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And to have that kind of mentality, you have to realize that business is business. Business is not a family. And people hate hearing that. I people love to say, oh, we're a family here at this business. Right? And I think there was something on social media a while back. Jet? Harold. Business. Handled. All right, let's get to it. So today is episode five of the six episode series of how to go from a soulpreneur to an enterprise. Yes. I'm so excited. So today we're going to talk about the structure of an enterprise. Let's go. All right. So basically, your business has outgrown the group chat at this point, right? Yes. So what that means is the business should not run through the founder or the business owner's phone any longer. We just discussed this briefly in episode four of this series. So let's dive into that further. Yeah. So one of the fastest ways to identify the growing business in Trevor is when the entire company runs through the founder's phone. Honestly, that's terrifying, but we both started off that way. But again, that's when we were in the solepreneur stage. Once we started hiring employees, we found that we had too much to manage to be able to manage client communication. Yeah. So I think what was that? How many employees do you think we had when we started identifying that better? Probably over five employees. Yeah, I feel around nine was a number. Nine was a number. Yeah. When we identified that. So we should have identified that sooner when we first started hiring our first few employees. But I think we did not because one, we didn't want to spend more extra money on a business phone. And two, we I think we enjoyed having quick and easy communication and being accessible to our clients. And at that point, we did not have admin who were able to kind of fill the need of that communication. For sure. For sure. And and real businesses have a structure, you know? So it's always important to have uh that structure. And also something that happened was that we started having different departments and different lines of businesses. Yeah, so departments, not chaos. So let's talk through a couple of things that help with that structure of an enterprise, which is departments, like you just said. Yeah. So that being said, people romanticize the chaos of entrepreneurship, right? Until payroll is do, or until the client start knocking on the door or start messing around. So and I think pe people, and I've been in we've been in a lot of rooms with entrepreneurs, and they're gonna hate it when I say this, but they love to talk about how hard and how chaotic and how many hats that they have to wear as an entrepreneur. Yes, and they enjoy it, they have the best time ranting and raving and complaining about it, but they never do anything about it. Yeah, and I feel that at least for me, the first year on business, that is okay because that shows you like, man, I'm in business, I'm busy enough. Yes, but people need to be humble enough and have the humility and the decision maker to move away from that solopreneur to become an entrepreneur. And one of the first things they can do is just to define every role they are doing. A lot of times they cannot do that. Does this sound familiar to you at all? Yeah, we are we are almost in that process. Like what happened to us, like what happened to us is like we defined the role, we knew what we needed, but we did not define the role, and we brought people in, and then we realized, oh, I don't know why what I want this person to do, because we didn't have a pretty role, a pretty well-defined role, and then you have to have this, and then you feel unhappy with the person, but it's it's a communication issue because they don't know what to do. Uh, but you have and then you have a hard conversation to do, and then this person gotta go through changes, and sometimes that affects morale, you know. No, it does. And then it can affect a lot of things like um client expectations and things too. So let's talk about that. So having a defined role, let's talk about what it looks like to do before you hire and after you hire. So if you're being proactive and defining the role before you hire for it, the way that I would approach it would be you're at the time the solepreneur, someone's doing the job, right? Before you hire for it. So take and review the time that you're committing and the things that you're doing to fulfill that role that you want someone to replace and put that, write that down, put it in a document. And that that's the basis of defining that role, right? So I think doing that and then building out the expectation, some KPIs. How do you know if that person's doing a good job? How do you know if they're doing a bad job? What can they expect from you as leadership in regards to training and support? So that's a that's the proactive approach. I agree. Now let's talk about the reactive approach that we are now dealing with. The way that we're handling this, and I think that this is after reviewing and seeing other businesses, this seems to be the best, most efficient way to do it. Right now we have our entire team, they're going through their past six months of workload and writing down the things that they handled the past six months. And we're doing this because we have a couple of employees who've done special projects for us. It's really good to understand what the uh what your employees have done before and are comfortable with. Then you know if that comes up again, the that person is the one who can handle it. So you can bake that into their role or bake that into a new role if it becomes significant enough to need that, right? So that's where we're at now. Once the employees have gone to that stage where they are writing down everything they're responsible for and what their tasks are, then the manager, supervisor, director, owner, whoever is responsible will review that, make changes, make notes, update, and then you can evaluate them all at once if you have a team with multiple people. If you see that there are four people who are all say they're all accountants, right? All bookkeeping level accountants. Say that three of them are doing five hours a week or 10 hours a week in one specific, say like AP, right? What that can tell you is okay, three people are doing 10 hours a week of AP. Does it make more sense to have one of them as the go-to AP person? Most likely, yes. So you can determine the type of workload and kind of specialize your employees with doing that. And that's something I think would be beneficial to reevaluate every so often, probably every year. Yeah. So then once we go through and we say, okay, we approve this, this is what the role is going to look like for you, X, Y, and Z, then we're going to also make sure we're setting expectations for management and employees. So we know what they can expect from us and they know what we can we should expect from them, which includes KPIs, regular one-on-ones, and they're like we do every six months, we do an act a formal review with HR, with the manager, and with the employee. So we make sure that we reiterate that. We can communicate during this time, like trajectory of their role, et cetera. So while we're on the topic of defining roles, so once you have that, I highly recommend doing one-on-ones with your team. And that can look like super simple stuff. I learned this from an old boss that I had. He was a great CFO, really smart guy. And it actually did a lot of good for me. And for the employee. So it's just a quick touch base. It can, I would say once a month is probably good. Um, and what you do, it should be the direct manager and the employee. And you just do a check and you're like, hey, are you are you good? Is your workload okay? Do you enjoy what you're doing? And I learned that from him. And the reason he asked if they enjoy what they're doing, it helps you do a couple of things. One, it helps you spot burnout. Two, it helps you spot people who may want to leave, or maybe if they don't enjoy what they're doing, a lot of times they're not going to do a great job at it. So you can help fix that, or if they're doing a couple of things that they don't feel that's in line with their role, that's a good opportunity for them to tell you that. And then maybe those tasks can go to someone else, or maybe that person might be better suited for a different role, whether at the company or not, right? So it helps identify a couple things, but then also more importantly, workload. Can they take on more work? Okay, good. Do they need to have less work? Yeah, etc. For sure. No, and that's pretty, and that is pretty good. And and you have implemented that cultural in our company, and that has been pretty well. And those one-to-guanes really help to, as you said, get a sense of what is going on with the employees. And I feel like you can correct stuff quickly. Like I know you like to fix things, fix problems. Yes. So that helps identify and fix any issues right away. Yeah. The the only thing I want to highlight is that those one-to-guanes is not about the company, it's all about the employee. You know, don't give any bad feedback to the employees unless they ask you for it. Make sure you are asking, hey, how are you doing? I want to check out the video. Yeah, the employee should be the one communicating mostly. You should not be saying directed, it's not a training session, it's a touch base. And that's not a review. It's not a review, it's just a touch base just to see how they're doing. Yeah, and then uh by doing all of that, by having the one-to-one, by defining role, another thing that that reserve uh is everyone doing everything. I know whenever you start creating departments and you probably don't have all the people needed to lead every department, and so you get in this little chaos where everybody's doing everything. As you said, the three people doing accounts payable by defining role. You can avoid everyone doing everything, and that way people are not distracted and they can become great at what they are doing. Exactly. And focus on that. No, you're exactly right. And that's something that's going on in our company right now is the operations team, everyone is doing everything. We're trying to move away from that, and how we're doing that is we're having our operations team track their time very specifically, and we are we're we're a part of the operations team as well. So we're all diligently tracking our time to see who's doing what. If there's overlap, then now we can have a way to analyze that and fix any overlap because we shouldn't be doing the same thing. None of us, right? And then we can see, okay, do we need another person? Which we know that we do, but we don't know what type of person quite yet. So we have to review what everyone's doing and how much time they're spending on it to see what person that we need to fill in the gaps. The good thing of where we are at now is that we know the consequences of bringing somebody without a defying role and also without training material. So I I feel within our company, right now we are in the mood, yes, we need to bring people, but let's do it in an organized way, the way it's beneficial for everybody. I agree. And the reason that we got into the mess, it's interesting because we both are doers. So instead of saying, okay, let's take a second and let's build this, we and I think it's helped us and hurt us. It's taught us a lot. We're able to learn by doing, which I feel like if you learn by doing and making mistakes, you're you're more likely to retain that. Right. So we did all of these things. Thankfully, it worked out knock on wood for us. Um, but we did all of these things, and then we have to backtrack now and spend more time on defining the roles and making sure everyone's educated properly, et cetera, et cetera. And understanding the white glove way. Um, but that being said, like we have constant interruptions right now because we didn't have defined departments and roles initially. Yeah, but we are fixing it up now and it's going to bring a lot of value over it. Also, in that transition from solopreneur to entrepreneurship and then whenever to enterprise, and whenever you have around like, you know, five to ten employees, something you are going to realize is that the business has gotten bigger than what you can handle. And right now, it's impossible for you as the business owner to take ownership of everything and make sure everything's going right. So what I came to the realization is like, hey, my time, my energy doesn't allow me for the growth we have had to make sure everything gets done. So now I need to start uh making sure that the people in those departments, you know, the operations people, everything take ownership on what they they in in their responsibilities. Yeah, you know, and that has been really really important. And always like, you know, we always encourage, we like growing. And and we also like it because growing and growth like throw uh shows what is broken is the system. And the faster we grow, the faster we realize what we are doing wrong, and the faster we can improve and become a better company. And that's something I would say to other business owners, surpreneurs, people who are growing into that enterprise stage. You shouldn't feel like a failure just because you're realizing all the broken pieces of your business. So sometimes I feel like Jet feels like we made mistakes and we did wrong things. Yes. And he takes it really harshly. But at the end of the day, what we're doing is we identified the problem only because we grew. So we did something right. We're growing and identifying the problem and we don't let it continue. We put a solution in place and we fix it. Uh for sure. And and to have that kind of mentality, you have to realize that business is business. Business is not a family. And people hate hearing that. I people love to say, oh, we're a family here at this business. Right. And I think there was something on social media a while back, and it was like, how you know if it's a toxic workplace? Have you seen that? And it's like it's like when they say, We're this business is like everyone hears family. Yeah. Right? Have a family, I can count them with my fingers. Exactly. And like you know, the there comes issues when they say we're like a family here. There's usually accountability issues, right? Issues with control, issues with respect and order, right? For sure. And yes, and treating your business more like a business, what it is, it is a business instead of trying to make fuel everybody like family, it's going to bring a lot of it brings a lot of issues, you know. There is this issue of favoritism. That's also like emotional leadership issue. Like many, you feel like a family, you don't want to let them go keep people around. But if you keep people around because you feel like they're family, which I care about everyone on our team, like at the level of, I mean, not quiet family, but like I I do care a lot about them and I want what's best for them because it helps the business grow and it helps the business and helps our clients who are valuable to us. But I will say if I need to let one of them go because they're not performing appropriately or up to their role responsibilities, then I have no trouble doing that. And when you have trouble doing that, that's when there's a problem. Because the thing is, it's not only impacting like a couple of small things, it's impacting your clients and your brand, which is impacting not only your livelihood, but also any other employees that you have. I agree. Your clients and customers trust you. They're there purchasing or they're getting your service and they expect it to be of a certain level of quality and they're paying good money for these things. So why would you let someone continue to disrupt or cause issues or not give them quality work? Uh for sure. For sure. Yeah, and then uh, you know, within my uh within my family, you know, I can tolerate dysfunction forever. But businesses can't afford that. Absolutely not. And I feel what happens is like, yes, we all are, yes, you can say as much as your family as you want to say, but as uh but whenever the business owner is not being taken care of or everything's not going well for the business owner, and like, okay, let's see now how much family you are your family. Exactly. You know, and that's why I've never liked it, and I've never I've never liked company that says, hey, we are family here. Yes, I can treat you like family. I can take care of you because of everything you have done for me, but I will only take care of you as long as you are doing what you are supposed to be doing, if you are a good employees. But if you're not a good employee, I'm not going to treat you uh like family. Exactly. So basically, structuring your business is what we're speaking of, structuring your entity. We highly recommend not structuring it like a family, structure it like a business. I agree. So let's let's jump into a little funny session here. What are some signs that you'll be that the business is operationally unwell? Oof, and I've personally experienced this too. I think employees being afraid to breathe. Oh like they feel like they need permission to breathe, permission to go to the restroom, permission to go to the doctor. Yeah. Like being afraid to take off work to go to the doctor. That is something I have always never wanted to do. I'm like, I want to make I want to make sure my the people that work for White Glove that are helping White Glove growth feels okay to do those things. Because whenever I have the job, I will I will I will have appreciated. I appreciate that, you know. The other thing is like when the other thing that shows a business is operational and well is whenever SOPs don't exist. No, that's true. So but talking about well, the SOPs and the employee not being able to breathe, all of that comes down to leadership, right? Yes, honestly. For sure. Yeah, you cannot scale. You're right. You cannot get you cannot scale while staying at the center of everything. You know, and sometimes the founders become the bottlenecks of everything. The founders, the owners, they can be bottlenecks, they can be micromanagers. Hey guys, we had a um, we had a should we tell them about the survey? I actually haven't really heard the resource. What were the resources? We had some surveys done. We have our own team every year take a survey. We had an employee who I don't know who the manager could have been of this employee, but the employee said that a negative is micromanagement. They said we are the that they experienced the worst micromanagement from our firm. Yeah. So yeah, micromanagement. That's something that you're gonna team leadership, leadership development, um, decision-making structures. I agree. Hey, you're really good at non-micromanagement people, and I'm really bad at it. What is your take on that on micromanagement? By the way, I have a phone call. I have experienced it. I have a phone call with my I have a phone call with my director of operation tomorrow where she's going to teach me about problem. Oh, I like it. Good to talk about. How not to micromanage. So what is your take on that? So I've experienced micromanagement. And it's funny because I experienced it when I I really wanted the supervisor, or I guess it was a manager role. And I applied for it and interviewed for it internally, right? They end up hiring someone externally who I had to train, and I know everyone's been there. And I went back to HR and requested to know why I did not get the promotion. And I was told I was too green. I was I was 23. Oh wow. I was too young. But at that time I was already, I've ex I've had management experience, right? And I was doing that role for a year and a half at the time, and I was already doing the management roles. So that we didn't have a manager for that position at the time. They hired a manager because we were expanding. Okay. So we hired a manager. I trained her, I spent two weeks training her, and then for the next six months, she relied on me to do all of the management duties. I delivered the reports, I made sure everything was done on time because it was only me and one other person. And she was our direct manager. Awesome. So then um for six months I did all of this, and then six months later she quit. It was too stressful. Okay. And you were doing everything. I was yes. I basically was doing all the stuff, right? What was it the stressful for? She would take personal phone calls. Like her office was right next to me because I was there helping her all the time. I would go in to ask her something and she'd be on the phone with her boyfriend. Interesting. Yeah. Anyway, I digress. But but again, like she was older, she was like 40. She's had this many years' experience being an accounting manager, etc. etc. So she was really had a good resume. Good. Right. How does it tie down to micromanagement? So she might well, yeah, so she micromanaged me. So let me tell you how that's a good point. So I was doing all these reports, handling everything right. So she came to me one day. She said, I don't like that you're delivering these reports. I was like, okay, no problem. I will send them to you. You don't you send them. She's like, okay, great. And then she came back to me the next day. Hey, all of these attorneys, or all the people who get the reports, they all don't respond to me, only to you. So she's like, you email them every time you talk to them. I want to know about it. I want you to copy me in. I want you to put me on the phone call, put me on the Teams link, the Zoom link. I want to be a part of every conversation you have with them. Interesting. Yeah. So then, but I think that was an issue because she they responded to me, but not her, but they knew me and not her, right? That's interesting. And then moving on to the next stage, the other employee who was on my team, I would communicate, train, and talk, and we would problem solve together. So when she found out, she then said, Anytime you guys are having a conversation, I need to be involved. Really? Mm-hmm. And the to escalate it even further, the her boss, the CFO at the time, my favorite like boss that I've had, I've talked about him before, talked about him earlier. He would have special projects and he would loop me in on and say, Hey, can you help with these things? Because I used Power BI and not a lot of people knew how to use it in the department. So I would use them for special projects and random things. So then she found out I was doing these and she said, Every time you're doing these, you need to make sure you put me on the email and let me know. And then eventually I asked her, I said, Hey, you know, what's why do I have to put you on everything? Like, even if it's for him, like, like, what's the purpose? I just want to understand. Like, did I do something wrong? And she just said, I need to know what you're up to and make sure you're completing your 40 hours. Okay. And she sees me. We were in the office every day. Then the next the next level of that is she started correcting my emails. And I was very at that time, I was so like anal about my emails. Like, you know, if when you're fresh out of college, you take your first job, you're so serious, right? You're like, dear, you know, like I did not mess around. I was like, dear uh Mr. Right. Like those double people. Like the attorneys and such. Like I was like, I would, I was not messing around. I spent like 20 minutes writing a short email because I wanted it to be perfect, you know? Yeah. So at that time I had very like structured email. I don't now, because I now don't care, you know. But I mean, I do sometimes, but I mean now it's not that big of a deal. But at the time I was freshly out of college, like this is my first like formal job. And she would respond to me with little corrections. And oftentimes it would be like something as subtle as like, hey, I didn't like the way that you said this. Instead, next time put it at the end of the email. Interesting. So that experience um for six months. Yeah, I guess in my point of view, um, you know, what I do is uh I get the prepared to request information to the clients. But but what I do is like before you send this email, let me know the request list before you send it to the mail because sometimes they are asking staff that we already know the information to, you know, that way there is no confusion from it. And then I I ask them to CC me, not because I want to see them, but they're making it being copied on things that you're involved in is appropriate. I ask my people to CC me too. Yeah. But I think I hope they don't take that micromanaging. No, it's not to me. Micromanaging is like, yeah, that, but like being copied and included on every single task that you're doing. To me, I'm like, there's no per I've been doing the job for a year and a half, zero complaints. I've gotten promoted twice. I got promoted twice in that time frame. I agree with you. So I'm like, what you know, and I'm doing I'm doing all of your reports, like I'm doing everything else additional. And sometimes with email requests, I give them feedback because of the experience. I'm like, yes, he's going to reply to you saying this, he's going to get confused because of the way you praise it. And more than that. I think that is, and I think having templates in this case, it was that makes sense. And I'm being very so unbiased right now, so much so that I like I had other people review and I was like, hey, am I being like does this sound other managers who were her colleagues at the time? Yeah. And they all were like, Yeah, that's over the top. That makes sense. Maybe that's why she left. She knew. Yeah, I agree. But um, yeah, so let's so I I definitely think micromanagement can be terrible for the employee, but also for the manager, yeah, because it's wasting your time doing that. And if you don't trust the person, they shouldn't be employed. I agree. If it's a them issue, if it's a you issue, then you shouldn't be a manager, or you need to work through that. In your case, like you just need to work through that. Yeah. I don't really want to uh I don't really want to micromanage people. I don't I don't have the time for that. No, for example, in whenever whenever we were at the honest retreat, I'm like, don't text me anything. Don't call me, don't ask me anything. And I don't, and I think from you, at least my experience with you, I mean, it's I'm not your employee, so it's a little different, but I don't think that you're necessarily micromanaging everything that they do, but I think their perception of it is you say, because you ask a lot of questions, and I think that they feel it's an attack and that you're identifying all of their flaws. Okay. But we we can we can continue on the standards and control issues are not the same thing, right? Exactly. So a lot of founders hide behind of high a lot of founders hide behind the I have high standards, which you and I both do. We've talked about this. We want white glove to be the highest and most best quality in the accounting world, right? So we do have high standards, but a lot of times it ends up being that the founders or the owner of the business just can't have trust. Yeah, and they can't pass the trust. Yeah, I've seen that a lot. Yeah, and I think that is a mentality issue with then, but initially it's just about like, you know, should employees they would they think the employees would not care as much as as as them. Well, and a lot of times, well, some owners expect employees to care as much as the business owner, yeah, which we both know. I'm I made that mistake at the beginning because when I was an employee, I felt that I really cared. No, I did too. I cared about the company. Like I was like, I was wearing company shirts every I was telling everyone about the company. What did they call it uh what is it called? Ambassador. No, no, they they had this same call like oh company guy, company man, company woman. Maybe. But I'm very I hated those people by the way. I'm very teaming those people. Well, I'm very team loyal. Like I will say, like, if I like a sports team like the Cubs, I like the Cubs. So like I'm gonna be a Cubs fan for the rest of my life. Like my child could play for the Red Sox, I'm still gonna boo the Red Sox. Whenever I was an employee, I hated people that put the company first on crazy idea. What do you mean crazy idea? Um for example, like you know, the company is doing a lot of changes that they know the companies are not going to like, the employees are not going to like. So they find this employee that is kind of more solid to the company, and then their job is like, hey, please help us out, make sure everybody's okay. And they go around trying to do that. And I'm like, That was kind of me, but let me tell you the mentality of that. Yeah. I think that mentality is like you understand. I mean, sometimes business owners or people who are in charge are not making the best decisions for everyone. Sometimes it's more because they want to have a top-heavy payroll system or something, right? But a lot of times it's, you know, you have to think about this. You at this point, like you're an employee, and the most important thing is that business running smoothly and and being healthy. And sometimes there has to be hard decisions that the owner has to make to keep the business running smoothly and for you to keep your job. But my mentality was like, my mentality was whenever I was an employee, I was a really confident person. I'm like, I can get a job anywhere. Sure. No, same. I'm like, no, me too. And then But as long as the company's reading, but I told you, I told you in a different podcast that I we talked about the A, B, and C players, there was a time when the promotions halted because of my me being so young and green, and I kind of flipped. I kinda I kind of flipped away from being that like all-star. Yeah. So I'm like, no, as long as it doesn't as if you're making changes that is not the best for the employees, I'm not going to go behind it. And that was the way I was. And I was telling everybody like, no, like, why are they doing that? No, I think that's fair. So let's talk about uh KPIs. You want to talk about KPIs? Yeah, let's talk about KPIs. So this is something that we I mean, we've talked about quite a bit. Basically, like you can't improve things that no one owns. So, like we talked about earlier, like this whole this entire episode is just about your enterprise, like your entity structure. So we talked about um a couple of things there that are important, definitely not making it a family business, um, having the departments. The next level is like ownership and like KPI ownership. So not only do you need to identify what the KPIs need to be on an individual role level, but at a department level too. And then you say who owns the KPIs. For sure. So who's gonna be responsible for making sure they're met? Accountability is really important, and then seeing seeing how everybody is doing on it is really important. Uh it's really important uh for Solan. Uh to have KPIs, you need people to manage. And to to have an enterprise, you need people. So if you don't know how to manage people, how to keep them accountable, how to put KPI on them that that is going to benefit the organization the best, like you are wasting resources. Exactly. So yeah, if you can't identify and set the put those in place, then you need to find someone who can. Yeah. So KPI to me, KPIs help establish, like, like you said, accountability, right? Yeah. So I think employees thrive when they know and they have good expectations, like role development, role description, KPI, they understand the culture of the business, right? They understand, um, and they know, like, okay, I can expect that if I want to take off for a doctor's appointment, my boss is gonna say, great, have a, you know, whatever, you're good. But then there's also that fact where they need to also realize and understand that our culture, the way our business works, their expectations also lies in, hey, you can take doctor appointments, take days off, go on vacation, but make sure your stuff is done and handled and people are your clients are taken care of while you're away. Yeah, well, what would be some KPI examples? KPI examples? Yeah. I mean, there's quite a few, but I I will say for one that we have set in place, a KPI that we have for business development is reaching out to five new business owners or potential clients a week. Well, somebody said it was KPIs, make sure you communicate KPIs. They were communicated to you, sir. When were they communicated? Pre-owners retreat. We'd had we had a discussion, a 2 p.m. discussion, okay? A 2 p.m. discussion. But yeah, do we follow up? No, because no, you asked me about it in um at the owner's retreat. I was like, I talked to you about it. I hate repeating myself. But uh, I mean, if it is not in Grider, and it's not a good thing. No, yeah, we we we need to put something in place a little better, yeah. So we will, but so we we start talking about culture. So I want to talk about something controversial with culture. So culture is not a pizza party, culture is not snacks and free hoodies, right? I'm tired. I'm so tired of business owners and businesses thinking that culture means like having a cold brew or um neon signs or like the uh drinks after nine or whatever, whatever they have, the little themed parties that they have, right? Yeah. So so what is culture to you? I think cultural is clarity. I think cultural is what people do whenever you are not there. So expectations, KPIs, um, knowing okay, we're okay with like we're more relaxed on taking a bathroom break, taking a doctor day, taking a vacation, as long as with the expectation that your work and your clients are taken care of to the highest quality. Yes, and definitely uh culturally set at the top, though. Yeah, for sure. Do you think that do you think culturally set at the at the top, or you think also employees can set the cultural if they give it free rounds? For example, I think it has to be top down. Like leadership has to because the cult like within the culture is clarity, right? So that's understanding your role, understanding your expectations, and there's no way the employees can set that if leadership hasn't already defined it. For sure. But I always thought cultural is how the people are in there, you know, cultural. I guess people make cultural. Yes, I mean, I mean their behavior, yeah, their behavior, there, but again, that comes with their expectations and understanding. For example, at my old uh job, I'm a CPFM, something I really liked a lot is that uh the employees will talk about sports, and they will talk about you know, and they that that was the conversation around town, around the office, and that will keep staff pretty healthy, you know. So I feel like sports join a lot of people and join people, you know, Joseph. And we were talking about every sport going on, like it will come football season, then basketball, then golf. I would do this, yeah. We had the same. Do you think that that is part of the culture? That came from the top. You think that's the leadership said, hey, yeah, talk about the sports. I mean, I do think that's a part of the culture, but I mean, I don't think leadership had to say, let's talk about sports, but they allowed those discussions to take place and they presented a workspace to peop where people felt comfortable. And the expectation was that as long as we're getting these things done, we can have these side conversations. We can have these check-ins. For sure. Right. So something at one at the company that I worked at a few companies ago, they that was important for them, those little check-ins and meetings. So when they were designing their new office space or new building right downtown here, they made sure that they didn't have designated spaces for certain employees. So they had like maybe the accounting, a couple of accounting team members and a couple of people in the intellectual property department were all on the same side. So then when they're going to like the watering hole or getting water or coffee, they can have those little discussions and it kind of brings in the company together from other departments, other areas, and that helps with that culture building. That makes sense. How do you implement cultural in a remote environment online? That's a tougher way to do it, but at least from my perspective, and what we've tried to do is being active in our group message and our entire firm message, sharing things that we have going on, asking them to share. So if we had for Mother's Day, we asked them to share some things that they did, right? Yeah. We asked them to share their vacation pictures when we we had an employee get married recently and we had her share her wedding thing. I mean, she offered, and I love that. That was amazing of her to talk about it. It was a beautiful wedding. It was so beautiful. Yeah. So I think having that, like where people are able and comfortable to share things about themselves in that group chat. And I mean, we do a little bit in meeting, we try to have a little discussion, but we're trying to be more efficient during those times now, especially. So I think one thing that you and I should do to initiate to have more initiative in our culture is to do more things like that, where we let or we encourage people to share what they did over the weekend, or we maybe we encourage something, something unique, and we say, Hey guys, today will you share a picture of like your favorite the favorite picture in your camera role? Or maybe like your favorite meme that you've seen in the last 30 days. Yeah. How do you be all uh I agree with you? We should do something like that. We should be intentional with the World Cup coming up because we have a very early national team. And I feel the socket, a lot of people watch the so-called defining culture and creating a culture and maintaining it via a virtual work team, right? We we discussed that, and that comes under the um umbrella of the entity and what you want your entity to look like, the structure of your entity. So another thing is that we can talk about and transition to is the difference between a baby business, soulpreneur slash small business, to an enterprise. Yeah. So we talked about this. You mentioned this earlier, but an enterprise feels calmer. Yes. Because there are systems, there are SOPs, there's delegation, proper delegation. So you're not delegating everything to one person, you're delegating it like we talked about structurally to whoever's role is defined as that. Um, there's communication structures. So for us, like we communicate on Teams, we're not texting, we're communicating on air call with clients, and then we're communicating via email. Yeah. Right? We have teens meetings, where we have regular meetings, so we have regular communication with our employees, with our teams, so we understand what's happening in the business, and they understand what's happening in the business as well. And at this point, when you have this all of this foundation built, that gives you like sustainable scaling. So we talked about building the skyscraper out of sticks versus out of the cement and rebar. Yeah. So that's the big difference is having the systems, the SOPs, the delegation, the communication structures on top of the well-defined roles, right? People understanding that it's a business, it's not a family environment. Right? Yes, for sure. For sure. Yeah, and and and that's what you gotta do to be able to uh to become an enterprise. And and I want to double down what you said about system and SOPs, like that is the foundation, like everything we have talked about there, system, SOPs, delegation, communication thresholds is the foundation to be able to do to be able to grow sustainable and scale sustainable. And I kind of feel something that happened with business owners, sometimes we have the blue-collar skills, like you know, we can do the job, we can do the technical skills, but we don't develop the white-colored skill of managing the people, of knowing how to create systems, SOP, and that is really, really important. For example, uh the uh for example, for us, the hardest thing has been to set time aside out of our busy time to be able to think about the systems exactly. But that is important, that is important to be able to onboard people better. I have gotten to the level where now it makes sense because now I'm so busy with bringing so many new people and I feel that I'm repeating the same thing. If I would have it type it down, that would be so much more than that. Do you remember me in December and and then November asking you to create training for the tax season? You were ahead on that for real. You were ahead in that for real. I was really hey, I'm not gonna lie. That's I guess that's one thing I forgot to bring up in the owner's retreat. Yeah, I had a lot of like stress about that really about tax season for that. I was I was so worried that the team was gonna be so underprepared. That's so important. Uh that's how do you think we did? Was the team underprepared? Of areas that we could improve on, which we we wouldn't have known until we went through that. That was our first tax season ever as White Glove as we know it. Yeah, but uh, were you you wanted that training for the accounting department or for For everyone. But so basically, the higher level a company gets, the less dramatic it gets. Which this is a this is interesting to think about. And I we can talk about this another day, because we could probably talk about this all day. But the psychol the psychology behind that, it's like the some people who become entrepreneurs, they thrive off of that chaos and they love being needed all the time. I get that. So maybe, maybe they don't want to get to the level of enterprise because they want to be the person who's like the end-all be all, the person who they have to call at midnight because a problem happened. They want to be needed in that way, and they love the drama, they love the chaos, right? Yeah, and we we talked about that the other in the first episode. The solution for that is you have to change your identity. And sometimes a lot of people get a lot of value out of their chaos being needed, but at least for me, it got really old really fast. You know, no, I agree. But you like a calm life, and I feel like some founders are so addicted to like urgency because they're used to that, but they become accustomed to that, they get into that for so long. Yeah. That then they when it feels calm, it feels like unfamiliar. Yeah, I definitely love being calm and being everything structural and not surprises. And that is also why I started a business, because I wanted to be in control of my time. So chaos, chaos doesn't allow me to have control of my time. Absolutely. For sure. So if your company currently like runs on panic, memory, and when I say memory, I mean what you have in your mind, not an SOB or a process, and a lot of caffeine, you're not alone. For real. You're not alone. Yeah. So many, and probably more businesses function that way than not. Yes. But the next level of growth requires structure. And a structure is what creates freedom. Exactly. This is that being said, I would like to thank our sponsor, White Glove CPAs and Business Solutions. Exactly. So something that White Glove CPAs and Business Solutions can provide is structure to businesses who are in this phase. There's multiple, I guess, areas of that. We do have like the monthly reoccurring accounting, which now we actually have broken up into tax and advisory. So the tax is more affordable, really good for more solepreneur, smaller businesses. And that's basically just keeping your books up to date to make sure that we have good numbers for tax season. Yes. Then the next level is advisory accounting. And that obviously we're keeping things up for tax as well. But the next level of that is good reporting, understanding your data, being able to analyze your pricing, things of that nature to know, okay, am I failing? Where am I failing? Knowing your numbers, understanding cash flow, just a deeper dive of understanding and make being able to make good decisions with your data. So those are some things that I would recommend doing and having us take a look at, have another accounting firm, whoever, right? But right now we're talking about White Glove, so we're thanking White Glove for the sponsorship. That's one area of service that we're offering. The next area, the obvious, is tax and tax strategy and planning. Those are really important aspects, especially for a growing business. It's really good to know what to expect to pay in taxes and maybe some things that you can do above IRS standards, of course. To reduce tax to reduce your tax liability. And achieve your goals. Exactly. And then that the third level is going to be the advisory services that we can offer you. We have several clients who I think they've had really good results. They're they're thriving. We've done a lot of cool stuff with them. And one of the things is pricing. So we're more than happy to do a big pricing project. We've done them before, we've done tons of them, and it's really helped profitability levels go up for our clients. We're doing it for ourselves as well right now. Yeah. So that's something I would encourage you to reach out. If you have questions about, we're happy to walk you through what that looks like. And there's, I mean, the advisory that we have to offer is limitless. But for this one, let's talk about the foundation so we can review and help you structure that to make sure you're set up for success. You have everything properly set up. Um for sure. And then just the CFO advisory as well. Yeah. So thank you, White Glove CPAs and Business Solutions for sponsoring the episode. You're a pretty good guy. So awesome guys. This is Harrow and Jet. This is Harrow and Jet. See you next time.