The secret to scaling to $50M+…

Summary

• My company, acquisition.com, aims to help businesses grow their revenue between $3 million to $10 million for free.
• A common issue for businesses in the $3-20 million revenue range is finding the right operator or realizing they need one to achieve their vision.
• I've been an operator in every business I've been involved with and currently operate acquisition.com, which has given me the experience to speak on this topic.
• An operator serves as the glue of the organization, executing the business plan while providing leadership, predictability, and accountability across the team.
• Job titles for operators vary depending on the size of the business and can range from Project Manager to Chief Operating Officer.
• Operators remove obstacles, free up time for the CEO, protect the visionary from daily operation issues, and can significantly speed up the pace of the business.
• An operator must be chosen carefully; if they're not a perfect match, they can stunt business growth, reduce revenue, and negatively impact team morale.
• Hiring the wrong operator can lead people to resent their business when in reality, they may only resent poor staffing decisions.
• The type of operator needed depends on the visionary's strengths and weaknesses, as well as the business's current stage.
• From zero to $1 million in revenue, businesses need a builder operator who can handle chaos and has some sales aptitude.
• Between $1-10 million, the primary focus is increasing lifetime gross profit per customer, so an operator capable of building systems further is necessary.
• From $10-50 million, businesses require an incremental improver to formalize systems and add consistency to professionalize the organization.
• Beyond $50 million, a builder who can attract talent and reinvent business processes for innovation is needed to avoid stagnation.
• Mistakes often made when hiring operators include hiring from big corporate too soon, bringing on someone who lacks humility or cannot delegate, adding excessive red tape, and not focusing on revenue generation.
• If you have an operator, consider having them review this information to understand where improvements can be made.

Video

How To Take Action

A good way of finding the right operator for your small business is by understanding what you need at each revenue level. Let's break it down:

• Zero to $1 Million: Look for a 'builder operator' who enjoys chaos and quick decision-making. They must be good with sales. Responsibilities at this stage include doing a variety of tasks and starting to put systems in place.

• $1 Million to $10 Million: Your focus should now be on increasing lifetime value of your customers. You still want a builder who is starting to add structure. Look for someone who can implement systems but still handles chaos well.

• $10 Million to $50 Million: Here, you need an 'incremental improver' to professionalize your operation. They should be good at streamlining and providing consistency, making the business run smoother.

• Beyond $50 Million: Time for a builder again, but now one who can innovate and attract talent to create new growth avenues for the business.

Avoid hiring people from corporate too soon, as they can bring unnecessary bureaucracy. Also, sidestep someone who lacks humility, can't delegate, or doesn't focus on revenue generation.

If you already have an operator, get them to watch the video to see where they can improve. If they’re not right for the role, your business might not reach its full potential.

Remember, a strong operator should not just execute plans but also inspire the team and contribute to revenue growth. Your business should run on values, not just processes and systems.

So take a hard look at where your business is and what type of operator will best complement you and your stage of business. Hiring the right person can make the difference between staying stagnant or accelerating towards your vision.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"you want to hire somebody who their your weaknesses and your dislikes are their likes and their strengths"

– Leila Hormozi

"the best operators simplify through elimination"

– Leila Hormozi

"if your operator's not a 10 out of 10, your business isn't going to be a 10 out of 10"

– Leila Hormozi

"the best operators are the ones who are absolute learning machines"

– Leila Hormozi

"you plus that person does not equal 2 equal 11"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

is laila hormozy i'm co-ceo of acquisition.com which is portfolio of companies it does about 85 million per year in revenue my goal with this company uh with this channel is to get you from wherever you're at to between three and 10 million in revenue for free and so that being said today i really really enjoyed making this video because i'm talking about in this video really how to find and how to know if you have the right operator in your business and guys i made this video because on a consistent basis i meet with about 15 20 companies per week that aren't in our portfolio to see if they would be a fit for the portfolio and most those people are doing you know anywhere between three and 20 million dollars in revenue that's probably the average and that being said what i noticed is literally like over 50 of the time the issue is actually their operator and so they don't know if they have the right one they're unsure about it the operator is not the right person for the business or they don't have one and they're trying to figure out what kind of person they need to help them really achieve that vision that they're looking for because honestly most of the times the you know visionary with all the ideas and the great at marketing and great with content isn't always the best operator it's that being said this is actually that i've done myself so i've been the operator in my business many times uh four times now in every business that we've had i'm currently the primary operator of acquisition.com and i've done it over and over again at every different revenue level up to you know over 100 million and so that being said i feel like i'm qualified to talk about it and i've helped so many people find an operator replace operators and get their first ones and i hope this video will do that for you all right so like i said in the description or the intro today we're gonna talk about how to hire operator and the reason i'm not saying first operator is because i actually wanted to make this kind of a tiered approach so basically you know what kind of operator you need from zero to one from one to ten from 10 to 50 and from 50 plus on and the reason i feel like i'm qualified to talk about this is because i've not only been the operator at every point in time but i've also replaced myself with operators at each of those points in time so i have a lot of experience hiring those people i have a lot of experience doing it i've excelled a lot of experience knowing what failure looks like and this video was actually prompted because i have a friend and he messaged me the other day and he said you know layla i'm kind of like on the verge of tears and i was like what's going on dude he's like you know his business is doing about 200 000 a month and it's literally just him with like contractors and that's fairly typical we see this often and that's usually one of the biggest pain points around that two thousand uh two hundred thousand per month that's when people really start to feel the pain and i was telling him he has to get an operator in place and he was like well how do i do that and that actually i said i'll make you uh you know i'll write up an email and send it to you and then i was like screw it i'm gonna make a piece of content on this because it's something that everybody struggles with and it's also the reason that so many people's businesses don't work i see this all the time on acquisition.com we talk to 15 20 businesses a week and half of them the reason their business isn't growing isn't because of the strategy or the market it's because they have a really poor executor and so that being said i find it to be a really important topic that i think is probably under discussed in the community and what is out there about operations is really archaic and really corporate and i don't like any of it and so i'm making this video for anyone who actually wants to know like boots on the ground entrepreneurial business is self-funded what does it look like so that being said let's dive in before we can really talk about operators we have to say what is an operator right so it's really the glue of the organization like i like to say when when i was starting off and i was the operator i see myself as the rock right like i'm the rock for everyone in the organization my job is to be really neutral and really a steady force for everybody in the organization i add in predictability and accountability for everyone across the team and you see yourself as really the lead executor of the business right and so it's typically that you're carrying out the business plan that's been decided upon by the visionary and the operator again if you're the visionary this person is the one that's taking your plan or taking your vision and they're making it come to life and so you need somebody who's a high high executor but who also has a level of leadership skills and that's why it's a very unique role in the business is that uh it's easy to find one or the other someone who loves doing a ton of and loves chaos or somebody who like loves leading people but it's hard to find someone who has a good combination of both and that being said what are some titles and what does this look like honestly depending on the size of your business this could range it could be a project manager it could be an ops manager it could be director of operations it could be vp of operations general manager president chief operating officer honestly it's just anything that's a very generalized role that everybody else rolls into in the company and that's kind of the gist of it so why is this important right well at some point your business what you're going to notice is that you are wearing all of the hats this can happen you know when you're first starting off and this can also happen later if you decide not to hire an operator and you're feeling it later down the line and what you start to realize is that you're responsible for a lot of things you're responsible for strategy you're responsible for executing the strategy you're responsible for leading people you're responsible for managing them and holding them accountable you start to realize that's really hard to do all these things at once i know for myself this always becomes a point in the business and so i've always been the operator before i've replaced myself as the operator eventually what it is is that i try for the first year year and a half of the business to be the primary operator before i hand off to someone so i know that i'm a fantastic builder and i can build systems and put them in place not every operator can do that and so i do that i make sure that i know how to do the job before i hand it off to somebody and i know that around about after a year of starting a business or a year and a half into starting business that's when it becomes too much i can't be strategic and execute the same time and if you look at the stats only about five percent of ceos don't have a primary operator now again it can come off as many different titles people say well this guy doesn't have a co so you know and i'm like right but his general manager is basically his operator and so sometimes it's hidden like that and basically what happens if you don't do this is you become the bottleneck and this happens to a lot of people and you know if you're watching this video you've probably felt it at some point or maybe you're feeling it right now and you're like i do need to hire somebody and you feel like everything's waiting on you in the business that's probably because you need a role similar to this and the thing is is if you get this role right it's going to do a lot for your business and i want to paint the picture of what what an operator should actually be able to do for your business versus what you might think it can do right first is they should be removing obstacles so you feel like there's a lot of constraints that you don't have time to solve or maybe mental bandwidth to solve or maybe you don't know how to solve them that person should be removing those obstacles from your path so you can keep driving forward the second thing that person should do is they should be freeing up your time as a ceo or visionary all the stuff that's on your plate they should be taking off i want to say like 70 of it because they basically want to take away anything that's not absolute highest best use of your time from you and they should protect you from everything else in the business so i can tell you like you know when we first started gym launch and i was the primary operator of jim launch i wouldn't tell alex about you know if anyone got mad if there were upset clients if there was an issue with employees if anyone was you know upset if really anything in the company was going wrong because i was like it's my responsibility to handle it he doesn't like i will 100 bring him if needed if it escalates that level but 99.9 percent of things don't need to go to him it's just gonna cloud his brain space and get him away from doing what he does best which is literally visualizing where the business is gonna go making content being the figurehead and then the last one is that it's gonna speed up the pace of the business and this is a huge misconception everyone thinks okay if i get an operator though they're going to slow this down they're going to slow everything down that is so bad ass backwards like if you get the right operator they will speed up your business and the problem is is that there's so many a lot of times what happens guys is that an inexperienced ceo hires an operator they don't know what to look for if they don't know what it looks like and they've never done it themselves and so they just assume that this person's correct and oftentimes they hire somebody who has experience from a bigger company and they usually come in and there's like all this bureaucracy and red tape and they just slow you down with like all their systems and sops and it's a bunch of and you don't need all that to make your business work i think it's this huge misconception people always ask me they're like well you know what sobs you use for business i'm like i'm gonna jump off a cliff that sounds terrible like i don't run my business with a boatload of sops you know i run my business by values and i think that a lot of ceos and operators think that you have to run the business by you know checklists and sops et cetera but that's not the best operators know how to run a business by values by inspiration yes you want some sops and yes you want some checklists here and there but that's not what should run the business so that being said that's what it looks like if you get this role right now if you don't get this role right which i've made this mistake multiple times i've seen this mistake happen multiple times i can tell you it is by far the worst mistake that you can make for your business because if this person is over literally the entire business then if they are not the right person your business is if your operator's not a 10 out of 10 your business isn't going to be a 10 out of 10. it's that simple if you hire the wrong person typically what you'll see is that one business operations are going to slow or come to a halt so you're going to notice and there's often like a really interesting correlation which i've seen with a couple companies in acquisition.com which is they bring in a new operator or we look back and you know they're trying to figure out the operator's the right person i say let's go look at the month you hired them and a lot of the times the month that they hire them is the month that their business puts stagnant that's not a coincidence the second thing that you're going to notice is that revenue and key indicators are going to start to decline so you know basically you bring that person in it looks like it's going decently well at least things are stagnant but you know maybe they're gonna grow soon but then you'll see maybe three six months down the line things start to decline and again that's because what is happening in your business today is the result of the things that you've done three to six months prior so if you brought that person in and eventually revenue declines that is because that person is not driving revenue they're not holding people accountable they're not inspiring the team they're not a good leader they're not managing people or they've hired the wrong people and that usually causes morale on the team to go down which you'll see is fairly typical you don't want somebody this is the thing everyone thinks i have to bring someone in and they just have to be like they probably won't be as good as me and in some roles that is 100 true because you are the founder and you care the most in this role you don't have room for that they need to be better than you at the things that they are going to be doing and i think that a lot of people have really low expectations of what this person should be doing instead they kind of think of them like a high level admin or like you know they're just thinking like they shouldn't be doing strategic thinking or anything like that it's like that's complete ass backwards that's not true all look at like cheryl sandberg and then eventually your best people leave and again i've seen this happen time and time again and it really it sucks it's just like if you get the wrong leader in there that's below or next to the visionary the rest of the team if they don't like them they're gonna peace out because they're like i like working for sally but i hate working for jennifer and even worse than those people leave and then that operator hires the wrong people they hire people that are not fit for the business i've had this happen multiple times where i've had to you know shore up the way because the person that i've had in place they've hired the wrong people and there are people that are uh an embodiment of maybe their values or what they think makes sense but not what my values are our company or what we think makes sense and ultimately what that happens is that keeps you from achieving your vision because if this person is the lead executor and they are not capable then you're not able ever to achieve the vision that you want and you really end up hating your business due to this one person which honestly is fairly typical i see a lot of people were like god i just hate my business like you donate your business you just hate the people that you hired because you don't know what you're supposed to be hiring it's like you don't know what good looks like and that's the truth it's like most people don't know what good looks like i see so many people out there and i can tell you like i have multiple people who i have known that they operated businesses and i know that they're not that great and then they go out and they do consulting for businesses and then they say i can turn your business into a 10 million 20 million business and i'm like you didn't do that when you were at that company but it's like you know visionaries don't know what to look for and so that's why i feel passionate about this and making this video is because like you have to protect yourself but with knowledge you have to know what it should look like to have a good operator and i feel like everything out there is actually contrary to what really works boots in the ground in the business and so if you really think of your business like a garden if you're the visionary what's basically happening is that you are out there and you're painting the vision you're like this is what i want the garden to look like here's the seeds i have over here here's the you know shovels i bought blah blah and then your operator is the gardener and they're like they have to go out and make the garden happen right you've painted this picture of this beautiful thing you want they have to go make it happen and so if you get it right it can look like a beautiful immaculate thing and you can be like this is amazing this person is gold i love this person you know you hear them they're like they just eat all day they'd get so much done they're such an executor and you see how much excitement is in people who get the right operator versus the people who don't your garden ends up looking like this and you basically like yeah you know you know sally's good you know i think she just uh i think she sees some coaching it's maybe some coaching or like you know i think you know i think she was good up until up until we hit 3 million but uh you know she does a lot i mean she's really busy though she's really busy and that's something i'll notice is that you just hear the difference in tone between people who have a fantastic operator and people who they know that the operator shouldn't be there and they still got them there for some reason and then we come in and i'm like i've got a big red circle around sally and i'm like sally ain't cutting it and they're like yeah i figured but you know it's scary to fire somebody that you feel like holds a lot of power in your business or has a lot of responsibility what i've come to find is that typically when you remove that person you find out they weren't doing anything so that being said it's really important that you get this right because that person who creates that dead garden this is essentially what they're doing they're cutting you're up there in first place like winning and you're like i love this is great they're there unknowingly whether it's unknown or not cutting down kind of cut your tree down and it happens a lot and especially if you don't get the match right and that person doesn't absolutely believe in your vision if they don't if they're not a complete follower they're not a complete advocate of you as a visionary they will 100 undermining and i've seen this happen so many times one of our portfolio companies i'm going to say that the guy's name is chris he's the visionary right chris is a fantastic visionary he's got tons of talent tons of charisma great with people really good at marketing really good at you know building up the crowd and chris uh i met his operator and i was like not impressed and as we kept working together his operator kept avoiding me and so eventually i was like hey you know can we talk and then we get on the phone call and i would think it would be funny if he's watching his youtube video and he basically for two hours in one way or another tells me how chris is not a great ceo he's actually the one running the whole business he's who the team's loyal to he's the reason they're successful well funny thing because i immediately like i'm like hot inside i'm like sweating i'm like this is so bad like we need to immediately take this person out and i call chris and i was like dude i was like did you know he's like well you know he says some things and it's bothering me i was like you can't have any tolerance from people saying like your operator has to be your number one advocate they can't disrespect you they can't undermine you imagine what that does to the rest of the organization that's a joke makes your business a joke and so the moment we removed this guy i kid you not they like tripled over the next few months i'm not kidding so uh we started working with them they were doing about uh three 300 something a month and now they're at you know 1.3 months and i honestly think like there was no way that we would have gotten there with that toxic operator in place toxic whatever i hate that term but you get what i'm saying like he was really poisonous to the team and that being said that's why this is so important to get right so you're like okay cool i get it how do i actually find this person right okay well the type of operator you need relies on two things okay it's going to rely on you and it's gonna rely on the business and so i'm gonna start with relying on you okay it's really simple but you have to understand this every coo book every operator book every manual out there on how to be an operator the number one thing is that you need to be whatever the ceo or the visionary needs you to be and so it's really it's kind of like an executive assistant role which is a form of an operator where it's really dependent on that other piece that other person the visionary what are they good at what are their capabilities etc and you just have to mold into that role and so if you're looking and you're trying to figure out what kind of operator do i need to hire it's really good to be cognizant of your own strengths weaknesses likes and dislikes and so i'll give you like a base case that i see typical right someone comes into acquisition.com it's like a visionary their strengths are going to be marketing sales math inspiration their weaknesses are going to be management follow through delivery and focus they're going to like content marketing and speaking and they're going to dislike meetings project management and generally people's stuff and so this is a really base case probably because a lot of people who come to acquisitions.com they're really obviously it's acquisition.com and so they're really attracted to a lot of the content that alex makes and so by nature they're actually pretty good at all the same things that alex is good at and so when they come in the things that they're bad at but they're doing are like management accountability systems and so everything's just kind of like this hot pod and so the best way to think about this is you basically want to hire somebody who their your weaknesses and your dislikes are their likes and their strengths so they are strong at management at follow through at delivery at focus they like meetings project management people stuff and that's the biggest thing you want to think about like what are things that you hate doing that you suck at and that person should be the app they should be the they should essentially make you a whole because you know for that five percent of ceos that are able to be the visionary and the executor they have found a way to not have weaknesses detrimental enough to harm the business when they act of those two roles but it is very very rare and it's very very hard i've seen it maybe two times where someone's done it very well and so that being said you want to hire the person that is going to be able to fill those spots for you and so that's first and foremost like the first filter you want when you're looking for an operator is like what do i hate what do i suck at that person needs to be good at and like those things now the second piece is the business and so here's where we're going to break down i really want to give you guys a good clear vision for like depending on your revenue level what kind of operator do you need and again like i said i've done it at every revenue level so that being said the business piece if you look at the business and you think about the entrepreneurial journey right okay so you have to basically look at the levels that are needed in each level of the business and so this is how we break it down acquisition.com and what we believe makes the most sense and is necessary at each point in time okay let me move my little guy zero to one million the entire focus is market fit okay so you've got one product one avatar one channel problem is you have no idea what the you're doing and the objective is you want to consistently sell something that people actually want to buy now the second level is deliverable and that's one to 10 million and there we're trying to increase the lifetime gross profit per customer the problem here is that typically when we run into entrepreneurs in the space they're not making enough profit per customer scale and they're not sure how to structure it in a way that would be advantageous to them and to the customer now the third level is 10 to 50 million and at 10 to 50 million we're really focusing on consistency of deliverable right and professionalizing the business because the problem is that we have inconsistent delivery we have poor tracking we have crm issues finances are a complete mess and that's when we really have to professionalize the business it's a lot of incremental improvements we're not figuring out a lot of new things at this point we're just putting in systems and practices for the business and then that last level is really that 50 to 100 million and at 50 to 100 million that's when you have to think about attracting talent okay and the reason for that is the business has to grow through different revenue streams typically around this point so either you become a conglomeration of products and product suites or you become a conglomeration of businesses right so a lot of people go into mna after they hit about 50 million the problem up here is that innovation tends to die and so the product's not old and fresh it's not fresh anymore and so you typically need to bring in people with ideas so that being said how does this translate to the operator okay well what you have to understand is there are actually two types of operators okay and they exist on a dichotomy and so there's not anyone that's it's not black or white there's not a builder or an incremental improver but there are how much of a builder are you how much of an incremental improver are you and so it's a dichotomy that each operator has to manage but you want to be cognizant of what that person's natural strengths are so a builder operator is someone who really thrives in chaos they like to build things from scratch they don't need any direction at all for the most part they love to be insanely busy they're operationally creative so they can essentially come up with ideas from scratch and they're really good in wartime when it's like this is go time the game's on the line let's go that is what i would consider a builder on the other side there's incremental improvers they like to scale and improve what already is working so they're not thinking about building from the ground up but they can take it once you've gotten it from zero to one and they can take it from one to ten right that's hypothetically speaking not in terms of numbers of the business they like improving existing systems and they value consistency and predictability and they can add a ton of that into the business and they're very good in times of peace because in times of peace the last thing you want is for someone to redo everything and you know be throwing chaos chaos into the mix so like for myself personally i tend to err towards side of builder so that's why it's easy for me to like be the primary operator in the beginning and then hand it off to somebody who's a little bit more of an incremental improver once we hit a certain revenue mark and that's just kind of how i've always done it for myself so that being said what i want to talk about is what does each what what kind of operator do you need each level and they do sway towards one or the other based on the level you're at your business so zero to one million you're just finding market fit right and so this is really marketing and sales focused you know we're not focusing on delivery yet we're not focusing on um you know customer experience yet we're really just like can i sell this over and over again that is the main objective of the business and so at this point revenue level you're at zero to one the business stage is market fit the objective is to get one product that you sell to one avatar through one channel product marketplace the problem is you have no idea what the you're doing uh the kind of operator you need in terms of title at this point in time you probably need either an executive assistant a project manager an operations coordinator so it's a little bit of a lower level operational role and so at that point you don't need a coo or something of that sort you just need something that's you know someone that can help you do pretty much everything and so the type of operator you need here is really a builder uh you do not want to incremental improve at this point you don't want someone who's super consistent super slow you want someone who's like fast chaos love doing love getting done and so their responsibility really at this point is like wearing all the hats doing all the day-to-day on behalf of the visionary and taking the vision and really starting to build all what you need from scratch and so uh that being said with this point in the business this is what i typically see goes wrong right the most common points of failure are these three things which is one as a visionary you hire someone who's way too inexperienced so a lot of times it's they're too inexperienced in your type of business they've never been in a startup before and they've never even done this role before and so if you already you've never done this and you've never done this business you bring someone new in you need them to have some kind of context because like you don't so they need to and so you want somebody who's like been in a startup started things with somebody before they can thrive in the chaos now the second piece point of that is a lot of people hire someone who seems that way but they have a low threshold for stress this it's very unstable at this point and you need somebody who's excited about the instability not going to complain about it and so my some people are like oh no you want the personality that's contrast no they're going to eventually resent the business present you be upset for how much time it takes you know no personal life no balance they're going to complain and you don't want that and i've seen this happen time and time again even in gym launch like when we would start new product lines or new sectors we would sometimes take people from other departments deploy them on this new project special project and you know they're essentially being like the the primary operators and builders and some people did terrible and i remember one girl you know she said to me she was like layla like i will never do that again and i remember thinking in my mind i was like why and she was like i mean i just worked all the time i had no work-life balance i was like yeah but how much did you learn like that's amazing you know what i mean but not everybody feels that way she was just really upset she didn't have work-life balance and so like that's really hard to have at this point in time with a business of this size and so you can't really hire for somebody like that and the last part is you don't let somebody with a lack of sales aptitude and here's why i'll tell you is what i've seen time and time again is that if the primary piece is to figure out the thing that you sell and who you sell it to you want somebody that is on your team that they also know how to sell like they also could if needed like coordinate the calls do set calls things like that because like it's really scrappy at this point you need people to be able to wear multiple hats you want some of the sales aptitude and so that is where a lot of the points of failure are so if you're at zero to one million you know you really want someone who is experienced they have a high stress threshold and they've got a little bit of sales aptitude now let's say that you are at 1 to 10 million and i'll tell you that this is probably the most popular revenue level where people do hire an operator so if you're watching this and you're between 110 million you might have an operator um it's also typically the revenue level where you up what kind of operate you hire so that being said the objective here is really to increase the lifetime gross profit of that customer and so usually the issue is that you're not making enough per customer to scale so it's like i want to scale on a higher team don't make enough money it's like right because we need to figure out lifetime value of the customer and how to make them more valuable to you and so typically at this point what you need is you need something as an operations manager or a director of operations right if you're at you know just two million a year three million a year might be just an operations manager if you're more towards the 10 million mark it might be more of a director of operation now titles don't matter as much because pay can be it can vary between the titles and with the type of business you have it might be better to attract one or the other it's really dependent on that but what you do need still is i think a lot of people mess up here is they think i need someone who's really an incremental improver you know someone who puts consistency in systems in the business and then no that you're not even at 10 million yet you need a builder and this is what a lot of people get wrong at this level is they think that they need that person with all those systems and sops and it's like a little bit but you need someone who can still build you haven't built it all yet this project is not finished and so it's their responsibility to really organize the chaos within the functions of the business so they at this point you're gonna be hiring leaders managers of different functions nothing super high level but management level you'll be setting the cadence for the team adding in some consistency and implementing systems and so this level again like i said is probably where most people get it wrong it's also where the most people hire and here's what i normally see is that the most common points of failure between 1 to 10 million okay the first one is that they go and you're a visionary and you're like i need to get someone from like a big company big corporate you know someone really understands these systems and operations and you're like i just really need to get someone here with that kind of experience so you hire someone from like the corporate world too soon like you do not need corporate at this level in fact it would probably do the opposite of what you would want and so i would recommend against that and i would try to hire somebody that's worked in you know fast growing startup businesses before the second is that you often find at this point that there's a lot of people uh bring on operators who lack humility and it sucks because this is usually where the business has the fastest growth is from that like 1 to 10 to then 30 million and if that person lacks humility they're going to bottleneck the out of the business i've seen this happen time and time and time again and i can also see it a lot with like people at acquisition.com is like if someone has an operator and i'm talking to them i'm saying like here's what we want to be preparing for next here's this and then yeah i know i got it like i've and then they always try to reference like well you know my last company i kind of you know this or that and i'm like you haven't done in this company have you right like you've never been entrepreneurial one you've never been to one like this and so it's really interesting because what you'll notice is that a lot of times the visionary remains super coachable and then they have an operator who's like a little more stubborn or pig-headed you don't want that that will not succeed the best operators are the ones who are absolute learning machines i can tell you one of our portfolio companies we brought in his wife to be the operator the reason i knew that she would be a fantastic operator is because i looked at her p l and i was like hey like we're not booking things correctly like this is how you actually want the p l set up here's an example and she went to the accounting firm that they worked with and they were like hey we can't do that for like three or four months it's gonna take us that much time so this went and she learned accounting and then two weeks later sent me her books from the last year that she redid all the books that is the kind of person you want as an operator someone with like the utmost humility absolutely able to be coached and an insane executor like can you imagine that level of execution is insane and then the last piece is if you hire somebody as an operator and they are unable to delegate that is not what you want this level this level is the point where very soon that person can't be doing 10 or 20 of everyone's job usually around that one to 10 they are that operator is helping a lot of this team because they're probably not trained up their lack of context it's a new team there's a lot of inefficiencies right so they're making up for the inefficiencies in their operations but it gets to a point where you have to be able to delegate and a lot of the times they're not able to at that level and it probably stems from the lack of humility so next level 10 to 50 million right here is where we want consistency of delivery so we figured out how to make more profit per customer we're making more money we're getting a little more team in there we've got things going it's a good machine right and now it's like i feel like everything's breaking there's no consistency i have no transparency because i have no good financials i have no good numbers i don't have good tracking that is where we're at when we're usually at that 10 to 50 work right and so what kind of an operator do you need here the problem is typically that everything is inconsistent and we've outgrown most of our systems right usually you want to hire someone with one of the three titles it's director of operations vp of operations or a ceo and now this point in the business once you've gotten everything figured out and you're like this thing works we've got it working we've got people in place that is the point where you're like i need someone who's more of an incremental improver and the reason is because it's because you need some predictability you need some consistency you need some you know just improvement to the business the thing already works we just need to make it better and so really the responsibilities at that point are like we're going to migrate ourselves to professional platforms we're going to formalize our finance you know make sure we have gap accounting we're going to be tracking the right metrics we're going to hire leaders we're going to continue to remove the visionary more and more from the business and get them to only doing the strategic visionary stuff and that's really the job at this point in time now where do most people operators mess up at that 10 to 50 million mark okay here's the three things that are done wrong typically at this stage and so again i'm making this so if you're the visionary you know what to instruct them on one is they add too much red tape it's a art and a science to adding just enough systems to a business for it to work better without slowing things down and a lot of operators don't know how to do it i can't tell you how many operators i've worked with all they want to do is put in systems and sops and more software and more systems and they always think more is better the best operators simplify through elimination they will take things away they will eliminate systems and they will get it to one thing that works insanely well for the business and so you don't want someone that's adding all that red tape you also don't want someone who becomes the bottleneck by adding red tape saying you can only ask your supervisor for this you can only talk to me for this don't ask any don't go to him for that only oh you can only speak to me only me and you'll see a lot of times those incremental improvers tend to be like that at that point in time it's like there's so much bureaucracy around like you have to only speak to your supervisor like don't go across department you talk to the wrong person here there's there's communication cadences and it's like that's not how life works that's not how a collaborative team works if you trust your team everybody should be able to talk to everybody there's no like this is right and this is wrong it's like yeah you report to this person technically but like you can ask other people for help too and so that is probably the first place that goes wrong the second is that you know kind of going hand in hand with this is that they are a manager and not a leader and so having a high level manager as an operator can get you to 10 million for sure probably even 15 or 20 million but then very quickly it changes and you realize that the bottleneck is that that person is not a leader that anybody else respects so if that person is not aspirational if that person is not charismatic if that person doesn't inspire your team guess who has to go do that job you so instead of working on the business and building the runway for what is next instead of strategically thinking like what do i need to do next to grow the business you're thinking like oh like the team needs me they miss me they you know they complain that i'm not there if that's happening that means that you've got a manager there and not a leader and that's probably the hardest transition for most operators is to learn that really that level five leadership skill which is leading leaders and a lot of people just aren't cut out to do it and then the last piece is that they often will value systems over revenue the best operators focus on revenue like it's this it's this weird thing where people ask me they're like well what should i tie them into you know like which i tie my operator into you know because obviously not you know they're not driving revenue i'm like what the are you talking about they should be the main person driving revenue they're making the vision come to life they're responsible for hiring the people over marketing and sales and product and all those other revenue driving departments so they are absolutely responsible for driving revenue and what you'll see in inexperienced operators or operators who've come from really big companies is they value systems and processes over revenue and you never want that they should always say you know marketing sales product always come first and so that are the point those are the points of failure 10 to 50 million now look at the last run of this just for anyone who you know probably not many people my youtube channel fall in this wrong but if you do or if you're curious what it looks like when you get there at 50 million this is when you really need to be attracting talent because you want to be growing the business through additional revenue streams or through a conglomeration of businesses and so what does that look like at that mark okay so at 50 million plus the business stage is that of talent acquisition we really need to be bringing more talent on because in order to grow our revenue streams or grow our business of businesses we need people there's no more systems that are going to take us further here it's not a piece of software you're not going to have monday.com taking you to 100 million but you need people that are talented people who are entrepreneurial and so the problem here is usually the and i see this happen time time again i had a friend who just had happened to her and she's like dude like nobody has ideas in my business it's all me and like our revenue's stagnant i know it's gonna start going down and that's what always happens is you hit that mark and the revenue stagnates and then you're like i know what that means which is it's gonna decline soon and that's because we don't have anybody else in the company who can come up with ideas and so the kind of operator you need at this point is a vp of operations or coo typically you're not going to probably get the right person for below that title now what type of operator here's what's really interesting is that those incremental those who are like really heavy incremental improvers tend to suck ass when it comes back to innovating again and the reason for that is because they need to be a builder you have to say how you have to re-envision how the whole machine works again you have to reinvent the business the culture is going to change the systems are going to change everything is going to change again and so you need someone who's a very talented very experienced builder and that's why i said being humble and being coachable is the most important thing as an operator and when you're looking for an operator because if you find someone who just is coachable and humble they can be coached and trained to lead the business through this mark they could have watched this video and now they know for themselves right but if they're closed minded to that they're not going to make it here and so the responsibility of that person is reinventing the business so it can support innovation that's the primary thing that they need to do at this point they need to break the processes that are long held they need to basically reimagine everything remove all the bottlenecks and turn away all the waste they need to start eliminating like crazy and so what are the most common points of failure right at that 10-100 the first one is that lack of change management right so at that 50 million mark you really realize that um change management is a skill 100 and so if that person doesn't understand how to do that this is what's going to be the it's honestly what's probably going to be detrimental to the business because you're going to be putting all these new things in place you're going to be changing people's roles adding new people subtracting people adding new departments subtracting new other product lines if you don't have to manage change effectively it's going to be very depart on the team so you need a leader that knows how to do that the second piece is again remember this is talent acquisition phase if that person is not inspirational enough is not enough of leader to attract the right talent you're because the operator is the person that is going out is trying to find the talent etc like you're saying what is needed in the vision for the business but they should be the one attracting the town and figuring out who needs to be in hc if they can't attract the talent because they are not talent again point of failure and the last thing is i think this all stems from one thing which is if this person is growing up and you've hit 50 million they are often too comfortable because in that you know say 10 20 to 50 million range when you're growing it's all that incremental improvement it's all improving and improving in volume and more and more but it's not different so it becomes very uncomfortable for a lot of people at this level and you'll see that a lot of people swap out their operator right here because again you need someone different who's fresh and new and who can reimagine the business who isn't afraid of being wrong who isn't afraid of changing the things that once worked that no longer do and so that being said those are the levels right so we've got the zero two 1 1 to 10 10 to 50 and 50 plus and here's the thing guys is i know that this is a lot of information if i were you what i would do is go back and i would screenshot whatever level i'm at and i would go over this if you have an operator have them watch this this this honestly stemmed from a conversation i had with one a visionary and then two a dinner i had the other night with somebody's operator who said what would happen like where do you think that i could fail and i explained all these different breaking points to her and the thing is that if you get this right this is what it should feel like you plus that person does not equal 2 equals 11. that's the best way that i could like in one just short summary that is what it feels like when you have the right person is that once you get that person in everything skyrockets so that being said i hope this video was of use to you if you want more videos like this or more videos on hiring that like integrator operator role drop a comment below i'm curious what you guys think it's a little different than things i normally talk about i could probably talk about it for hours because i've done it so much i've hired for it so much and it's what i do primarily in acquisition.com that being said have a fantastic week