In this Throwback episode, Chad Franzen interviews business leader Josh, who shares his proven framework for rapidly enhancing business performance. Josh outlines four key drivers of growth: product innovation, hiring talented people, sales and marketing, and implementing effective operational systems. Drawing from his own entrepreneurial journey, Josh provides practical examples and actionable advice for each area. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on these core levers to achieve quick, sustainable results. The episode offers valuable insights and resources for entrepreneurs looking to improve their businesses, with Josh inviting listeners to connect for further guidance.

Chapters:

Introduction and Framework Overview (00:00:00)
Josh introduces Chad as the interviewer and outlines his four-part framework for enhancing business performance.

Product Innovation (00:01:50)
Josh discusses the importance of unique product innovation, sharing an example of educational posters during COVID-19.

Hiring Smart People (00:05:29)
Josh explains why hiring talented people is crucial, with examples of improving processes through expert team members.

Sales and Marketing (00:10:54)
Josh emphasizes sales and marketing as the lifeblood of any business, necessary before scaling other areas.

Operations and Implementing an Operating System (00:11:59)
Josh details the importance of operational systems for scaling, describing their meeting structure and management processes.

Getting Started with Operating Systems (00:15:47)
Josh gives advice on how to begin implementing an operating system, recommending resources and offering help.

Conclusion and Farewell (00:17:23)
Chad and Josh wrap up the episode and say goodbye to listeners.

Links and Mentions:

Meetings and Frameworks
L10 Meeting
4-1-1 Meetings
EOS Framework

Websites
Ecomm Breakthrough
Rise25

Books
The E-Myth

Transcript:

Josh 00:00:00  I have Chad Franzen here of rise 25, who has done hundreds of interviews with successful entrepreneurs and CEOs. We have flipped the script and he's going to be interviewing me today. Welcome, Chad.

Chad 00:00:12  Hey, Josh, thanks. It's great to be here. today, I would love to talk about your approach to, enhancing the performance of a business in your years as a business leader. What kind of framework have you developed where you can just step in and kind of implement ways to enhance the performance of a business pretty quickly.

Josh 00:00:28  Over the last few years, I think, as our own business has continued to grow in scale, and I needed to build out a leadership team, I needed to myself write down what I felt were the biggest drivers, needle movers, biggest levers that I can pull inside the business. And so it forced me to kind of like narrow it down to like, there's a million different things that I could be working on with inside the business, right? I could be working on just HR in and of itself.

Josh 00:00:59  I could be working on marketing, social media. I could be working on, you know, accounting, finance. There's the list goes on and on and on. Right. So what I decided to do is just create like four areas where if we focus on these four areas within our business and we make strategic decisions, this should be able to make an impact if we pull this particular lever. So that's how I kind of identified these. And I have specific examples here that I'll share with you that that walk through kind of why I decided like this is a core area of the business rather than, you know, maybe accounting for example, and finance, although important, you know, these are the four core things that I can move into a business, make changes, and then be able to see growth happen real quick. Does that make sense?

Chad 00:01:50  Yeah, absolutely. So the first one that you listed, of the four was product innovation. Tell me a little bit more about you know obviously it's very important, but tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on it.

Josh 00:02:00  Yeah. In one of our earlier podcast episodes, I shared this as one of my biggest mistakes that I've made in a business, and that is kind of creating me two products or looking at the market and saying, well, they're doing well with this type of product. So obviously I should just introduce something similar and I'm going to have similar results. What I have learned from launching over 1300 different products at this point is that you need to bring something unique to the table. creating meta products is never going to serve you in the long run. If if you do stumble upon something and it works. It's going to be a short term win in my opinion. So one of the examples that I would give you is, you know, one of the products that we launched during Covid, was educational posters. Okay. So obviously with homeschool, becoming more of a thing during Covid. Back in 2020, we our business had to pivot. We looked at, you know, different home school supplies and different things that we could launch to cater to that market because it was such a it was an expanding market at the time.

Josh 00:03:11  We looked at one of the most competitive niches on Amazon itself, and we saw educational posters as one of those. What we decided to do is we decided to throw our hat in the ring, but what we noticed is that nearly all of the competitors and most of these competitors were overseas competitors, right? So what we noticed, though, is they all look very, very similar. You know, Chad, I would argue that it those posters that you saw on Amazon were probably the exact same posters that we grew up with in the classroom, you know, just kind of your standard, you know, vanilla educational poster, so to speak. And we're talking about like, ABC to, you know, all the letters of the alphabet. Counting from 1 to 100. Things like that. So what my wife decided to do, though, is she. You know, she's just so good at design. But she looked at what was trending on Etsy, what was trending on Pinterest, what was trending on Google, and what did she see on social media that teachers, how teachers were decorating their room, or how parents were decorating their homeschool rooms, so to speak.

Josh 00:04:21  And after kind of gathering all of that information, she decided to design something that I don't think anybody else has ever seen before. So number one, she has a very creative mind. But we went into an overlay like, again, if most people would look at that niche, they'd say, that's a saturated market, don't go into it. There's no way you're going to make any money. And instead what we did is we launched the product in August of 2020. We became the number t...