Momentum Podcast: 768

What Is an Operator (And Why as a Visionary You Need One!)

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

This week I've jumped on a few sales calls with people who are considering joining one of our memberships. It has been eye-opening as it usually is. One of the things that came up on two of the calls that I was on is the question “what is an operator?”

Honestly, I was surprised by the question because we do so much work with Amin at operators it is obvious to us exactly what they do and who they are. And I realized just how close we are to our product and how we need to explain more and make things more clear. Play simply if you're a visionary entrepreneur, an operator is a person who can change your life, make things easier for you, and help you make a massive dent in the universe. Very few visionary entrepreneurs create massive outcomes without an operator in their lives.

Alex Charfen, a business growth coach who helps entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses, gives practical, tangible, and actionable tips that you can implement into your business right now.

This recording could be life-changing for you if you are trying to do everything yourself and feel like you're the biggest bottleneck.

I'm going to do a series of recordings about operators, starting with this one… what is an operator?

Your business has the potential to change the world, and the only way to see that potential become a reality is to implement a strategic plan. If you're ready to learn more, go to predictableplanningsystem.com to get started.

Our entrepreneurial journey doesn't end here! Be sure to check out our Facebook Community filled with entrepreneurs just like you who are getting into momentum and building world-changing empires charfen.com/community

If you are an entrepreneur who is listening in and you can relate, then be sure and head over to momentumplanner.com/mps and gain access to one of the most requested business tools to grow and scale your business in any market condition, even in this one.

Full Audio Transcript

This is the Momentum podcast. Today, I wanted to jump in and share something that has been kind of surprising over the past week, in fact, there's a lesson in this for me. I think there might be a lesson in for you, no matter what type of product you have. So in the last week, we had a coach who was under the weather and we were making some changes in our products. We're making some upgrades and upgrades and enhancements. And so I decided to jump in and take a few sales calls, which is always funny. When somebody expects to see one of our team members and I show up, there's usually like a five minute period of just getting over the fact that I'm the one taking the call. And so we have done that several times this week. I've had a few calls, and here's something that's really interesting. A question came up on two of the calls. What is an operator? And when I think about how often I talk about an entrepreneur having an operator, when I think about how often I talk about the term operator, just assuming that everyone knows it. It shows me something. It shows me that I am really close to our product. It should end when I say close to our product is like, you are so close to your product, you can't see what other people see. You're so close to your product, you can't see where other people might be confused or might not have clarity and 100 percent candor and honesty. When when I was asked What is an operator twice this week, I'm like, Wow, we really have to clarify what is this role in a business that we see in the business? And so that's that's what I want to share with you today. What is an operator? I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority. The few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be. And what is an operator? So I'm going to take a step back first, and let's talk about how most businesses are started. You know, businesses are started by what we call a visionary entrepreneur, by the way. Operators can be visionaries, too, but visionary entrepreneurs, most of those who start a business have a very similar personality type. We are that small percentage of the population that gets up every day, travels into the future, creates a new reality. Come back, it comes back to the present and demands it becomes real. We are high level future thinkers. We're not really great at details and things like calendars, and I always joke with people that for me, when I open a calendar, I literally get heart palpitations. It's difficult for me to stay in a conversation that includes a calendar because there's too many details. It's overwhelming. I, you know, my whole life, I struggled with that. Now I just accept it. And also, when it comes to setting up a bunch of meetings that have contingencies and and making sure everybody's going to be in a place like those types of tactical operational things are overwhelming for me, and they're overwhelming for most visionaries. And so what we see as a incredibly important and almost required relationship in a business is to have visionary and operator or in our company, like with Cadey and I, both of us are the visionaries. We both have visionary seeds on the org chart. And then we have Haley, who's our operator, and here's what the operator does. Here's what Haley does. Here's what good operators do. First, they have. They have a different personality than us as visionaries. See where for me, I go into the future. I create a new reality. I come back to the president and I demand it becomes real. You know, for me, that is like outcomes. And how are we going to grow this business and what types of products we have? Who's the avatar? What change are we going to make for Haley? It's what processes are we going to have? How are we going to protect everyone? What system? What process, structure and routine are we going to put in put in place so that everything that we're doing works and she's content? While I'm thinking of the big picture, she's thinking of the operator personality things of how do we make this work? How do we make sure it keeps working? And how do we keep everyone safe? How do we make a promise and deliver the promise? How do we make sure that the business moves forward at the tactical level? And so the operator personality loves the details, loves this step by step, loves the directional process, loves linear creating linear processes, whereas entrepreneurs, we might enjoy some of that. But long term, those are things that actually slow down our capacity to be strategic. For an operator, it's exactly what makes them strategic in their role, because the operator is helping you set up all the details and the structure of the business from that when you're a visionary is actually a tactical role. So what Haley does, what a great operator does, is they come into the business, they understand all the objectives, they understand who's doing, what they are following up on those things to make sure that they're done and then they're doing the tactical things for a visionary. The strategic things for an operator. So seeing things for a visionary setting up a calendar is tactical. For an operator. The way they set it up is actually strategic for a visionary setting up a bunch of meetings, that's tactical. But for an operator getting the meetings on the calendar in the way where the right people can attend and you get the right information that you need, that is very strategic. And so an operator is making sure that the right people are in the right place at the right time. People know what they're accountable for. People know what you're measuring to see if they're successful and they know clearly what all the outcomes in the business are. And so as a visionary, we can hand over that thinking to our operator and they can help us drive everything home. They can help us make sure that we're moving forward in the business, make sure that we're doing the things that we need to do. And last week at our event, was it last week or the week before? Well, in the last couple of weeks at our event, I'm terrible at time, that terrible at times. I can't even handle calendars. I forget what week we did something I'm pretty sure it was last week. So last week, you, our man, we actually had a panel of operators which I love to have now. Just so, you know, operators can have completely different titles like an operator might be called a personal assistant, an executive assistant in some companies, project manager. But we like to elevate them to the title of operator Adam Project Manager because they don't just manage projects. They also help with a lot of other things. They can be called an operations manager, a director of operations, high level. If you have a larger company, you might have a VP of operations or even a chief operating officer. Those are all in the operator range. And what this person is doing is taking pressure and noise away from the entrepreneur consistently to help them grow, depending on the size of the business. So when you're in an early business like you're, it's just you. And maybe that a vey personal assistant, that person is helping you put structure and process around your personal life. They're making sure that that you are getting what you need done, so you can put more strategic time into the business. They're helping you offload things like car registrations and insurance and and making sure your bills are paid and making sure everything is done for you so that you can put more time into the business and so things don't fall through the cracks. Then, as the business starts growing and the operator goes from an AA or personal assistant into maybe an operations manager or a project manager or a. Really, operations manager is the title we like to use or just operator early on. They're now helping you document the business and build process and structure into the business. What is the thing that you do in the business to make money and you document that? How are you driving revenue into the business? You document that. That's a series of process documents and flow charts. Your operator helps you. So you're now building process and structure around what the business needs. And then as the business grows, the operator transitions to, you know, maybe from operator operations manager. And now, after they help you build the process and structure around what you do well, they help you hire a team so you can offload to that team what you do while you bob process. Then you start offloading it to a team. So the operator helps bring in the contractors. The team members that you need helps transition. The things you're doing to them shows them clear outcomes so they know exactly what they need to do. They have clear scoreboards, so they know what you and your operator are measuring to see if they're successful. And then they have clear accountability where they know what they're responsible for and the people around them are responsible for. All of this is driven out by the operator. So as the visionary entrepreneur, you can stay high level driving those long term outcomes. And as the business grows even further, the operator goes from helping you build the team to helping you build a leadership team and helping you bring in leaders who first are going to run segments of the business. And then eventually, that operator will help you go from segments of the business to developing departments and divisions in your business so that you have departments that are running their own outcomes. Now, as a company, here's how we step in and help we train the operator in all of these disciplines from the very beginning, all the way to splitting into departments. And so it doesn't matter if you're in an early stage business, maybe in several hundred thousand up to maybe one over a million. We will show the operator how to make your life easier and more efficient. Then once you get to that one to three million, we will show the operator how to document what is being done in the business. What you do well, so that nothing happens as you elevate to more strategic activities, that it keeps happening and keeps going. Then we'll train the operator how to start bringing in the right people, how to build the team, how to transition responsibility to those team members in a way that it sticks in a way that it works in a way that it keeps happening. And then after that, we help you work with that operator so that you start building out a leadership team and you build out a structure that now you can pour into that structure so that you're not doing everything yourself. So in short, an operator for a visionary is like one of the most effective ways that you can grow your business and get out of that feeling that you are doing it all yourself. I think as visionary entrepreneurs, we get stuck in that feeling. Oftentimes we are doing it all ourselves. Oftentimes, if we had any projects or anything else to the business, it falls on us. So when we have the operator in our business and they understand how to support us, they understand how to help us offload what we're doing. They understand how to help us go through what we're doing every day. Look at what's tactical. Start doing more of the strategic and hand off the tactical to them so that they can either delegate it to a team member or delegated to a process or delegated to a project or a policy in our business. That is where the operator is life changing for a visionary entrepreneur. And when I look at some of the companies that we've had that have just exploded. One of the main factors in that growth, one of the main factors in the entrepreneur getting time back is having a solid operator come in, take over the day to day tactics of the business, still communicating with the entrepreneur constantly on what's going on, but then making it so that you and I, as visionary entrepreneurs, have space so that we can go do the thinking that when we need, we need to do. We can create the projects we need to do. We can create the strategy for the company rather than being tied into the business and working in the business every day. In fact, you know, when you go to an event and somebody says that you need to stop working on your business and start working in your business well for a long time, as an entrepreneur or for me, especially in my 20s, when somebody would say that it would irritate me, I would think like, I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to transition from working in the business to on the business because I'm overwhelmed in the business. Well, one of the fastest catalysts to get you out of in the business and start working on the business is to bring in an operator even at the AEA executive assistant, personal assistant, virtual assistant level. If you bring in the right operator and start transitioning the right things to them, everything in your business will change and you will have the time to grow the business, work on the business, create a bigger strategy, bigger outcome and make a massive debt in the universe. So I'm going to record a few more videos on a few more recordings on on operators like how do you set an operator up for success? What is the highest value that an operator has and how can you work with your operator more efficiently? I'm going to keep them coming. And if you have any questions about working with an operator, setting up a system so that you can offload where you're uncomfortable, offload this stuff that is taking too much of your time so that you can get your time back and be more strategic. Please. Post them below, and if you'd like to get more information on hiring an operator or working with the operator you have in your business even better and having the process structure and routine so you can predictably grow your business over time. Go to billionaire code icon on billionaire code. You can download the nine level framework that shows you how to go from startup to $100 million entrepreneur. And you can also set up a call with my team. We would love to jump on with you, discuss you, your operator, how your business is growing, and how we may, may be able to help you simplify your operations so you can grow like crazy. Go to billionaire billionaire code dot com. We look forward to hearing from you and thanks for being with me here.

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With gratitude,

Alex

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