’s very short. As short as possible, which might… In some cases, it might be there’s a one hour, all-hands meeting once a week, but that needs to be very specific. So, it’s not… Like one client. When I showed up to help them professionalize their team, it was… Stop me if you’ve heard of this one before… It was the CEO, and then it was her team, who all talk with her about what was going on. Right?
Brian Keith (21m 31s):
Completely common way for companies to get to a million dollars because the CEO is amazing! They’re creative, they’re smart, they’re virtuous and glorious and heroes. And then by the time we were done, it was someone else is running the meeting, not the CEO, she just attended if she wanted to. And there was a script. Everyone knew the script, everyone had the metrics they brought to the meeting, and there was a predefined, “here’s the one problem we’re working on in this meeting” after a few little updates over here, and it was just narrow, right? And people could talk about other stuff elsewhere, but that one time, the synchronous thing was so focused. And I think that’s one of the most important things.
Brian Keith (22m 11s):
Now, Voxer… I’ve definitely used a Voxer and there’s some great advantages to Voxer. Have you used a Voxer in any of your companies?
Charles Gaudet (22m 20s):
I’ve been integrating Voxer right now to move some of our meetings from synchronistic to asynchronistic. So we’ve actually cleared out a number of meetings off my calendar and we’ve moved all of our meetings, in those particular categories, into Voxer.
Brian Keith (22m 38s):
Great. So Voxer, for folks who don’t know, is a walkie-talkie app. You can be talking one-on-one, or you can be talking inside of a group, or you can broadcast. And so one of the great things with Voxer is to set times when you’re going to be having certain conversations, both record a note to a particular person or a team whenever you want to, but you can also audio record notes to go to, let’s say, your VA or your executive assistant, and let them take that, put it into your task management tool, and ask the people who need to be involved and go tag those people. So you, the CEO can even stay out of your task management system. That’s pretty cool. Well let’s say you want to have a finance meeting. Maybe you say, okay, these five people are in this particular Voxer group. And we’re going to say that we are focusing on finance on Tuesday mornings from 8 to 10, so let’s have everyone check in there by 8:00 AM, Tuesday morning, have your question’s about finance in to the room, into the Voxer room. And then everybody check in once or twice throughout that two hour period. And now you’re not stealing everyone’s time to be focused on a Zoom call, and folks and go gather stuff. You can post links in there. You can go forward messages to other people if they need to hear it directly inside Voxer.
Brian Keith (23m 43s):
But that way you’re still saying, okay, we still have a finance time… We’re not just trying to drag your brain out of some other task to talk about finance. We’re saying, “This is when we’re talking about finance.” So you’re still focused, even though you’re not taking people’s time as much.
Charles Gaudet (23m 58s):
And you can respond when you’re able to respond, and it’s understood. This communication communication platform, you respond when you can respond, at the best time that you can respond. You can ask questions whenever you want to ask questions, at the best time that you can ask questions. So, it’s more optimizing your available time. So a lot of my communication happens, like when I take the dog out, you know, to take the dog out to the bathroom, and it’s like, all right, let me go through my Voxers and respond.
Brian Keith (24m 24s):
Yeah. And having a system around what the expectations are… If you’re in a meeting, then you know that I asked you a question, you probably going to answer me back in Voxer saying, “I expect this particular team member to respond to this kind of question within 30 minutes during the business day, or two days, or not on weekends, or on weekends.” Having clarity there is great. It can be a friction point if I Voxer you, and I think you’re going to respond within 15 minutes because I’m awake, and so obviously you got to respond to me… And you think, “that’s a little task I already gave you five other tasks that are way more important.” So clearly you expect me to want you to respond to me after those types of things are done. If expectation… It’s easier in some ways to talk in a face-to-face meeting about what we expect just with Voxer because for some people who are not used to it, it’s a new format.
Brian Keith (25m 15s):
If you think you’ve told someone to do something, but they haven’t really responded… Not so good. So a great thing is you can heart messages on Voxer. I would always just heart a message after I listened to it. That tells me I’ve listened to it. That tells them I’ve listened to it. And then normalize that it’s okay to respond with a, “I’d heard your Voxer. I’ll get back to you by tomorrow.” You know, non-answer answers just to say, “I’ve heard it. I’ve not processed it yet,” or “I’ve processed your message. I put in Asana and I’m sending you the link below.” Like one thing that I would do in a block, and this isn’t a Voxer, ’cause in this particular client, tax management tools were not as effective as Voxer… .
Brian Keith (25m 54s):
I get tasks, and this is what I was being a COO for a company, like a fractional COO. I get a task. I translate it into text. The actual actionable stuff, put it in Asana, put it on the spot I think it belongs in my task list. Screenshot the task list, put that into Voxer. So the CEO can see it and say, “I think what you just asked me for belongs here. I think it’s number five.” And that way, that’s for anybody on the team. I think what you just gave me belongs here. If you think it’s more important than anything above it, or actually less important than something below it, please let me know. And they don’t have to do anything at that point. Whenever they look back, they can see, “Oh, Brian is going to do it after these other things.”
Brian Keith (26m 35s):
Great. Or they can say that actually this is really urgent, more so than what I told you yesterday was really urgent. And that could get this incredible level of clarity. So everyone’s like, Oh yeah, they don’t even have to look into Asana. They can just look at the screenshot. I mean, all looking at the same thing.
Charles Gaudet (26m 53s):
I like that. ‘Cause, you know, the theme of our conversation has all been around, you know, optimizing and maximizing our time and being far more intentional, anything from getting up in the morning to controlling your information, to even meetings, which more often than not, is a time suck… And we’re bringing this up because this is the Beyond Seven Figures podcast. And as you study more successful people, one thing that you’re going to find in common is that they manage their time. They’re very disciplined with their time. They’re not fighting for hours. They’re fighting for minutes. Every minute is very, very, very pre-programmed. And it’s funny because there’s a few things that I’ve even had to force myself into doing. So, you know, for those that don’t know, our company has grown by leaps and leaps and leaps and bounds recently. And it’s brought on a higher level of complexity than I have been used to in the past, and governing my own time in a way that I’ve never really had to do before.
Charles Gaudet (28m 5s):
And in the past I had found myself, you know, okay. I had a list of things that I wanted to accomplish. And then I could find time to accomplish that by the end of the day. Nowadays, it doesn’t work like that. If it’s not scheduled in my calendar, it actually doesn’t get done because there’s so many demands on my time. And my team has grown by so much and whatnot, I have to build discipline now in to saying “every minute it has to be intentional because there’s just too much going on.”
Brian Keith (28m 38s):
You just implied bunch of different procedures and systems. Like, there has to be a system for how things get on your calendar each day. There has to be a system for how they get taken off your calendar when they’re no longer it’s important to something else. There has to be a system for rest. Sometimes when I’m not at my best, I “rest” by scrolling social media. Ooh or by reading Twitter. Ooh… Does that actually rest, or is that distraction from discomfort around undone tasks? Ooh. My fiancé is a health coach and a life coach. She brings forth really painful questions. And we were even talking today about her business and about how she’s going to reach this next level, and I said, “Okay, well, when you’re looking at your work time, yes it’s important to know what you’re doing during your work time, but it’s also important to know that you’re not doing.” Like, does the dog get to be in your office and being loved on when you’re during your prime work time, or is that a no?
Brian Keith (29m 33s):
Because it’s fun. It’s fulfilling. Is that actually superior, or is it better to have during this time? Like my mom had rule growing up… She is an entrepreneur. She had a rule. You can only knock on the office door if you’re bleeding or the houses on fire. And I think I once knocked on the door in fourth grade or something and you know… Knock on the door and she opens the door and, you know, “Are you bleeding?” No. “Is the house on fire?” No. “Why are you knocking?” And here’s the thing, it worked for a mom. And mom’s very smart here, but why are we not doing that with ourselves? That it’s easy to say, well, “that person’s distracting” or “that social media is distracting,” but really, what thoughts are we allowing into our head?
Brian Keith (30m 14s):
What activities, what actions, how are we resting? Am I allowed to go do X, Y, or Z during my prime time? Like I’m a morning person. So what do I allow myself to do at 8:45 if I want to take a break? Maybe I don’t get to leave this room or maybe I only get to go outside, but really no touching the cell phone, no Twitter, because those don’t add energy, but getting outside, throwing a thing with a dog, maybe that adds energy. But we need to be so disciplined with ourselves. And like you were saying with your calendar, we have to have a system for someone, ideally not you, needs to understand this happens over here, which means we’re taking this thing off Charles’s calendar, an adding this thing on. There has to be a procedure.
Brian Keith (30m 57s):
And then ideally you have to follow the procedure, where if you want to do something, you have to go through your procedure to determine, does this actually get to kick something else off my list because I don’t just get to do it. If I just do it, that means I’m saying no to the system, and the system is not going to love me and honor me if I’m not loving and honoring it. It can’t serve my business if I don’t look at it and actually honor it.
Charles Gaudet (31m 20s):
Yeah, you’re right. And where we’re building SOPs right now for communication. That’s not something we had done in the past, but right now we’re building an SOP specific for communication. When this type of communication happens, this is how you communicate with me or anybody else on the team. When this type of communication happens, this is what you do. And just about every part of this communication is all outside of the inbox. So nothing’s in the inbox, because the inbox ends up being a distraction. But then there’s another component as well… In realizing that we are pushing against the limits of the clock here, I do want to touch upon repetitive tasks and that of automation. And so, you know, we talked about meetings, but now in terms of like other parts of automation, other parts of the business that we should be looking at, making sure that things are automated. Things that are obvious, of course would be, you know, when somebody opts in and having a nurturing sequence that comes through. But what are some of like, the less obvious types of automation that you’ve seen in these seven or eight figure businesses that you believe are some of the core types of automation that should exist?
Brian Keith (32m 34s):
Customer service reporting stats. Reporting stats, reporting on the performance of customer support and having a procedure around that. Like, how are you auditing how well any particular procedure’s working? And really, I would say auditing in general. That there is reporting, which is saying, well, “this thing happened.” Great. Then there’s auditing, which is looking at a deeper level of, “are we sure that this report is correct?”
Brian Keith (33m 4s):
If it is correct, what does that tell us about how the procedure’s working? How could we improve this process? Almost every… I’m almost going to say every business I’ve looked into that has some kind of reporting built up, it’s always wrong. And we know this. We operate knowing our reports are out of date or maybe some of them are broken. We know the reports are wrong, and so we make decisions knowing that those numbers are like fuzzy-ish in the right direction, they’re directionally accurate. But then, whenever we make a new system, we always say, “I will audit the system every month because I am a good person. I know what I’m doing.” And then we don’t audit it every month because the new things show up, because we don’t follow our own systems.
Brian Keith (33m 49s):
So having the time to say, “I’m going to audit this particular system and I’m going to look for these three things.” I built some crazy tools where are you can pipe a lot of information into Google Sheets and you can have a Google Sheet go in and extract information for you and then color code it. Like you can have, let’s say a sales process. And you might see that sales process tends to produce at 20% conversion rate. So if it produces less than 10% or more than 25%, when looking at the last (take your sales cycle) three weeks, then I need to know about it. But you don’t actually need to know what it actually performed. You only need to know, is it green, yellow, or red? And there’s a hundred processes where are you only need to know if they’re green, yellow, or red. And so automating that audit process to really tell you really what to focus on your auditing time.
Brian Keith (34m 32s):
Like you might have, let’s say 10 sales campaigns. And each one of them has boundaries where a good is green, yellow is a bit underperforming, and red is something’s probably broken… You can pipe those up where you say here’s 10 things – the lowest value color of this thing gets put onto the main sheet. So you might have a sheet that you look at as the CEO every day that says sales processes, and it’s either green, yellow, or red. And then you have the same thing for financial processes, customer service processes, ad campaigns, your return on ad spend.
Brian Keith (35m 9s):
Furthermore, you can make all of these so they actually text you when something goes wrong. I had a client once where they’re a company that responded to what happened in the news in terms of their sales. And this client was looking around, and suddenly there’s this huge traffic flow. And he asked this tech texting, like, “What’s this?” And they said, “Oh yeah, it’s been happening for a couple of days.” Well there was a news story that affected their business. This guy didn’t know about it. He should’ve known, but no one told him. So we built a tool that listened to Google Analytics data, and if there was a surge, it texted them. And it also told him when the traffic surge is over. So now instead of waiting for anybody else, he’s got a text message that told him the next day or three might be 10x more powerful to spend ad money right now than later, or run a new test on a particular sales page.
Brian Keith (35m 56s):
So I’d say automating some of those auditing and reporting tools so that you’re getting push notifications when things go wrong. Not even looking at the actual raw data, not even looking at each individual sales campaign as a green, yellow, or red, but looking at more like just overall – are the sales campaigns green in general? And also if one turns red, text me, or text the right person.
Charles Gaudet (36m 16s):
Super smart. We actually call that a check engine light, right? You need to make sure when you’re in your vehicle, when you’re low on gas or when, you know, whatever that might be, you have a check engine light that says, okay, I have an issue that we need to address.
Charles Gaudet (36m 29s):
A friend of mine, when he brought the story up, he was worth several hundred million dollars. And he owns multiple businesses out in Texas, snd he said at the end of every day, I have to get emailed this sheet where all my KPIs are sent to me… Because it’s critically important that you keep an eye on all the KPIs. I like your idea of building in this, so to speak, check engine light, red, yellow, green, because you can look at complex situations and instantly be able to identify: where’s the areas that I have to pay attention to. The other thing is that, and the reason why you want to know when there’s been an elevation, when things are performing at a much higher level, I have a client, he’s a private equity investor buys all of these companies…
Charles Gaudet (37m 24s):
So one of the companies that he purchased, there was a TikTok influencer that on their own created a video, and on their own, because the video had hundreds of thousands of views and whatnot, they ended up selling out of their product in a matter of a couple of days. Huge, huge, huge surge in revenue. Well, if he wasn’t keeping track of his metrics on a regular basis and crystal clear as to where sales are coming from, he would have never known that it came from this particular influencer. And as a result of coming from the influencer, then he was able to say, “Okay, how can we form a relationship, create more leverage, and expand that into future sales?” So metrics, metrics, metrics are the key to optimization.
Brian keith (38m 12s):
We can last three weeks without food, three days without water, three hours without something else, three minutes without air… There’s all these things where some metrics matter a lot. If your heart stops beating, you do not have very long. Whereas if you haven’t eaten today, you know, that’s not a problem. You can eat tomorrow. And understanding that with our business, in terms of our lead flow, in terms of our sales, in terms of our customer service compliance… For all of these things, we need to have some sense of that.
Charles Gaudet (38m 38s):
So, Brian, I know we’re pushing up against the clock here, and this is the Beyond Seven Figures podcast. If there was one huge actionable tip that you would give our audience for taking their companies beyond seven figures, what is your number one tip right now?
Brian Keith (38m 53s):
plan your perfect morning. From what happens for you probably before 8:00 AM, and get… And not just for you, but imagine if you were 10 times the size as you were now in revenue, what would that morning have to look like before 8:00 AM? If you’re making 10 million now, great. If you were making a hundred million, what would you be doing before 8:00 AM? Make yourself a script when you’re at your most highest energy state, your most creative, and then go follow it for month and see what happens.
Charles Gaudet (39m 24s):
I love it, man. I love it. Now, if people want to learn more about you and everything that you do, where’s the best place for them to visit?
Brian Keith (39m 30s):
The best place is to go get my book at RedBeardImpact.com. I wrote a book called The Impact Framework, which takes some of these ideas around systems and puts them in a really easy slide deck-like book. It takes 10 minutes to read and then take anything in that book and go apply it and you’ll make more money.
Charles Gaudet (39m 48s):
Awesome. So that is RedBeardImpact.com. Awesome. Thank you very much, my friend. So that was Brian Keith at RedBeardImpact.com, and that wraps up today’s Beyond Seven Figures podcast. If you’re looking for more advanced tips on taking your company over the next level, please also be sure to visit us over at PredictableProfits.com. Again, that’s PredictableProfits.com. Charles Gaudet with Brian Keith, I’ll see you in another episode.
