Living The Red Life - Frameworks Are The Key To TRUE Freedom in Life & Business

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

In Todays episode, I dive deep into one of the most critical aspects of scaling a successful business: the power of frameworks and predictability. Over the past decade, I've learned firsthand that while entrepreneurs thrive on freedom and creativity, most of the people we hire crave clear systems and processes. I share how I've scaled my companies to over 110 staff members and the mistakes I made by not implementing structured frameworks early on. I wrongly assumed that managers would naturally develop efficient systems within their departments, but I discovered that without clear guidance from the top, things can quickly become chaotic, especially in the dynamic entrepreneurial world.I discuss how essential it is to establish robust frameworks in your business from the ground up, focusing on areas that will be critical for years to come, such as social media, recruiting, and sales funnels. By creating detailed SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) and training materials, you can significantly reduce errors, streamline operations, and make delegation much easier. I emphasize the importance of starting with a flowchart to visualize the entire process, then breaking it down into core deliverables, and finally creating comprehensive SOPs for each step. This approach not only simplifies your business but also prepares it for scalable growth, ensuring that your team is equipped to operate efficiently and effectively from day one.CHAPTER TITLES 00:45 - The Importance of Frameworks in Business02:15 - Overview of the Growth Framework04:00 - Key Components of the Growth Framework06:30 - The Role of Data in Driving Business Growth08:45 - How to Implement a Business Growth Framework11:20 - Real-World Examples of Framework Application14:10 - Measuring Success: KPIs and Metrics16:00 - Adapting Frameworks to Different Industries17:50 - Case Study: A Look at a Growing Business19:10 - Case Study: Successful Implementation of a Marketing Framework21:45 - Common Challenges in Maintaining Business Frameworks23:30 - The Role of Leadership in Framework Adoption25:05 - The Future of Frameworks in Business GrowthConnect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedInInstagramFacebookTwitter

Every big area of your business should have a very clear framework, SOPs and trainings and standardized processes throughout. And here's the thing, as entrepreneurs we want freedom. We don't want to follow a recipe, right? 95% of the people you hire, even when they tell you they want to make their own decisions and be creative and have freedom, they do not. They want to follow an exact system. I promise you there's no confusion, there's no guessing or figuring it out, which we love as entrepreneurs and they hate. My name is Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today we have a solo episode from myself on something

that's so important for your business, something that I learned over the last 10 years and if I could go all the way back to the start of my career, I wish I knew this seven, eight years ago when I really started to scale and build serious teams. So this is going to be great for you if you're a beginner or if you're into media or building a team or have a couple of VAs. I promise you this is hopefully something that will stay with you forever and make your life way better, your business way healthier, your business more sellable and way less stressful. And it's the power of frameworks and predictability. And what I mean by that is building everything from the ground up the right way with clear frameworks and predictability versus randomness. And I've got to say, it's probably one of the biggest mistakes I've made in my business. And I'm going to talk to you about it now. And we're really like this last year or two going back and fixing this and it's so hard to fix you know this like mini empire I have now versus if I had done this the right way but huh that's the power of mentorship that's the power of podcasts like this and learning from people that have maybe

been doing it longer than you or got a little further ahead is you don't have to make those same mistakes so here we go the power of frameworks and predictability in your business. So let me take you back and really talk about why this is important, okay? So just if you, you know, maybe you've not followed me for long, I'll give you a quick history. We scaled my companies to about 110 staff members,

about half of them, 50 or so were in office and then the rest were remote. And I've had remote teams for, you know, seven, eight years of a decent size, 20, 30, 40 staff. And then we really scaled the last sort of three, four years. And it got really messy in a sense of I assumed wrongly, and I'm sure you all assume wrongly too, if you don't listen to this podcast the the basic way to build a business is you have your employees you have your workers right and then you have your managers or supervisors and then you have your executive team and operations people so I wrongly assumed that I get a bunch of workers get a few managers that sit above the workers. The managers will look after the workers, make sure they're organized, develop their departments, build good systems in their departments.

And eventually the C-suite will check that they're all doing their thing. Right. And that's kind of how general business should work. However, should work and reality are very, very different, especially, you know, probably in this entrepreneurial world, right, where we have a lot going on. It's not like a McDonald's conveyor belt or a subway or a car rental where everything's SOP'd. It's been the same for 20 years. Everyone's doing the exact same thing. And that's where it breaks down. Right. It's not that, you know, I was hiring maybe all the wrong people. Some definitely were. But it's just that our businesses are so different to a standard business, right?

And yours is probably the same if you're listening to this. You're doing lots of things. You're trying to grow. You're trying to develop all these things. You have all these ideas. You have the typical entrepreneur, shiny object. So a normal business structure with, you know, worker bees, right, managers or supervisors, it doesn't quite work the same in this setting as

it does in a developed standardized business like McDonald's or a car rental company or American Airlines, because they're always doing the same thing. They're renting the same cars in the same process with the same software or they're flying American Airlines. The pre-check-in is the exact same. It's not changed in five, ten years, right? So you've got to understand that going into this and this is why the frameworks and predictability that I've now developed over the last couple of years that I've implemented are so powerful and they're game changing and you know especially in my higher level programs my 50 and 100k programs I'm actually building them out for and slash with my clients and they love it too so that's a bit of a backstory why I'm here and teaching this and uh and hopefully you can do this right away so you don't get like me where you have all these businesses and 100

staff and then you have to like try and rebuild them all from the ground up while keeping the business running. OK, so let's start at the top. What do I mean by frameworks? Right. So we'll call this the power of predictability. So frameworks create consistency and predictability in your processes. It makes them easy to replicate and easy to scale. And it also removes any risk or error or drastically reduces it. Right now, there's always going to be a time where even with American Airlines, the person doesn't follow the right check-in process or the person doesn't check a guest incorrectly and then there's an error on their ticket. You can't avoid that in any business in the world.

There's always a time where your McDonald's burger is wrong, right? But out of a thousand McDonald's burgers, a couple are wrong or a few and 967 burgers are totally how they should be per brand, okay? So this kind of power of predictability is so important because you, not the supervisor or manager, this was the first mistake I made, you as the CEO and the owner maybe with an operational person supporting you, has to lay the foundations and build these frameworks. And the frameworks need to act as like a decision making tool right so when i talk about a framework the easiest way for you to visualize it is kind of like a flow chart with

a bunch of processes or training manuals or sops connected to it okay so every big area of your business should have a very clear framework sops and trainings and standardized processes throughout. OK, so again, I'll use these other examples. McDonald's, the way you make a cheeseburger is the same. So they can bring in new staff and open new franchises all around the world. And everyone makes the burger the same. And any new staff member quickly understands how to do it. So what I want you to do now is look at five areas of your business, right? What are the

five things that you believe right now are a big part of your business and you believe over the next five years they're going to stay a big part of your business, okay? So let me explain for me. I mean, one big part of my business that I've been doing for the last five years and I'll probably do for the next five is building funnels and running ads right so funnels sales processes landing pages and running ads I think I'm always going to do that right even if I start a whole new software company or any sort of business there's always going to be like a sales process where it involves some form of advertising creatives designs copy images it's probably going to link to some form of a landing page or a website or a lead form of some sort. And then it's probably going to have a back end, right? Emails

and stuff. So that's a really good system for me to now optimize, spend time on and build a framework. It's like the cheeseburger at McDonald's, right? It's always going to probably exist, okay? Now, the next big thing for me is social media. I believe social media is going to be around for the next five or ten years, and I'm going to get even bigger and do even more on social media. So, I actually just spent the last couple of months with my marketing and content team and video team and my head copywriter and I rebuilt my entire social media framework in a lot of detail it's about 60 pages of a document that literally details every type of post how to make it clear examples KPIs and it lists 15 categories and on average four types of pose in each category. So it lists, I think the total came to about 80 or 90.

So, you know, if you do 15 times five, that would be about 80. So we have 80 different types of pieces of content and SOP on each and how to create it and examples, okay? So that's another system or framework I built okay and then you know the list goes on we've got one for hiring right so we have a pretty good system for like interviewing you know when we scaled to 110 staff we were interviewing about 800 people a month and hiring about five so just under one percent of those those. So same again, we have a great system for hiring.

And then we, and even like now, we're not hiring as many people right now because we're paused and we're rebuilding all these frameworks. But when we restart, like I'm not going to never hire again, right? I'm not like, you know, so when I restart in a few months or whenever,

we are still hiring people like four different roles, just not like 10 different roles just not like 10 different roles like we normally are so when we restart we have that system and framework built and then we also have the second half of that which is the onboarding process so you know we have all that we've automated a lot of their onboarding how they onboard how they get into the business um how they we have like a training website it's like a about 10 hours of work it's like 30 pages and videos they go through then we have like checking calls with the hr manager we have like onboarding channels and then we have like a 50 page training manual depending

on what department they're in 50 to 100 pages so we you have a really good onboarding system, right? So there's a few examples of like my five of my big frameworks that I'm focused on, right? And even just earlier today, I was working on one with my team around podcasts and stage outreach, right? To get more people, some big celebrities on my podcast, this one that you're listening to right now to get me on other big top podcasts that I've not been on and to get me on more stages right I speak about two three times a month right now and I want to take that to like one a week so for a month so yeah we're building a framework for that so there's some examples for me I want you to think about some examples for yourself so some key frameworks that you think are really important in your business a big driver of your business and going to be around for a while right and the reason I say

around for a while hopefully it's obvious but you don't want to like if McDonald's launches this special dessert for Christmas and it's only around for a week or two because Because McDonald's is so big, they're always going to build a framework and SOPs for it. But like in reality for you as a smaller entrepreneur, if you're just doing this one thing one time, it's often easier just to kind of do it yourself and maybe shoot a quick loom video for your team. But like it's not worth spending 20 hours to build this like crazy system and framework if it's only a 30 minute job right so obviously you want to pick long stuff with longevity as well okay so that's kind of like

the overview of what it is how you're going to approach it in your business you're going to pick five things and you're going to start building out these frameworks and if you if that if you've kind of got these ideas floating in your head of what that should look like, you're probably going, okay, really, I get it. How do I build a framework for social media or whatever, right? So what you're going to, and maybe it's fulfillment, right? Maybe you send out supplements or you create fitness programs or whatever it might be. You're a coach, okay? Whatever it is, the first thing you're going to do is build a flow chart, okay? be you're a coach okay whatever it is you're the first thing you're gonna do is build a flow chart okay so you're gonna start big picture with a flow chart this is where you explain the process from a bird's

eye view okay then you're gonna write a step-by-step guide on here's everything that's involved okay what we call core deliverables so the second part is writing out core deliverables so this the second part is writing out core deliverables. So this might be imagine it like a content page. So it's 20, maybe it's 10, 15, 20 different sections or pieces of content for that process. Okay so if we were talking about recruitment and HRM, let's just say recruitment right? So one thing would be like, if I just give you a few random examples, I'm not going to list all 20, but it would be like job posts. Then it would be posting on different job websites. And you'd have one for LinkedIn, one for Indeed,

one for Upwork, one for Facebook groups, whatever, right? Then it would be pay ranges where you list all your jobs and all the pay ranges. Then one would be interview one and interview one questions and the process. Next would be interview two. Next one would be reference checks. Next one would be background checks. Next one would be onboarding and contracts and making an offer, right? so that's like seven or eight for recruiting there's probably like 15 or 20 total for us we have kpis and different ones but that would be me listing everything okay so that's part two so part one is building out the wireframe or the flowchart part two is then actually writing out each individual step now this is the harder

more time consuming part if you're a solo entrepreneur or beginner is you're going to do a one page document with a five to 10 minute loom video for every step. OK, and it's going to include logins, a bullet point, step by step, overview, useful links and then a recording of you going through it. OK, and I know what you're thinking. Really, that lot of work but it is but you're also going to create most of it while you're doing it yourself okay so next time you go and if you're solo entrepreneur or with just a couple of staff you're doing most of these things yourself and if your staff member's doing it perfectly and you've trained them they can help you create these

two okay so you're going to record a 5, 15 minute loom video of you doing it. And then what you can even do is take that transcript, put it in chat GPT, and it can write out the one page of for you, as long as you tell it what it needs to write out. Okay. Like an intro section, a step-by-step bullet point, and then, you know, additional information and then you can clean it up. Okay. And once you clean it up, I recommend you repost it in and say, here's the final version where I fixed it. Please bear this in mind for the second video I'm going to send you. And then you can, you know, you can send it the next one and it should get it even better. So that, and once you've completed this for a system, that's your entire framework built, right? So it's first is the wireframe okay or the the flowchart second

is the bullet point content list or core deliverable list and then third is the individual sop that makes up each area and boom now you have you know and for most of you, it might not be 20. Maybe it's less complicated than mine. Maybe it's 10. But now you've got this entire framework for something like social media or funnels or ads. And it's okay if it takes you, say you do one a day, right? And you've got 12. And say you work six days a week. So it's two weeks to get one framework done for social media the next two weeks you're going to do recruiting the next two weeks you're going to do funnels the next two weeks you're

going to do your fulfillment the next two weeks you're going to do your customer service the next two weeks you're going to do i don't know uh youtube videos okay so it's gonna be a couple of months of work but i promise you you'll be your life will change in your business right once you've got these because whenever you delegate right you're actually going to be able to delegate way more than you ever thought possible now you've mapped everything out you're going to be able to get way more done It's going to be way easier to delegate so you can get high leverage stuff done. And it's going to simplify a lot of the mess in the business when you're having to do everything right now. And it's going to set you up for success to scale. So when you scale, right, you're now going to be able to bring people in efficiently, like at a McDonald's.

And instead of bringing in a YouTube person and saying hey run my YouTube because that's what we all do as entrepreneurs when we start you're now going to say hey run my YouTube here's the exact process for it and the framework and each individual step and 10 training videos and they're going to be 90% correct on day one like efficient in their role versus having zero clue and doing most of it wrong. And then you have to spoon feed them, waste a month of your life, get frustrated and fire them, which is the reality with most entrepreneurs. Now, what also is important and a big learning curve for me is most of the supervisors and managers you hire that aren't on

like six figure salaries they're not even though they'll tell you they are they're not going to be experienced enough at creating these systems and frameworks that was probably my biggest like one of my biggest leadership mistakes and lessons in the last two years was I knew we needed these about a year two years ago as we were growing. So then I started bringing in more high level managers and department heads to build these. And they couldn't do a good job because they're not the visionary like you. And they're not the creator of the well, your world, right? You're like God in your world and the creator of your world. And it's very hard.

Some are better than others some managers just suck at it and they'll tell you they're good when they just aren't and some are genuinely pretty good at it but they still need a lot of information from you so it's much easier if you just build it and then here's where I think managers in our sort of industry like entrepreneurial world play a better role is they're better at enforcing it. Because eventually, once you've really scaled to like 50, 60, 70, 80 staff like me or 100, now you've got like five people making cheeseburgers and then you need a manager to make sure,

just spot check they're all doing it right and they're not straying and starting to add an extra slice of cheese or put the ketchup in the wrong order because that does happen in McDonald's and every business right so the managers are better to like monitor it optimize it a little come back to you and say hey Rudy I know originally you said you were putting the cheese on on station free but we found that by the time it gets to you know the customer it's all melded and like they can't even see the cheese. So some of them have said that it's not got any cheese on. So we suggest

putting it on station six. And that's where I think managers come in great is like making sure the conveyor belt's moving, checking it's all being followed because people will start to skip steps and optimizing it for you, right? So that's where you should bring managers in. So that's a bit of an overview of how to build these great frameworks. Now, one of the most powerful investments financially and time-wise you can make is hiring people that are experts to help you build those frameworks, okay? Because the only problem you would have is if you make these and you're not very experienced, right?

I'm very experienced as a marketer and in social media and all these things, is you don't want to build a cheeseburger framework when the recipe sucks, right? If the meat sucks and you're selling them to put on way too much ketchup and all these things, now you just built like a crappy system that's going to screw you over forever. OK, so I really advise like only build the frameworks and the things, you know, are great in your business that you're really good at and leverage other people. So like in our Inner Circle Legacy program, I come in and actually build the social media framework for the client because that's one of my expertise now once it's built they understand it enough and they're smart enough to keep it going but they didn't have the 10 years of experience that I had and maybe the creativeness

that I have that I to actually build it out the correct way and all and knowing all the minutia what to do what not to do right so that's where i really excel so also bring in you can bring in some experts to help build these frameworks and i actually did that with youtube right because i had done less youtube in my life so when we got really serious about youtube and i wanted to learn it i probably paid over 10 15 grand to help bring it bring in all these experts and it was just a few calls here and there or five grand consulting package as I was building this framework because I said I want to build this YouTube framework from day one that's really good not waste two three four years figuring out

YouTube I want to collapse time and pay so even I pay right and the same for accounting I paid 20 grand to you know some accounting executives and CFOs and stuff and you know we've done that for sales as well paid 20 grand so a lot of this I've you know built myself but with consultants plus my 10 years of experience so yeah just to recap right this is going to give you a lot of power of predictability. Okay, so it's going to let you continually do things the right way, even as you start to step out and grow. It's going to give your team and VAs and whoever you have frameworks to make the right decisions versus trying to trust them to figure it out by themselves. And most of the time they won't, they'll disappoint you because they're not you, right? They're earning $5 an hour as a VA or $20, $30 an hour versus you as the entrepreneur. It's gonna give you a lot more scalability because when you start marketing and sales are hard,

but as you get better and you start to hit the million or two, you figured out the marketing and sales. Now it's the fulfillment, the logistics, the operation and the team that gets hard so it's going to give you that scalability it's going to give you better team alignment right your team are going to function more effectively and here's the thing as entrepreneurs we want freedom we don't want to follow a cheeseburger recipe right we'd get so bored if we did that every day. But let me tell you, it's the exact opposite for 95% of the population. 95% of the people you hire, even when

they tell you they want to make their own decisions and be creative and have freedom, they do not. They want to follow an exact system. I promise you. And when you try and let them do whatever, they're going to let you down. You're going to be frustrated. You're going to get upset at them. Then they're going to get upset at you because in their head, they were trying and working hard and putting in all the hours. Don't do it. There's a reason there's a few percent of the world that are CEOs and entrepreneurs and 99% are workers. Okay. You're the 1%. Most other people are the 99%. So it's actually going to build a better, happier team

when they know exactly what to do. And I was shocked by this because I thought I had a team of like entrepreneurial people. But once I like showed them exactly what to do and gave them the 50 page, they were all fulfilled. They were like, oh, Rudy, this is so good. Finally, we get it now we know exactly what to do there's no confusion and i'm sat there like yo i would be bored out of

my mind if i just had to do this all day but they love it because it's clear it's precise there's no room for error they're not going to get shouted at and then there's no confusion there's no guessing or figuring it out which we love as entrepreneurs and they hate so it's going to help the team too it's going to let you have better speed to market you're going to launch stuff way faster and save money doing it because it'll cost you a lot less and you'll get better results faster you're going to have a better customer experience if everyone makes the right cheeseburger and the customer can come back every week, even if it's different staff and get the same cheeseburger they love, the customer will be happier. And of course, you're going to be able

to actually build the business to scale and hopefully sell one day because if a buyer comes in, right, and I know that's a million miles away for a lot of you to even think about, but if a buyer comes in one day and they want to buy the business, this is one of the first things they're going to look at. The first thing they're going to look at is do they like the business? Second thing is the financials. Third thing is can I take this business over and run it without this entrepreneurial person? Did they create the business and they hold all the keys or is everything mapped out and super clear? If you do what I'm saying now, you're going to impress them. They're going to impress them.

They're going to go, holy cow, this entrepreneur is one of the few entrepreneurs that's actually organized, built everything out, and it's running without them. And probably the final one is, guys, this is going to give you your freedom back. It's going to let you have a lot of these tasks run without you. Maybe you're just going to monitor them so you can spend more time with your family or you can launch more stuff or have more businesses or have a better work life balance or just work on more exciting projects. OK, so there you have it. I hope you enjoyed today's session and you can learn from, you know, a lot of my business mistakes I made in my 20s, which, you know, this has really been a big game changer for me and I didn't think I needed it because when it was 10 20 30 staff I could like brute force and check everything because I have

ADHD but then once you get to like 100 it's just impossible and just the reality check for me is I ended up with like over 100 staff but I felt my business was no more effective in some areas. In other areas, it definitely was. But in a lot of areas, it was no more effective than when I had 30, 40 staff. And it was a big wake up call to like get rid of a lot of those people, build these foundations. And now as we rescale, I'm sure we'll get way more out of it. So yes, that's a wrap, guys. I hope you enjoyed today's session and I will see you guys very, very soon for another Juo episode coming up. Take care.