Jordan Solender: 18:56
So a lot of it is a brain dump right. You want to give the AI agent as much as your brain as you can the the whole. The best part about AI is that you can give it a golden image and it’s going to regurgitate, you know, everything off that golden image. You can say, you know, if the client says this or has this sentiment, then I want you to respond with this. If it has that, then respond with this. A lot of if then stuff, but it’s a lot of brain dump, right? You want to put as much information into your custom GPT or your custom PDF knowledge base as you can for this voice agent. That way it knows what to do and when to do it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:31
So that’s one you’ve noticed. You noticed a bottleneck kind of in the in the lead and sales process with the AI voice agent. What else I don’t know. Could be with that you’ve removed yourself or team through automation or AI.
Jordan Solender: 19:47
Sure, sure. So let me tell another recent one so about my buddy. We’ll, we’ll we’ll call him Tom. I just helped him out recently. So I’m working with Tom. Yeah. He’s the founder, another of a seven figure marketing agency. Super smart guy, great team. He’s he’s had his team for 15, 20 years. Everything in the business ran through Tom though, right? Everything ran through him. He was approving every invoice. He was answering every question, reviewing every client email before they went out. Basically, nothing moved unless Tom touched it. He had great. He had a great team for back end operations and customer success. But you know, Tom was very involved, right? He was he was definitely working in the business, not on the business as a you know, as I say. So I asked him, you know what? You know, he’s coming to me and he’s telling me he’s like, dude, I’m super burned out, right?
Like, I am not sure I want to scale this thing to a point of exit. I’d like to exit within 3 to 5 years. He’s like, I know, but I’m super burned out and I’m. I said, what’s one thing that drives you crazy but still depends on you? And he goes real fast. He goes invoices. He goes, I’m spending like two hours a day just approving invoices and payments and I’m like, invoices and payments. And he goes, yeah. And I’m like, okay, so let’s let’s just remove yourself one thing. Just remove yourself from one thing. Right. Let’s let’s just focus on one thing to remove yourself from and take it from there. Right?
Remove yourself from one thing. If you could take anything away. Right. What would that one thing be? So we worked together and we built a small automation using an automation platform. Right. In his accounting software. It was QuickBooks that auto approved anything under a certain amount and flagged any exceptions for review. Right. So this single change alone in his busy season gave him ten hours back every week. Ten hours ten. I mean, what could you do with ten hours? I mean, you’re an entrepreneur. I mean, what could you do with ten extra freaking hours, man? So I wouldn’t.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:59
Start a barbecue restaurant, but that’s what I wouldn’t do. But.
Jordan Solender: 22:04
Oh, investor in a barbecue restaurant didn’t start it. But. But the best part about this whole thing, though, is that once Tom saw that automation could replace like that one area, he comes back to me the next week. Literally the next week, we hadn’t even seen like the benefits of like a month. It was literally the next week. It was like a Tuesday morning. He calls me and he goes, that saved me a ton of time, right? I’m not worried about it. Everything under a certain amount, if it matches a certain criteria, just auto approves. It’s nice. My team’s not waiting on me anymore. My team’s happier, I’m happier. Ten hours easy, and I’m like, okay.
And I’m like, let’s pick one more thing. So then he starts looking into it and he’s like, all right, well, there’s client onboarding. I’m really involved with. There’s proposals, there’s scheduling. So we’re like, I don’t know, a month, a month and a half now later, he’s not buried in approvals anymore. He feels like he’s leading the business again. Right. He’s talking strategy with me. Right. Which he hasn’t talked to me about strategy like ever. Right. Because he’s been so ingrained in everything entrenched. You know, in you know, the lesson. I think the takeaway here is, you know, and I do this every day with, with my own businesses, right. It’s to try to make them better because the I hate the phrase. I absolutely hate the phrase if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
I hate that it can always be improved. It can always be fixed. It could always be better. Don’t don’t even write the the guys that say that they want a job, you know, they’re they’re not looking to to scale. They’re they’re looking to have a job. And if you want to be an entrepreneur and build a job for yourself, like that’s totally fine. I think my messaging and who I work best for and with and provide the value to our entrepreneurs that want to scale and work on the business, not in the business, and just pick one thing and remove yourself. That’s that’s how real scale starts, just picking one thing and removing yourself.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:02
Jordan, you said you have a special like audit process when you’re working with someone to evaluate. I love that question is what’s one thing that drives you crazy? That depends on you because then you just kind of chip away at the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And you mentioned you have this process in the beginning to evaluate. I don’t know if it’s the company or the person or the tasks. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Jordan Solender: 24:29
Yeah. So my first step in I call it my Bottleneck framework. Right. Is is the Audit right. We figure out exactly where you, the founder, are, the bottleneck. Right. Where are things being held up? What’s taking a lot of your time? We want to map out everything that touches you decisions, approvals, client communication, operations. I want to measure how much of it actually requires you.
Once we see where the friction is, we can start. We can decide to start eliminating or delegating or automating any of it. Right. If you can document it, you can delegate it. I like to say so the goal isn’t to overwhelm you with systems. It’s to find one area that’s blocking scale and start removing you from it, right? Remember, remove yourself from one thing. That’s it. So that’s the foundation for everything that comes next, right? It’s figuring out how to remove you from those things.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:27
You know I love the eliminate automate delegate. One of my favorite books is The Goal. You know yeah. It’s and it talks a lot about obviously bottlenecks and friction points. So I love what you’re saying here when you look at and sometimes I forget just to think of eliminating something like you know sometimes my mind goes to, well I should delegate it, automate it or whatever. Maybe I should just get rid of it, right. And so what are some of those things that you found that business owners were doing that you’re like, let’s just get rid of it altogether. Do you remember any of those.
Jordan Solender: 26:06
About getting rid of a process altogether?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:08
Yeah. Like eliminating whatever something that someone’s doing right? In the case of, you know, not even automating or delegating, but just removing it, it’s unnecessary.
Jordan Solender: 26:19
So I, I don’t know, I mean, this all depends on the business, right? Like you, you gotta you gotta look at the facts. You gotta look at what you’re doing in the business on a, on a daily basis. But to remove a process I don’t think you’re ever actually removing, you’re removing yourself from process. But to remove a complete process from your business, I don’t think that’s ever happening. You’re you’re modifying your your scaling it. Maybe you’re maybe even automating it. Right? I don’t know if eliminating is the right word. Right.
Like for instance, take a. Take a delivery service. Right. And order comes in. You know, I’m sure somebody’s taking it over the phone. They’re putting it into a computer. The computer sends it out to a dispatcher. Dispatcher takes it to your house, right? I’m sure there’s even a better way to do it, where the dispatcher just gets it right from the computer and eliminates that, or removes right that that middleman. You know, I think things are just constantly should be changed and constantly flowing. I don’t know if eliminating a whole process is a way to look at it, though. Yeah, that makes sense.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:28
Yeah, totally. I’ll give you an example from like the podcast early on I’m like, oh, well, you know, after the after we record this, I’m going to just say, oh, you know, kind of record a special intro on every episode, right? And say, you got to check out Jordan because he’ll basically help eliminate you, you know, basically eliminate the bottlenecks in your business and blah, blah, blah.
And I was finding I wasn’t doing it right after. Right. The interview was over. And so it would be a couple days and I’d be like, I don’t remember everything. Jordan says. I’m going to go back and listen to the interview and then record like a special intro. And I’m like, what would happen if I just didn’t record a special intro, right? And so no one cared. So I was like, that saves me so much time. And that was that was a bottleneck in my process and I just got rid of it. Right. So.
Jordan Solender: 28:24
Well, I was going to say on that note, a lot of founders think they need to fix every process, right? But half the time what they need to do, to your point is, is eliminate them, right? So over time, businesses collect steps that made sense once, but now they just kind of slow things down. So that was something right there that kind of just slowed you down. And then as soon as you realized like, oh, you know, there there wasn’t nothing broke, right?
In fact, things got faster and you relieved some time for yourself. I mean, in some sense, right? Elimination is the cleanest form of optimization. But before you automate or delegate or strip out the unnecessary because no system is better than a bad one, that’s already been automated. Right? So, you know, sometimes it’s the cleanest form of of optimizing. It’s just eliminating. So I think it all depends on the situation.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:11
To what you were saying with founders. And that’s why what you do is really important, because I find sometimes I’m too close to something. I don’t see that. I don’t see a fresh set of eyes on a business. Right. To me, that’s normal. I need I’ve been doing it for this long. I almost feel like I need to do it, even though I probably don’t. So having someone like you who’s built these businesses is is very valuable to look through and see, because you may I don’t know if this has happened, but someone thinks, oh, this is the thing I need to, you know, automate. And you’re like, actually, when we did this evaluation, this is way seems like way more important to get rid of.
Jordan Solender: 29:53
Yeah. So interesting. You just said something that I say all the time. So about being too close to their own process. Right? Like you build it, you build the process like in your podcast strategy, like in how you spin up a podcast and whatnot. Right? Like you built that process. So a lot of the times founders are too close to the process. So you built it. You understand the logic behind every step. And it’s it’s hard to see where the waste is. So that’s why when people come to me, it’s easy for me to, to to look at it right and be like this, this, this. When you’re that close, everything feels necessary.
Everything feels necessary because you’re doing it. You built it even when half of it isn’t right. So you start almost defending inefficiencies because they worked once. That’s why an outside audit is so powerful. It’s it’s not emotional. It’s just data. And as somebody once told me, you know, facts don’t have feelings, right? It’s it’s not emotional. It’s just data. So sometimes you need someone who isn’t living inside the process every day to ask, why are we even doing this? Like, what’s what’s the point of this? Right. Distance creates clarity. And when you zoom out and you realize most bottlenecks aren’t people problems, they’re visibility problems. You can’t see the problem.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:08
You know what is another thing? Jordan, when you look back at your companies or the people you’ve helped, what’s another thing people stated that drives them crazy, that depended on them? We talked about, obviously in one of your processes, the calls. Right. It depended on someone or people weren’t booking. The other example with the agency was the kind of the invoices and that kind of thing. What else have you found when you’re talking to people? Is that one thing that’s driving them crazy?
Jordan Solender: 31:45
There’s a lot here. There’s a lot to there’s a lot to unpack. Okay. How about this one I was talking to somebody about at the same EO dinner last night, about answering the same questions over and over and over again, right? Chasing team members for updates, approvals that pile up, watching money come in and time disappear. Right. Because you’re not scaling effectively. Maybe you’re scaling, but not well. It’s it’s a lot of this goes back to time. Right. So scaling revenue but not themselves. Right.
Again pulling the founder out. So every new client now means more chaos not freedom. A lot of I’ve noticed that a lot of founders are subconsciously like scared of scaling because another client means more questions or I need to hire more staff, or I need to look at the financials of, you know, this client, is this client profitable? Right. And that’s really where I come in, right? I help the founders identify exactly where they’ve become that bottleneck. We install the systems, the automation, the structure. So the business runs without depending on them. So the goal isn’t more a hustle, it’s more clarity and control and more time. If you’re looking for more of like a specific example, I know that was like high level. We can take the answering the questions over and over again, right.
Let’s let’s talk about SOPs. Let’s talk about automation and using AI to your leverage. Like AI is a wild tool, like AI is a wild tool, you know? So we’re standardizing platforms right now across every one of my companies to standardize SOPs and have AI write the SOPs. I’ll record a short loom video and document something that I’m doing on a daily basis. To win in a certain part of the business. I’ll upload it to the SOP platform and and I’ll have everybody go watch it, and then I’ll have that SOP AI platform generate a quiz to make sure everybody fully understands, hey, this is how you win in this specific, specific facet of the business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:57
I’m curious. I want to talk tech stack for a little bit. Right. Because people love talking about tech and software and tools. Is that specific one an internal tool, or do you use an external software for SOPs?
Jordan Solender: 34:11
For SOPs? We’ve tried so many tools. I’ve tried to manual, you know, actually another EO member.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:20
They’ve been on the podcast. Yeah.
Jordan Solender: 34:21
Oh really? Yeah. Yeah. Great platform. Ultimately though, we we looked at manual and but we ended up going with a company called Wale. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of whale but wild for SOPs. Wild for SOPs. So we use whale for learning onboarding and SOP creation okay.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:43
Yeah.
Jordan Solender: 34:45
This isn’t affiliated or sponsored.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:46
Or.
Jordan Solender: 34:47
Anything like that. I just, you know, we love them. We use.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:49
Them. Yeah we use Sweet Process. I have not tested out whale but we like Sweet Process and SOP platform that centralizes everything. And yeah. So it’s it’s definitely our team is like thank God we have this thing. You know, what are some of the other important tools software that you and the team use.
Jordan Solender: 35:13
We’re big with Loom. We use a lot of Loom, right, to not waste time. You know what could have been a meeting could have easily been a loom, I always say. So we’ll record like a 1 to 5 minute Loom. Here’s here’s what’s going on. We can see who read it. Tech stack. We love Slack because it integrates into everything. We use Salesforce as our CRM standardized on all the companies. Ever since Salesforce rolled out their AI right, engaging with leads, you know, lost leads or, you know, people that aren’t talking to us, you know, it’s never been easier. ChatGPT you know, everybody has a license to our ChatGPT environment. We have our own custom GPT that we’ve made to answer questions internally from everything about HR internally and culture in the company, all the way to customer facing documents and how to create certain documents and deliverables to make sure every customer is getting the you know, the right things across every company.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:12
Do you use anything from like a project management perspective, like assigning tasks?
Jordan Solender: 36:18
Yeah. So we use Monday.com, we try Asana. We tried ClickUp ended up going with Monday again because of integrations. So the more things a platform integrates to, the better. I like things that are connected. I don’t want to have redundancy. So you know we can integrate. We use Google Workspace on our back end for every company so we can integrate Google Workspace. Google Workspace with Monday, Open AI, Slack. You know Salesforce. They all integrate to each other at every single company. So there’s no redundancy in data. There’s always a source of truth.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:54
Anything from, like, you guys get a I mean, it’s amazing the inbound leads and things you get from your companies. Are there any, like, phone systems that you use that connects everything, or is it Salesforce kind of allow you to do that?
Jordan Solender: 37:08
So Salesforce allows us to do it all as far as like a customer relationship management tool. But when it comes to inbound leads, I mean every company is different, right? It select is dominantly more of an outbound company. So I have a team making anywhere between 3000 to 4000 calls a day. Right. So the sales math, right? I was talking about sales math last night and doing the sales funnel and the sales math. Right.
Like we need this many leads every single month to go in top of funnel. This many touches need to happen. If we are over this amount of touches, kick that lead out of the funnel because they’re not going to answer the phone. I am a big subscriber to the Pareto method right, 20% versus 80%. So I know 20% is going to pick up the phone. 20% of that is going to book a meeting, 20% of that is going to be qualified. 20% of that is going to get to the sales process. So, you know, it’s it’s very simple to work backwards on how many leads I need in the top of the funnel every month for it. Select for Maryland’s DJ. It’s almost the exact opposite because that’s an inbound company.
So it’s more based on Instagram Reels and hold rates on reels, right. How many people have followed us that month? So people find us by searching, you know, what is our SEO look like? Everything is is totally different. But the one thing that is true across all the companies is that there is sales math. There is always sales math, there is always a funnel. And you have to understand your sales math, your numbers and your funnel if your business is going to scale successfully.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:47
Yeah. Jordan, you brought up a really good point. I think about Pareto’s principle. Maybe every hour. You know, and I had Perry Marshall, who wrote 80/20 Sales and Marketing, whi he Richard Koch has. Like, if you go on, anyone goes on audible. He’s got the 80 over 20 book. So Perry actually went to I don’t know if it was Portugal or Spain to like spend time with Richard Koch, who wrote 80 over 20. So, so Perry came out with like the 80/20, like applied it to sales and marketing and came out with it. So of course I listened to all of the 80 over 20 books, like if I can get that little extra nugget from I mean, it’s a simple principle, right? But it’s, you know, 20% of whatever, you know, activity leads to 80% of results or however you want to apply it. But, you know, I definitely love going deep in that on that specific topic. I’m curious, the call that’s a crazy amount of calls per day. How do you manage that from a technology perspective or certain? Again, like softwares or things that you’re using to at least do the outbound stuff.
Jordan Solender: 39:54
Yeah. So we there’s all different types of dialers out there. Right now in the US, AI dialing I’m pretty sure is illegal. You can’t do that at scale. I think you can do it for inbound calls, which we do because that’s, you know, people are requesting info. So they’ve opted in. Essentially we actually have humans. You know, we have we have a whole team overseas that is doing outbound calls. We use something called a parallel dialer, which is basically a human component dialer. So there’s a bunch of people in a call center, you know, they’re making hundreds of dials a day for my team. And as soon as they get somebody on the line, beep goes in the air. And, you know, my my team gets to pick up. So, you know, between that and the 10/80 ten rule, you know, I would say those are the biggest nuggets for for scaling for founders right now.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:46
I’m curious, Jordan, from your standpoint, you’ve had mentors, colleagues throughout your career and who are some of those advisors and some of the great advice they’ve given you?
Jordan Solender: 41:02
A lot of people in EO, you know, EO has been so fruitful in that way, you know, in understanding not just your business and how it relates to your home life, right? But also how your home life relates to your business. You know, those are those are some big things. But first and foremost, my dad was an entrepreneur, right. So watching so my dad, you know, when I was a when I was a kid, you know, a toddler, my dad was big in the Domino’s Pizza boom. So when I was a little kid, you know, I think like ages one to 6 or 7, he had a bunch of Domino’s franchises in the Mid-Atlantic.
You know, everything from North Carolina to Jersey. He he he had a Domino’s Pizza franchise. I remember being a kid and making pizzas in Domino’s Pizzas. That’s when my birthday party was, you know, so that was that was really fun. I got some cute pictures as a kid doing that. My dad took a page out of Mr. Wonderful’s book from Shark Tank, you know, and he always he always pressed me when I was starting my business this really early on. Know your numbers, right? I think I took that a step further because he was always referring to financials. Right.
You know, profit margins, you know, net income. You know, just a basic, basic things on a PNL. I took it a step further, you know, in sales math. Right. So I know the amount of leads, like I mentioned, you know, the amount of touches, the amount of phone calls, how many proposals versions need to happen before we average, you know, a sale. So know your numbers. If you don’t know your numbers in your ICP as a founder. Big red flag, right? You might just be creating a job for yourself.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:38
Any other EO members and an advice they’ve given you that’s been helpful.
Jordan Solender: 42:45
I mean, so, so many. I’ll give a shout out to Kate in New York. So, Kate, I don’t want to throw out a last name, but I’m sure you could figure it out with the LinkedIn search. So she she’s a LinkedIn expert, right. And for for her, you know, she she was telling me I was on the phone with her a couple weeks ago. You know, creating content creates trust. And as an entrepreneur with multiple businesses, right, you need to create trust in multiple verticals and industries. So something I’m leaning into more recently is creating content, right.
Getting myself out there. And, you know, if you got a bunch of entrepreneurs in the room, the one that is going to make himself uncomfortable more often than not is the one that’s going to win, right? You got it. You got to put yourself in uncomfortable situations. And most entrepreneurs, right. Like we’re natural salespeople, we’re natural leaders, but we don’t like making ourselves uncomfortable, like putting ourselves on camera a lot of the times.
So she was telling me, you know, you know, you got to make yourself content and trustworthy through that content, and other people will want to work with you that way because they’ll be able to see you, you know, and you’ll gain that authority in that space by making that content. Put yourself in an uncomfortable situation by creating that content. So hope, hope that makes sense. But you know, I’m trying to do that myself.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:21
It’s amazing. Jordan, like some of the people I talk to and they’re so impressive and they’re. Concerned about sharing I don’t know, whatever. I don’t know what they’re concerned about, honestly. Like just maybe they haven’t done it or but just getting on video and even were chatting. It’s maybe just that muscle that needs to be flexed. But I’m like, you’re I’m thinking you’re right. You should like, you’re a rockstar. You should be sharing like all of the knowledge and things and people want to hear it. So I don’t know what. Maybe some something’s holding people back, I guess. I don’t know what it is.
Jordan Solender: 44:58
Yeah. And that’s, that’s the plan to do with, you know, my my coaching piece. Right. And I talked about the bottleneck framework, as I’m calling it. I talked about a little bit, you know, just people in EO reaching out to me. How do I remove myself from this? How do I remove myself from that? How do I delegate this effectively? How do I scale the business and not be in it so much? So I’m hopefully I’m going to be doing a lot of that in the coming weeks. I’m actually going to be rolling out JordanSolender.com where you can talk to me about it consulting, business coaching, business consulting, automation and AI injection, all of these things I’m going to kind of consolidate there to JordanSolender.com.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:37
Last question Jordan. And before I ask it I just want to thank you for sharing your knowledge and your journey with all of us. And people can check out, as you mentioned, JordanSolender.com and also ITSelect.io for more info. Just some of your favorite books resources. Obviously your well studied guy and you’re talking about, you know, the sales process and bottlenecks and SOPs and Pareto principle. What are some of your favorite books of all time that people should check out that has been valuable for you?
Jordan Solender: 46:14
Absolutely. So the one book I give to every salesperson or operator that I hire when I hire them over the past, I would say 5 to 7 years has been Chris Voss. Never Split the Difference.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 46:33
Chris was a guest. Yeah.
Jordan Solender: 46:34
Oh, really? Oh, yeah. So, man, I’d love to meet him. So, fan. Fantastic speaker, great author, phenomenal book. Right. The next is Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time. So I would say those two have made the biggest impact on me as a, as a leader, a coach, you know, business owner. Those two.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 47:00
I love it. Jordan, one of the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing the journey JordanSolender.com, ITSelect.io. We’ll see everyone next time.
Jordan. Thanks so much.
Jordan Solender: 47:10
Thank you Jeremy. Have a great day.
