The Secret To True Entrepreneurial Freedom

This is the Momentum podcast. I'm one of our recent member calls, two of our members shared just how much things have changed in their business since they've added some process structure and routine to create consistency. You know, as a advocate for entrepreneurs, I share that process will set you free and entrepreneurs are the only people out there that I know quite a nine to five so that they can go work a nine to 11 and I don't mean nine to 11 in the morning, seven days a week. And so many of us want this thing called freedom, but we haven't put in place the systems and the structure that is going to get us that freedom that is going to get us the results we want. And probably most importantly, there is going to help us impact the market whose lives we want to change. Well, one of our recent calls, Chris Kennedy and Gabe Arnold, two of our members that are incredible entrepreneurs, shared just how much things have changed for them after they added some process structure and routine and got some of that consistency. And rather than me tell you in another way, after Seven Hundred and Something podcast how these things will change your life, I want you to hear directly from Gabe and Chris. I think you're going to find this incredibly relatable, inspirational, and you might even change some things after you listen. 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. I'll I'll I'll give you a win and comes along with gratitude, but we started we really started implementing the system that January 1st going along with your implementation plan. And it's been awesome and it's it's definitely it's taking a load off my plate or it's made things a lot easier. So it works. Nice. Thanks. Thank you for the confirmation. So give us an idea. So you started January one, right? So you're into you're about one a little over a month into your first waterfall. And is it done for you? It's, you know, it's OK. So what? It's done for me, it's definitely got man. It's been a bunch of stuff. It's done, but I think the key thing number one, more clarity between our team, everyone knowing what everyone else is working on to a greater degree and because a large part of our team is remote. That was definitely an issue we were having. And then the other thing is we we started implementing like the leadership structure. So I've started really coaching some leaders on our team and it's amazing the. The amount of freedom that has given me because I've really been pretty disciplined about, OK, I'm going to do one on ones with the leaders each week, which is it's time right to do that. But by doing that, I'm I'm like, Okay, I've got to coach these people how to solve the problems that I was solving before. So it's freeing. So that's interesting. Cool. Yeah, that means still work in progress. There's areas we can improve and I'm still getting used to that. The meetings, and it does feel like kind of a lot of meetings still, but it's gotten rid of a lot of emergency type meetings that are unplanned and not great. And the death of a thousand paper God meetings when they just pop up and it's like, got a minute when I I remember before I had all of our systems in my 20s, I ran a team of about fifty five people and got them, and it actually made my heart palpitations. Like when somebody would come and say, Hey, do you have a second? I'd always be like, Oh God, what is this going to be? And why am I doing it? And why is it right now? And I've got eight things on my desk, so I want to ask a couple more questions just so everybody can hear it, because I think anybody who's fresh in the cadence is just it's awesome perspective. Thanks for being here, everyone. It's awesome to see you. So I, you're about six weeks in. How has communication shifted between you and your team in those six weeks besides just having the meetings? What else have you noticed? Fewer random questions. So now people are so I mean, it's a culmination of all of the different things being implemented, right? So we have a joke about the organizational structure, how I put it out like that everyone on the team like give their idea of what that was and how we had 14 different versions of it, right? So we got really clear on that that cleared up a whole bunch of stuff. So now people know, Hey, if I've got a problem going to this person, not to Chris, right? So that was super helpful. Like I said, the one on one coaching, it's been like the one on ones like taking the coaching. And I did read radical candor right after the summit last time because so many people said that was a good read. Yeah. So that's been helpful in terms of how to do the coaching. Let's see, and then the OTAs, and yeah, I mean, we were pretty conservative with a number of projects we took on because I heard a lot of feedback. People kind of tend to jump in and do way too many. And we said, OK, let's let's do fewer rather than too many, and I'm feeling like we could do more. But it's been nice because it's created that momentum of we're actually getting things done. So all of that is creating a lot less. It's a lot more tight at the end of the day. That's so cool. Yeah. And I think another thing sorry, I'm doing all the talking here, but another thing the rebranding that you did is also helpful. Just communicating with the team is now it's at the beginning. It's like, Hey, what's the Charfen program or what is it now? It's like, No, we're implementing simple operations. It's it's more satisfying. It is kind of stuff so awesome instead of trying to explain who I am. Yeah, I appreciate that, Chris. So cool. I love hearing this game. Why don't you jump in with a couple of wins? I love to get like just the ball rolling on that. Let's hear it. Yeah, thank you. So we're 10 months in right now and I know, sure, at the summit, like we, we have a ton of growth. We grew revenue, 60 percent of profit, 80 plus percent, which that's great. And I was super loved the numbers. And that's obviously why I have a business, but equally are probably even more importantly to me in the last um. But this this quarter, we put on the waterfall growing our leadership team. And so we took it from me, Danielle and Christian, because we super paired it down when we joined Charfen because we had a leader, so we shouldn't have been there. And then we added, in fact, here we added six more. We have basically added, like the department leaders, the leadership team, and since doing that like operations have gotten even smoother because we've been able to help. We have a quick 15 minute huddle before the whole team huddle and it solves a majority of problems. And so then when we move in to the daily huddle, there's really not a lot of blockers or solve challenges. And then the other thing we did is after the daily huddle we put in place, the department huddles, even though there's only like, you know, four to, I don't know, 40 people at each department paid at the most. That's just been really powerful, and it took the team a minute to get used to. Getting, you know, starting the twisted leadership team starts like 8:50 in the morning and then we're in everybody's in huddles. Leadership, we're all team model or department huddle until 10 a.m.. But even though we've basically put, you know, an hour plus on the clock in the morning, it seemed like a lot to everybody. But now everybody's really happy with it. And so by 10 o'clock in the morning, everybody is super clear on what they're doing. And I was talking to Danielle, my operator, today and even last week on our one on one. And like everything super smooth, we have no fires. Everything's like candle in real time, which is super cool. And then the other other thing that I'll share to that's been great because last year was not great, because around this time last year, before we joined the program, we did annual reviews for all parties. We had a couple more team members because there were some part who did like forty five annual reviews and it was hell hated. And so we put in place team members self assessments on a say like August or September. And it was great because Danielle, the operator, was able to review those put together a simple document and make recommendations for rate increases. And in like 20 minutes, we had it all handled of who was getting increases and it was just such a simpler system to do that to the team member self value. Plus, I love reading those because I have a great I don't read them all the time. But when I do sit down and read some of them, I have really great insight into what the team members life is like and what's what's going on. So it's it's overall things have just gotten so much smoother and so much easier to run, and I only have two direct reports which are just phenomenal. David, that is so awesome, Gabe. So we've got some new members on this call, and whenever somebody hear something like my teams and huddles from 8:30 to 10, I think that's what you said. People like entrepreneurs kind of freak out. It's like, wait a second. And then instantly, here's what I know just from working with entrepreneurs from my whole career, they started doing math. It's like, Wait, that's an hour and a half a day, five days a week. That means it's seven half hours a week. That means I'm paying this much money for those meetings. That means they can be doing other stuff. How do you possibly do that? That's like twenty five, 20 percent of their time working with you in a week. So Gabe, what has putting those huddles in place under productivity? Because that's what most people worry about is if I put too much meetings in place, we're going to lose productivity. What is it done for you? A productivity boost and a way better a year ago, I would say that probably 30 to 40 percent of our projects were not on schedule and like like significant delays of two weeks or more, which is significant to me now. I think we have, you know, four out of 100 projects that are not even off schedule but have minor delays at it, so I can just look at I get a weekly project report from each project manager and from my leave project manager. And things are on schedule. The other thing that it's really done is we update it or chart after the summer to say it was screwed up at some level. I think so. After the December summit, we have to the org chart and in putting that in place and then having the leadership huddle and having a department huddle after our all team huddle, we've been able to now effectively funnel requests through the Department Leader. And so we're not overwhelming like individual team members. So we're actually being more productive at getting things stall out faster. We also do momentum planning in our daily huddle and the team. I thought they were going to hate it because it was a change of like sometimes just new proxies. The team, you know, we have to sell it, but we put that in place and then the self-assessments we got the next month, probably 80 percent of them said, I love that we do our momentum planning every day. And I think that's an equal driver to just having the cadence of having the touch points every day is that we mandated that everybody nicely, but we mandated everybody to do momentum planning. And so even though it feels like the mornings are pretty intense for me, like I, I start at eight and then I'm in touch points and meeting with my assistant as operator and like it, it's a pretty stacked until then, but in two hours it's like I pretty much have the day knocked out and then I can move on to projects or something I want to do or things like that. So it's productivity is definitely gone up and I can. The data shows that because we don't have anywhere near the amount of project delays that we did before, it's because questions get answered in real time and there's a like a preset container to solve those problems. And so I. I probably get three shots a week, like, hey, can I update you on this, but I don't get those. Do you have a second anymore? Because I know what you mean, those just cannibalize your life? Yeah, it's death of a thousand paper, guys. It's like, that's it's brutal.