Podcast and Business Update

This is the Momentum podcast.

It's been a while since I've given an update on what I'm doing and how our company is doing and being on calls, sales calls with people, and coaching calls with people. I've mentioned this on several podcasts and I've had people reach out and ask how it's going and what's happening. And so this is all about giving you an update on what we're doing as a company and some really intense lessons that I've learned. I'm excited to share this with you.

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.

If you've been listening to my podcast for a while, then, you know, over the course of about the past year, I have been really focusing on our product and how we create change with entrepreneurs and the process we take entrepreneurs through. And as a result, I reorganize my business so that for months I think it's been like 6 to 9 months. I have been the primary person on a lot of the sales calls. I've been doing a lot of the coaching calls and coaching intervention with our members and committing a lot more time to being one on one with our members and in a group setting with our members and being one on one with the people who are coming towards us. And I did all of this very purposefully because I wanted to get back in touch with what we do. I wanted to get back in touch with the problems we're solving. I wanted to get back in touch with the issues that the avatar who is reaching out to us is having, and it has been incredibly revealing. Now I'll just share a quick philosophy with you for how I've run businesses and how I've created products really my whole career. You know, I know we exist in this world where coaching and information products sometimes are sold on a Friday and they get registrations the next week, all week and over the weekend and the next week. Then they start creating the product. The next Friday, they start delivering it the next Monday, and you stay one step ahead of your customers. And you know, in some cases where someone has a massive amount of expertise and they're advertising, something is a beta program and they're telling everybody exactly what they're doing, I think that's okay. But far too often that is the case with people who are charging full price and telling people they're going to have a great experience and not really telling them everything that's going on. And I think there are a lot of challenges with that. In fact, when I look at how I've created products, I kind of give you my philosophy. See, I think really the better the product you have, the more your product becomes your marketing.

There's really three different categories of CEOs, three different categories of visionaries that I see out there, and I'll share with you the categories so you can identify which one you're in, and then I'll share with you which one I believe I am. So the first type of visionary that you see out there is the marketing visionary, and it's the visionary who's incredible at marketing, who's really good at getting the message out there, who's good at like copywriting and understanding the funnels and understanding the tactics of marketing. And I'm pretty good at those things, but I wouldn't put myself in that category. And then the other type of CEO, there are three, is the operational visionary, the person who's really good at operations, who's really good at hiring people, who are hiring teams. This is a small category, not a lot of visionaries in this category, but those that I've met who are really good at this are extraordinary at it, extraordinary at it. And that's where they spend most of their time. And the third type of visionary that I see out there is the product visionary. It's the person who really loves the product, who obsesses over the product, who obsesses over the outcome for the product, the customer, what are they going through? They have a massive amount of customer empathy. They feel what their members feel. They feel what their customer feels. And I am 100% that type of CEO. I also have some skills in marketing and some skills in operations. And you know, we're a company called Simple Operation, so I've figured a lot of that out over time, but I've figured it out through an obsession around the product. And over the past nine months or a year of being one on one with our customers, I've been able to see some refinements and improvements that we can make in our product that we've been teaching for over ten years or even longer than that.

We started teaching the content that we're teaching now. In 2011. We started using a lot of this content in a business that we started growing in 2007, and a lot of it's carryover from businesses that I just started running as far back as the nineties. Now I'm totally aging myself. I'm 50 years old. I've been running businesses my whole life since my teens and really in my twenties is when I started figuring some of this stuff out and in my thirties is when I started really applying it and then I started teaching it and coaching it to tons of entrepreneurs in 2011. And here's what's happened by taking the time to be one on one with our customers, I feel like I understand our avatar and the person that we're serving at an entirely different level and the person that we work with is the visionary entrepreneur and can be any one of those three categories that I just named. But it's the visionary entrepreneur who has a company that's running, who has started hiring a team, who is getting leverage or already has a team, and who's probably in like the 1 to $10 million range in revenue and has hit that place where they feel like they're still doing it all themselves. Hiring a team has created more work. They're finding mistakes, they're seeing challenges, they're frustrated and anxious on a daily basis, and they're having that fantasy. I call it the quitting fantasy of quitting everything and going back to when it was just them and they could do it all by themselves. And the reason I call it the quitting fantasy is even if we quit, we're going to start something up later on. And that fantasy, if you're feeling that fantasy, then we can help. We want to talk to you. We can help you simplify your operations and stop doing everything yourself.

And I know this with a level of confidence that I've had in the past, but my level of confidence has gone up ten X because spending time with the people who are considering our product and spending time with the people who are already in our product has revealed to me the following: number one, we're the best in the market at what we do. We're going to start really putting a lot more marketing out there and attracting more people and getting more people into the system because spending this time has increased my confidence through the roof. The fact that we can help visionary entrepreneurs who feel stuck and we can help them and their operators simplify their operations to the point where they can grow their business and spend less time in the company. My friend Gabe Arnold, who was one of our members, doubled his revenue more than doubled his profit and cut the time. The amount of time you spend in his company is 50%. We can help entrepreneurs do this and this. An outcome of doing this has made me incredibly confident. The other outcome is, after teaching this content since 2011, we've got over 12 years teaching these systems. We've got over 20 years using these systems. And what I now know is that the way that we are teaching now, the way that we have just reshot all of our content and that's what I've been doing now for the past couple of months. I've been reshooting everything, creating new resources, and creating new paths to go through everything. The way that our content is set up now, it is going to help anyone who comes in and applies our content. Here's the level of confidence I want to have in my product. I want to have a level of confidence that if somebody buys our product and they come back to us and say, Hey, this isn't working, we have confidence to say, "Hey, you probably didn't implement it. Let's take a look at what you're doing because if you implement this, it is going to cause a massive change in your business". And I know that now with the level of certainty that has it, it's exciting. It's actually super energizing.

Taking this time, going through this process has been enlightening and energizing. And man, it's so exciting and I can't wait for people to start going through this new process of this content that's been around forever. Well, forever. It's been around for a long time. It feels like forever when you've been teaching something for over a decade. But now, instead of that scenario, I told you at the beginning, when you start selling it and then you build it and then you stay one step ahead of your students, I know that we can help any visionary in this situation that I just described. And by the way, it's not just up to 10 million. We've worked with companies that are at 60 million recently, 22 million, over 50 million. We're about to start working with a company of over 100 million. You know, we can absolutely help calm the chaos, put predictability into the business, get the entrepreneur out of the day-to-day, empower the operator to run the day-to-day in a way that they have massive confidence and they know everything that everybody on the team is doing with minimum effective dose information. And I know this because of the time that I've spent on this. And what's interesting is I now have a new level of confidence in marketing, and I have a new level of excitement around marketing, of a new level of my internal pressure to get as many people as I can to experience this, because I want to help as many people as I possibly can. And I know that these systems are going to work now because they've been ground up, rebuilt, reorganized and put into a process that's going to be even easier for our members.

And here's something that is really important to me. People come to us because they have anxiety, they're frustrated in their business. They're doing too much. They feel like they're stuck in the day-to-day. You know, we work with visionaries and their operators where the visionary is overwhelmed and that as a result, the operator starts getting overwhelmed. And, you know, I've been in information products and coaching systems where there is just hours upon hours of information and a platform and hours upon hours of things that you have to go through. Well, I've spent dozens we'll know at this point, hundreds of hours making it. So then instead of hours on our platform, we record the same content in minutes and have an even greater effect because more can get consumed, more can be applied, and we create massive momentum in our customers' businesses. And so this has been a really this has been a period of massive personal growth. I was going to say this has been a really exciting time. It has, but it's been a period of massive personal growth by pulling back and putting myself on the front lines for a temporary period of time. I'm now extracting myself day by day, but putting myself on the front line, taking sales calls, and being one on one with my customers. You know, it has been a massive opportunity for personal development. And I'll be honest with you, there have been days where I'm like, Oh, I've been doing this forever. Do I really have to get on another sales call or another coaching call? And there's been days where I've had those negative thoughts and negative mindset, but I keep reminding myself I'm building a product that is going to be around for decades. I'm building a system and a structure that is going to help entrepreneurs for as long as I'm here and hopefully long after that. We are rewriting how small business operations are created so that small businesses become medium-sized, become big businesses, and they can continue to grow and use our systems regardless of what size they get to.

And so every time I've had those thoughts and, you know, sometimes they linger, sometimes they're frustrating. I'm being really transparent here because I think any entrepreneur who steps back into sales or steps back into delivery or steps back into interacting with customers after they haven't for a long time feels those feelings. But I keep reminding myself, and I've been reminding myself that that's how this product is going to get done and that's how this product is going to become first in class, the number one product in our category. And I feel like we're there now. And so if you've been a podcast listener for a while, like I said at the beginning, I wanted to give you an update and let you know where I am. We are so excited to be rolling these new systems out.

And so if you're an entrepreneur who runs a business and you sound like the person that I just described and you want help simplifying your operations, getting out of the day-to-day, getting into higher levels of strategic activity and strategic thinking systematically, predictably over time, so that you build a real business that can run without you reach out to us because I've always been confident we can help you. Now I'm even more confident, infinitely more confident than I was before. Go to simple operations.com, click on the button right on the homepage and register for a call with my team. And let us tell you, let us show you how we can help you simplify your operations faster than any other company out there. How we can help you step into the role of visionary so that you are guiding the company from a strategic level and how we can help you get out of the day-to-day so that your company becomes more effective. You don't feel like you're doing everything yourself and you make a bigger impact. And let's get real. A far bigger income go to simpleoperations.com, register for a call with my team. We're looking forward to hearing from you.