The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Jim Tannehill, COO of Empire Operating System

Episode Date: August 20, 2022

Jim Tannehill, COO of Empire Operating System Enter Code for a special gift for listenters: "chrisvossshowfree" You can go to their website empireom.com, select the online course and use that code at checkout.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com oh my gosh you guys ready for some serious brain bleed uh the wall street journal author we had on, I think a day or two ago, he, after the show, he was like,

that serious brain bleed comment that's in the front of the show just made me laugh my butt off. He's like, that is the greatest thing ever. So, welcome. Get your brain bleed on. We're going to make you smarter by the end of this. You might be sexier. I don't know, maybe your wife will be more interested in the bedroom

after the show because you'll be so smart. She'll be like, you're like a giant cranium of knowledge. Or maybe not. Anyway, guys, you never know until you listen to the show and try. Then you're going to learn so much stuff, be so much smarter, and then people will be so impressed by you

as you walk around, just like they do me. Except they're disappointed when they meet because they see how I look. But fortunately for you, the podcast is all audio. Unless you go to, of course, the biggest plug, youtube.com, 4ChessCrispBoss. Hit the bell notification button. Also go to goodreads.com, 4ChessCrispBoss. You can see all the books we're reading and reviewing over there and my book. You can also go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn,

the big 120,000 LinkedIn group, the big LinkedIn newsletter. Subscribe to that thing. Holy crap, it's so massive. I don't know what to do with it half the time. So yeah, you've got all those things. And then, of course, my site, Chris Voss Leadership Institute dot com. Today we have an amazing CEO on the show. He's going to be talking to us about what he does and how he does it. The gentleman who's on the show with us today, Jim Tannehill, and he is the COO of Empire Operating System, and he's also a business coach. He was able to take company from start to viability in a brand-new market in 12 weeks using the Empire Operating System we'll be talking about today. He's Empire certified, certified by Tranual, and an expert in lucid

charts. He's currently the CEO, I mentioned, of Empire Operating System, and he's worked with over 100 companies, businesses, teams in many different industries. Welcome to the show, Jim. How are you? Thanks, Chris, man. I'm doing well. Thank you for having me on the show. Love your show.

Love the energy you bring. This is a great experience, so thank you. You know what the key is? The key is coffee, high caffeinated coffee. We run on the Death Wish coffee and the Devil's Mountain coffee. It's coffee it's 1400 it's the highest levels of coffee you can endure uh without dying or you know you do get heart palpitations still no i'm just kidding you don't see by the way they're good brands anyway welcome to the show give us your dot coms plugs and i think you have a free code you want to offer people uh that uh are on the show of course

yeah so uh anyone that is interested in learning about more about empire uh we have a course online that retails directly for 12.99 but with chris having me on the show i'm we're going to be generous and we're going to give you a free code to use at checkout so the that code will be chris boss show free and uh you just go to our website empireom.com and you enter that code will be ChrisVossShowFree. And you just go to our website, EmpireOM.com, and you enter that code, and that will give you free access to our course. It comes with a downloadable workbook, too. So, again, the website is EmpireOM.com. The free code is ChrisVossShowFree, and that will get you access to our course and kind of introduce you to what we're doing. There you go.

And give us kind of an overview of what the company is and how you do it. Yeah, of course. So Empire was founded a few years ago by our CEO. His name's Eddie Wilson. A couple years ago, Eddie was, he had over 100 businesses and 4,000 employees. Wow. He was using different operating systems to help grow and build his businesses. And he found that he'd hit a ceiling with many reputable

brands. He loved their different operating systems, but he couldn't find a way to continue to grow and scale. So he took what he liked from their operating systems and he kind of built his own. And then in 2019, he was able to exit, I believe about 85 of those businesses for a billion plus in revenue. And that's when you realize, hey, I have an idea here. I have proof of concept. I used it in my businesses. I'm going to write the curriculum and I'm going to tell the world about it. And that's where we came about. So what kind of makes us different in how we operate is we believe there's five phases of business, startup, perseverance, viability, scale, and succession. And what we're able to do is we're able to work with anybody in any of those phases.

We help you identify where you're at and kind of take you where you want to go. So from the solopreneur who has a business idea concept, all the way to that person that's looking to exit to sell their business, to hand it down to the next generation, whatever that looks like, we're able to help you in all five phases. Where some of the other operating systems, they can only help you in one or two. We can help you, uh, all the way throughout that entire journey. So that's, that's a little bit about who we are and why we were founded. That's pretty awesome. I mean, that's, that is the scale of a business. You go through that,

you know, coming up with the idea and then, you know, trying to implement it, execute it, and then going through, you know, the perseverance, the hard work. And then, uh know, if you've done what our friend who's been on a couple times wrote the book, Exit Rich, talks about you, you know, you try and sell it. And she really changed my mind on building businesses to sell. Yeah, she's awesome. Michelle Seeler Tucker. I was just with her last week in Sarasota. She's awesome.

I got her book. She's one of my next reads. Yeah She's got a lot of nice reads. Yeah, she's been on the show twice. And, you know, I always built companies to be empires. I always built them to keep them forever. I mean, they'd last like, you know, 10, 15, 20 years. But, you know, sometimes there's market forces that happen or, in my case, business partnerships break up. And, you know, there's all sorts of things that can happen.

I mean, 2008 housing crisis and, you know, the economy came to a standstill and, you know, you had to go redesign your life. So who is your core customer or market or coaches that can work with you? Who's the person that's out there in the audience that needs your services? Yeah. So, you know, we do a quick identification that kind of allows you to kind of see what phase of business you're in. So if you can easily identify which phase of business you're in, we can help you grow there. But usually our typical client right now for business purposes is doing a million plus in revenue. We've got we got that are doing hundreds of millions that are working with us. And then business coaches, anyone that has that, that, that looking to add an additional certification, you know, that, that feather the cap fuel that,

that will allow them to reach more businesses. Cause again, a lot of these operating systems, they, they'll help you in perseverance or viability, or they'll only help you in the, in the scale phase. And you're, you're missing out on a lot of helping out a lot of good people. And that's really why we built the businesses to build both relationships and to help people build their businesses and be successful. Yeah. The trends kind of have shifted a little bit to where the startups aren't failing as quick as a rate as they were.

But now the businesses that have been in business for 10 to 15 years, those are the ones that are kind of going out of business because they've reached a point to where they're not able to, where they haven't adapted, where they haven't changed and adapted to the times. And that's where we're seeing the biggest failure right now is not with startups, but with businesses that have been in business that just haven't been able to adapt to the current market. There you go. You know, I, that was, we, we used to take over companies and I used to what I called white knighting them. But a lot of times we were, you know, we'd offer to do

loans and then we get into a companies and then we find a way to fold them to into our portfolio companies. And I wrote about this in my book. And what was interesting to me was a lot of entrepreneurs did that. They would go through a cycle where usually what they would do is they would have their business model, they'd start up, they might make a few bucks or something off the business model, and they would just run that thing into the ground, into bankruptcy court within the first two years. That, or like you mentioned before, companies that would be around for 10, 15 years, they found the magic formula, everything's working, and then the market changes. People go, hey, we don't want to do mail anymore. We don't want to buy online. Or, hey, we don't want to do physical paper. We want to do

online stuff. And the world changes. It goes from brick and you know, online stuff, you know, and the world changes, you know, it goes from brick and mortar to social media. In my case, you know, my businesses used to be all brick and mortar. And then of course, now you do business online and you really have to adapt to that. And a lot of newspapers went through that and a lot are still going out of business because they weren't able to adapt from a hard newspaper subscription model and delivery to online subscription delivery. So you basically work with two different clients. You work with people who have businesses and they're trying to be successful.

You have staff there. I noticed on your website you have a directory. So let's say I'm a coach and let's say there's a variety of my coaching. Let's say maybe I'm a coach that has a lot of experience. Like you say, maybe it needs an extra certification or just one to put in the can. Or what if I'm like a beginner coach? I don't have any certifications. Give me a variety for that spread if you would.

Yeah. So that's something that we've worked hard into our model to where we have, you know, we, I keep it, I keep up close with all of our coaches, what's making them successful, what they're doing currently at the moment. And we help provide some sort of business development plan to show them, hey, this is the path forward. If you do A, B, C, this is how the coaches are finding success. So there's not only that component, but then part of our certification process is we're not just, you know, having that two-day in-person certification and then sending you out the door, see you later. We're doing ongoing training. We have weekly calls with our coaches to make sure they understand the curriculum. You know, we're always innovating, adding other things to it. And so we offer a lot of support on the back-end support too. So we do that. And then we have a lot of good affiliate partnerships

that we worked hard to put together on purpose that will help provide value, not only to our coaches, but also to the companies that they're working with. So to that brand new coach, that's kind of starting now, like we have a program where we can flip you through, get you certified,

and then we can really help you build out your coaching business. And we help with some leads. We get coaches' leads. There's a lot of different things that we do. For us, it's important that our coaches are successful because if our coaches aren't successful and don't feel supported, then they're not working with companies,

and then our brand and who we are dies, our message dies. Our coaches are our lifeblood, and as long as they're going out and they're happy and they have clients and who we are dies, our message dies. Our coaches are our lifeblood. And as long as they're going out and they're happy and they have clients and we're supporting them, then, you know, the good news is going to spread. So you can cover the whole gambit of, you know, people that maybe are new. They want to get into coaching. Maybe they don't know how to coach. They want to learn the trade and the business back of it. All the way to people that are, you know, we have a lot of coaches that have been on the show.

You know, coaches that are, you know, they've been doing it for years, but they want extra certification. I did notice one thing in your website. It appears you have a directory on there so people can search. And so there's kind of a directory for coaches on there where people can find. And so that might be something just about any coach might be looking for. Yeah, it's a huge benefit too. And so people can search for the type of coach they're looking for. Do you work with all types of coaches?

I know there's life coaches, there's business coaches. It seems like there's a ride of everything. Do you work with all types of coaches or is there a certain business segment? No, that's a great question. We do work with all types of coaches. I actually had a call with a potential coach today and he was kind of, he says, you know, I help with the top line. I help with a lot of sales. He said, I don't see where you guys fit.

And I said, we, it's, he said, so it's either I do that or I teach on Empire. And I told him, I was like, it's not either or. It's an and situation to where you're teaching them on sales. And now you're bringing them the operational support on how they can actually run and do business. So we're giving you that back end, that stuff that, you know, because a lot of CEOs, a lot of business owners, we're great at going out and doing and creating, but we don't take the time to put together the back end kind of stuff. You know, we're good at building the plane while we're flying it. But when we get to a certain point when we have to hire and add additional resources and additional personnel, we are kind of stuck wondering why, hey, why can't you build the plane with me? I've done this. And instead, hey, why can't you build the plane with me? I've done this.

And instead, hey, this is the plan. We will build out the back end while you're building the plane. That way, when you bring someone on board, the plan and the strategy is already there. It's already set and you can just plug people in and keep going. Definitely, definitely. That's good to have because, you know, there's a lot of people that want to get into coaching. they're like, how do I get into this? And there's a lot of things that are out there. Having a directory really helps. What's the, what's the, how long you guys been doing this aspect of the business? I know your CEO has been, you know, building businesses all of his life and stuff. How long you been doing this and what's the vision that you guys have you guys see this as building a huge directory and a huge sort of uh one-stop shop for coaches or or what's the vision yeah so we've been in business uh you know operating like this for about two years now and the yeah that is we are planning

we want to be the one-stop shop for for coaches for businesses on on both sides uh you know that that's that's the goal is to help as many people as possible. You know, when I first saw this, when I first saw the curriculum, because I wasn't part of it when it was created. When I first saw it, I was like, man, if I would have known this 10 years ago, when I started out on my entrepreneurial journey, it would have saved me a lot of headaches. And it would have saved me, I learned a lot of lessons the hard way where here we've taken all the left, but a lot of the lessons that we have all learned the hard way. And we put a plan together and said, Hey, if you, if you don't want to stub your toe on this part, here's the plan that'll help, help guide you and take you to where you want to go and where you need to be to help build business correctly. Awesome.

Awesome. That's always good to have. I mean, you, you've got to rock and roll with it. You do some software, I think, don't you? We have. We're working on our own project management software. It's going to be called Empire Toolbox. We haven't fully rolled that out just yet,

but it'll be project management, similar to an Asana, Trello. I'm hoping to replace that for for for a company someday but uh yeah that that's in the work and in the works in the pipeline there you go and then you guys have a course as well tell us about the course yeah so the online course is about three to five hours worth of content uh the videos are anywhere from about five to twelve minutes long it's it's all in a training module so it kind of gives you a high level view of what our curriculum, what we teach, the methodology, the ideology. So if you wanted to, if someone were to purchase the course, were to take the code and look

at it for free, they would walk away with some actionable items, some actionable steps that they could implement in their business. And then from there, you know, if they feel like, hey, this is a good operating system, they can either come in and get certified to self-implement and we'll teach you specific things and be hands-on with you. Or if they want to grow fast and scale fast, then we can, at that point, we'd refer them to one of our awesome coaches and the coach would jump in and help implement the Empire operating system in their business. There you go. That is freaking awesome, man. There's a lot you guys offer on the website as I go through it.

You've got help to become a coach, help finding a coach, the Empire products, of course, where you can order stuff up. Who are your partners? This is a section on your website. Talk about some of the people there. I recognize some faces on there. Yeah, so we have a partnership with uh with with tax hive um you know what they they they run events and do some different events um with with uh the different taxes things like that so we have a that's one that we're still formulating it's it's it's one of the one of

our main partners then money is with uh andrew cordell andrew is a fantastic entrepreneur and he just has a way of simplifying you know how how the big ways how the big people are making their money and not paying a ton of taxes legally he's got a great program uh that really teaches you how to how to use your money the self-directed uh iras and different things like that and then uh pam jordan uh pivot uh i forget the i forget the rest of the mcconnell group but the self-directed IRAs and different things like that. And then Pam Jordan, Pivot. I forget the rest of the name. I'm going to go with Pivot. Again, financial there.

She's a CFO and, you know, very, very smart financially. Again, helping you protect your money and use your money correctly. And I'm trying to go from memory. But those are a few different partners that we have on there that are doing some big things. Yeah, I can see Mr. Wonderful. Or not Mr. Wonderful. Is it Mr. Wonderful? Yeah, Mr. Wonderful from the Shark Tank.

And Allen Stein Jr. Yeah, he's great, man. He's worked with a lot of professional athletes. Really helps the mindset. He's phenomenal. I think he's written a couple of books. He's worked with Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Kobe. So he's phenomenal. Odigo? Odigo. Training by Lance Tanaka. American Association of Private Lenders. Money is,

yeah, you've got quite a few people here. Think Realty and Pivot Business Group. So this is really cool. And then people can use your site. I noticed the login, they can take the course and software access. Yep. Yeah.

That's all. Yeah, that's all part of it. I'd like to, I'd like to talk about, I know a couple of things. If you, if you let me, please, there's a concept that we talk about that is the core, like part of it. I'd like to talk about a couple things. If you let me.

Please. There's a concept that we talk about that is the core foundation of Empire. It's something I really want to get into. It's called the brick. The concept came from, if you've ever been to Newark, New Jersey, you'll see that across the water, across the river, is Manhattan. What's funny is that Newark, New Jersey was founded just before Manhattan and Newark was supposed to be the center of all Western commerce. Like they

were supposed to be what Manhattan is, but we now know Manhattan is today. So they both started in a little bit of a competition building both their cities. What Newark got caught up on is they wanted, they got caught up on the architectural designs. They wanted, you know, they're importing goods from Italy and things like that. When there was a brick manufacturing company right down the river, right down the water from both cities, Manhattan said, you know what, we're just going to take what's available to us and we're just going to build with these bricks. So if you go to the Hell's Kitchen, in the Hell's Kitchen district of Manhattan, you'll see these yellowish colored bricks. So if you go to the Hell's Kitchen, in the Hell's Kitchen district of Manhattan,

you'll see these yellowish colored bricks. They've aged over time and weather. But most of those buildings back in the 17th century, when both cities were built, Manhattan, they just laid one brick at a time. Where Newark was so focused on their design and the architecture that it took them forever. And Manhattan ended up becoming the city that we know it is now.

And that's part of the concept that we talk about in Empire. How do you build an empire? You lay one brick at a time. And we take that principle and we really look at people's businesses and we focus on that one thing that that company needs to look at in order to build their empire, in order to build their business. You know, kind of like, you know, kind of like you think of a river as, as it, as when it's wide, it's not flowing as fast, but as, as the,

as the banks shrink and as the mouth of the river shrinks, it picks up speed and becomes very rapid. And that's what we focus on at Empire. Kind of what makes us different is we focus on what that break is in your company and we help you accelerate into the next phase of business. There you go. Another good example might be, you know, the race with like we're gonna wall ourselves off and make this exclusive product and and it's gonna have our name on it and we're gonna control you know every part of the of the creation of it and microsoft saw that they could you know dominate the market by licensing microsoft and so they flooded the market because, you know, there was all these people who licensed

it and they really exponated their distribution channels and advertising channels and marketing. It's kind of like what people do with apps back in the day with Apple iPhone. And, you know, they became the dominant brand of computing and Apple stayed fairly small for a lot of years. I mean mean they still have a good niche but you know at one point they were almost bankrupt uh microsoft is still in london money to steve jobs uh when he came back to you know not bankrupt the company and release some better products uh so you know that was the example of you know where you know hey work with you got and capture market share and rock and roll.

You know, don't wait for the market to try and build the most perfect product. But, yeah, both good examples in that scenario. What are some other things that we haven't talked about and touched on? I've been going through your website as we're talking about this. People should definitely check it out. What are some other things we haven't touched on? Yeah, you know, I mean, just continuing on a little bit in the curriculum, just I got something, some stuff that you learned, but we really talked about,

you know, so we established that you need to have a brick in your business, right? What that brick is. So in order for people, again, that might just be listening to the show and not going to take us up on our pre-op workhorse, I can explain real quickly how you can identify where that brick is in your company and how you can build on it. So we use something called a SIPOC. It's an acronym. It stands for Supply, Input, Process, Output, Customer.

So essentially, it's your customer journey where the supply, where your leads are coming in, your input, where in your CRM, how they're coming in, the intake of them. And then your process is where your solution meets their problem. And then the output is the performance on that solution. And the customer is the customer review, how to make them a repeat customer. And, you know, because that's the best form of marketing. That's the cheapest customer to get is one that's a repeat customer. So in that SIPOC is where your brick lies.

For most companies, it lies where that process, where in that P, where the process, where your solution meets the customer's problem. But it doesn't always lie within there. But if you were able to dissect your business and follow that kind of river, then you'd be able to see where your brick is. And then just because it lives in that process, your business and follow that kind of river, then you'd be able to see where your brick is.

And then just because it lives in that process in that area doesn't mean all the functions above the leads coming in, qualifying the leads, and then the formats on your service doesn't mean those are less important. Those are just as important, but it shows you the roles of each department that you have in your business and how important they are and how crucial they are to that brick. It aligns everybody and pushes everybody to that point. What do you find a lot of – that's good to have. What do you find a lot of coaches struggle with? Is it getting leads?

Is it the back-end business of it? What do you find a lot of them struggle with? Maybe how do you guys help resolve that yeah so leads leads are definitely something that uh something that coaches struggle with and uh we've got a couple different uh campaigns that we're working on that we're going to be launching soon that will help capture some some good leads for for for our coaches uh some linkedin campaigns and things like that we put some assessments together that we're going to put out there, but then just the, the, the backend operational point. So a lot of, a lot of the coaches that I've talked to, you know, they have a customer

client journey of anywhere from, you know, 90 to 180 days. And that's kind of it. Like once they get to the end of that journey, it's kind of, all right, I'm, I'm kind of done here. Where with us, since we help in all five phases, that client journey can last a lot longer and you still be helpful because what happens is a lot of companies will become so dependent on a coach that they'll never leave a coach and they'll never achieve what they should. And so that's, that's in, but a coach feels the need to keep them in their pipeline and because it's revenue, but with the additional tools, resources, curriculum, education that we're putting out, they can still continue to look to deliver that good value while keeping their, their same customer. So that's, you know, that's essentially one of the biggest problems that I see with coaches in the coaching industry is sometimes we allow our clients to stay in our pipeline because we need the revenue and we're not actually delivering. At one point, we delivered a lot of

value to where they're okay with keeping us. But if we're not going to consistently deliver value, then we're not going to consistently, you know, get good customers. Yeah. And so it's real important that coaches know how to do all that. They do the work, especially with their newer coaches. You know, they don't, they're like, I just want to be a coach and help people. And you're like, you know, there's a whole business end to it. There's a whole getting leads.

There's a whole, you know, following up those leads, keeping people into systems or tiers or however your system's set up and things of that nature. What else haven't we touched on? Man, we've touched on a lot. So the kind of last thing that I will kind of go over is this year, Eddie and I, our CEO, we focused on, we wanted to get 100 brand new coaches this year. We've got, we're close we're close. We're,

we're in the 70, 80 range right now, depending on, depending on when you talk to me, because we got some signing up. We have two more certifications that'll be in the Atlanta area. Our normal cost for the certification is 10 grand, but we've cut that in half just because we want to open up, open up to anybody that would be interested. So it would be five grand. It's a two-day in-person event. We'll give you all the curriculum, the workbook, the PowerPoints, and all the additional support after that. Again, it's not just a certification walk.

Once you step out, once you walk away from this two days, you'll never talk to us again. There's ongoing support with with some marketing some branding and then again with your business development will be we uh we give leads out to our coaches that they qualified leads that they can close on different things like that so if anyone's interested in that uh that that's another opportunity and if you have any general inquiries or anything in general um outside what we talked about you can always email me at, my email address is jim at empireom.com. So again, that's jim, J-I-M at empireom.com. That's good to have so people can reach out to you.

So give us those plugs again one more time. Yeah. You guys had an offer too there. Yeah. Our free gift for listening to, for being on the awesome and listening to the Chris Voss show is we, our course normally retails for $12.99.

If you input the code Chris Voss show free at empireom.com and select the online course and use that code at checkout, you'll get that, you'll get that course for free. So again,

that code is Chris Voss show free and you just go to our website empireom.com, select the course and put that in shopping cart and put that code is CHRISVOSTSCHOFREE. And you just go to our website, EmpireOM.com, select the course, and put that in Shopping Garden and put that code in that checkout. And then that certification for half price right now. There you go, guys. You can check it out and order it up. And, you know, you can, if you're wherever you are on the scale of being a coach, you know, one more directory position.

So you show up and search and different things like that is always good. And they've got a lot of different products. And their CEO has got a lot of experience behind him and underneath his belt. I mean, you could definitely tap into that. Let's run this by Eddie Wilson, the CEO, right? Yep. He's an avid real estate investor. Over the course of his career, he built more than 100 different businesses, managed 4,000 employees,

traveled around there speaking about business leadership. So tapping into that pedigree and having that on your thing and having a knowledge base to do stuff. What's the old thing? It's about who you know and stuff like that. That can definitely help. So thank you very much for being on the show, Jim. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me. There you go. Thanks, Samadis, for tuning in. Be sure to check him out.

There'll be a link on the Chris Voss show if you want to go follow that up. Some people don't write that down mid-show, but the link will be on the Chris Voss show and all the different extensions you see across social media. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss. Go to youtube.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss. All of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram,

and all those crazy places those kids are playing. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.