Ecommerce Therapy: 3 Nine-Figure Operators on Focus & Passion

Sean Frank (0:00)

Welcome to the Operators Podcast. Today, it's a therapy episode. We have Q4 right around the corner. You can go to nineops.com/blackfriday. There's already been a webinar giving you tips, tricks, everything for it. But today, it's about passion and priority. What makes us want to keep doing this? How do we stay engaged in the world of AI?

And how can you run teams as teams change? Are they going to get bigger, smaller? There's excess work, what are you going to do with it? There's good tips and tricks in here, but a lot of it is us just spilling our guts out, putting our hearts on our sleeves, listening to the therapy episode with Matt, Mike, Sean, let's get into it.

Mike Beckham (0:35)

I think right now the thing that I'm focused on the most is how do I make sure that my organization is focusing on the right things? How do I lead them in doing that? How do I teach that skill?

And one of the tendencies I've noticed in myself is that as we're getting bigger, I mean, we sell so many different things in so many different places, that I do have this negative tendency whenever I feel like we're not focusing the way that we should, to just be like, we should go back to the way we did it, you know, six years ago, seven years ago. It's not realistic. It's just I sometimes, I really kind of long for the simplicity of the earlier days in the company. And now it's much bigger, much more complex. And so I'm just kind of wrestling with as a leader, how do I help people to have good judgment about what it is they need to be focused on at any given point in time?

Sean Frank (1:25)

How are you figuring out how to do that? What tips and tricks do you have?

Mike Beckham (1:30)

Well, one of the things that we've run into, everybody probably has some kind of an annual planning cycle. And we've been on an annual planning cycle for several years now. And we're going to change it. We're going to change it to tri-annual.

And that might not even be frequent enough because we started realizing we were setting these goals in December and by like March or April, it was like those are the wrong goals. And we're just, we're in a trend industry that's moving and changing very quickly.

Plus, you know, like we don't control the market and our customers. So this year, Kids has just been awesome for us, way better than expected. We thought it would be good. It was way better than expected. Kids Textiles has been way better than expected for us. And so even if we had different plans about the things we were going to focus on, you know, at what point do you just say, hey guys, stop everything. The market's spoken. This is what it wants us to be doing. This is what it wants us to be focused on. And I think that the way I verbalized it at a meeting last week was, if you think about everybody that works at your company, they probably have this array of things they can work on, tasks, projects. And they range from exceptionally high impact, but really, really ambiguous, hard to figure out what to do, all the way down to super easy to figure out, but are barely going to move the needle at all. And I think I've seen this observation made by others before, and I think it's true that if you're not careful, people in your organization will pick these middle-of-the-road tasks where they feel reasonably confident that they can do them and do them well, and will make some impact, but aren't really the most impactful things. And so you end up having your organization not necessarily focusing all their attention on the most important things, because those are always the most ambiguous. Those are always the most challenging questions, the ones where it's the easiest for you to look stupid, the easiest for you to not be able to come up with an answer that actually works out. And so there's this kind of self-preservation, fear of looking bad that can make our organizations and the people in our organizations drift away from doing the best work, the best things to be working on at any given point in time.

Matt Bertulli (3:46)

So you guys have heard of EOS, right? Like Entrepreneurial Operating System, there's like Rockefeller Habits. So they've got this very prescribed, you know, annual planning cycle. And then you do quarterly planning in between.

And there's a nuanced thing that we did, Mike, that helped a lot, which was we just stuck, we went to a quarterly planning cycle, but it was always a 12 or 18 month rolling planning every quarter because everything was changing so quickly. So like we no longer had, like we set annual plans once a year and then we update as we go, we literally every three months, we set new 12 month plans on a rolling basis just because things would shift around too much. The hardest part of that was product because product cycles are just so damn long.