Speaker 1: 0:00

John Hoyos is the founder of the First Fractional, bringing 30 years of diverse professional experience to the table. His career spans multiple industries, including technology, alcohol, automotive and media, where he's excelled in roles ranging from sales and marketing to talent, operations and finance. The common theme has been working with small businesses, where his wide range of impact can provide greater value. Now John's on a mission to help tiny businesses of two to 10 people level up His secret sauce a knack for seeing the big picture while getting down to the nitty gritty. Whether it's optimizing project delivery, transferring knowledge or fine tuning communication, john's all about creating real, lasting growth for businesses. Let's see what makes John so buzzworthy. Welcome to the Buzzworthy Marketing Show, john. Welcome to the show. How are you doing today? Pretty good Buzz. How are you? I'm doing well. You seem you're at a home office here. Where are you calling in from?

Speaker 2: 1:12

Yeah, it's about 12 feet from my bedroom.

Speaker 1: 1:18

Oh, awesome, that's awesome. So today we're talking about tiny businesses and the operations of tiny businesses, which the majority of small businesses in America are technically tiny Two to 10 employees though, as an SMB owner and somebody who has owned multiple businesses with under 10 people and some with over 100 people as as well, there's in running them it doesn't seem like there's that much difference. But there is right. Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. What is what do you? What do you feel is the the different? Let's talk.

Speaker 1: 1:56

You know this is. I'd love to know this right here, cause I this is a lived experience and I want to hear it back from somebody who actually works with people with it, cause we didn't I didn't have this 19 years ago People like you that were willing to help people, that were who I was 19 years ago, when I was first starting out, I had myself a homeless guy that I brought off the streets and a 1,200 square foot facility that we ran together. So my first hire was a guy off the streets dialing for dollars in the phone book, selling business card design. Okay, that's how we started. There you go.

Speaker 2: 2:37

Quickly, we needed help.

Speaker 1: 2:40

And I did find myself as like, when you get to that the second person you hire is still okay, but then, once you get to that three, four, maybe even five, like those are pretty, you can manage those pretty well. But what is it that like right around four or five employees that all of a sudden things completely change for you? Why is that?

Speaker 2: 3:06

Because you can't do direct communication anymore. Right, it's, you can't do. In other words, as one person, you can only manage so many tasks and so many people at the same time. It's bandwidth, right. And then beyond that, you have to depend on others to, you know, extend that communication and to manage people. And now you're it's just like the game of telephone, right, and like hearing through the can and you know, trying to decipher exactly what, what is needed. And then typically the owner is going to be that technician where they're the master of their craft and they don't realize how much they actually know and how much information they actually have to impart to others to make them effective at bringing what they want.

Speaker 1: 3:57

Exactly. Oh, I totally get that. It's funny because I was a big fan of Michael Gerber back in the day. I was a big fan of Michael Gerber back in the day, so when it came to delegating, it was a matter of being an entrepreneur, not out of necessity. Even though the necessity was there, I knew I couldn't do that and all the things that Michael said I need to be doing through the e-myth methodology. And then now, even more current, would be Mike Michalowicz's clockwork.

Speaker 1: 4:27

I'm sure you have a couple other ones, if not already written a book about it yourself that you can give to the listeners. But the funny thing is is that, like Esso, when you're talking about like transferring that knowledge and I run into people who run businesses with over 10 people, right, and they still don't have what is called standard operating procedures, sops. Now in the marketing world, sops are like a gold mine. There's people who sell SOPs for hundreds of dollars. They're absolutely worthless because they're not how people do things in their own business, but they feel well, I was told I got to get an SOP and all that good stuff. There are so many ways to approach standard operating procedures, which is what you're talking about, that transference of the technician's knowledge into something written, or something that is transferable without them having to be the person telling them, or something that is transferable without them having to be the person telling them? What are your favorite ways to help those folks that are?

Speaker 2: 5:32

only have two or three people to get that started. Well, the first thing I do buzz is I sell them the SOP on how to write the SOP.

Speaker 1: 5:37

There you go Now that I would buy. I would buy that because it's like teach a way that other people can even digest, let alone learn how to do their job from. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:13

So it's really interesting because technology has actually made this a lot easier. Now, amen, right, like the ability to take an AI note taker with you. Like, if I'm a technician, I'm going to instruct you how to do things, and I've got a note taker that's not only going to record it but also summarize it. I can throw that right into a document. It makes it so easy for technicians to be able to memorialize the information they know without going through the grind of. I can't believe I have to talk about all these different things that I know.

Speaker 2: 6:52

Right Like that's part of the stumbling block is that I have to spell out every single word and I have to be very detailed and I have to take all of these things that I know and put them in all these different places, like it's overwhelming and it gets shoved to the side because there's 17 other fires to put out.

Speaker 1: 7:08

Right, Right, and I think that it's important. Like you said, it's important to summarize right the summarization, because how you do things at the next level is going to change. So if you get too detailed, you're going to then basically mothball your own SOPs because you got into the weeds too far and, as I don't know if other people do, I usually hire people who generally know how to do the thing I'm hiring them to do. The SOP is just. This is how we approach it, right?

Speaker 2: 7:48

Yes, but oh, I like buts. One of the things that many people think about SOPs is that, okay, I create them, I'm done. Good, leave me alone. Sops have to be living documents. You have to be able to create them as something that can be updated so that as your business evolves, as your best practices evolve, as you hire somebody that has expertise in this area, they're going to come in and say I've seen this SOP. There's no way I'm doing this, because this is going to take me 10 times longer. I can do bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.

Speaker 2: 8:22

And here's the new SOP, because that's why you're hiring that person. You're hiring them for their expertise in that.

Speaker 1: 8:29

I love that and I have adopted a practice that I lifted off of a friend. Basically, you create the SOP and then that person, like you said, they come in, they read the SOP and it's not a matter of you know. Obviously you're going to ask before you change it, but once they have, they have the SOP and they're operating off of it, they own it. So if there are iterations that have to happen, that's their responsibility, not yours anymore, because otherwise you're just asking them to come back to you, which the whole point was that I hired you to do the job right, right. So as long as the job is getting done and if they need to change it and you have your processes and everybody's, you know, I give everybody that they're going to have ways of making sure that people don't just start doing things the way they want to do it Right.

Speaker 1: 9:18

I get that part, but the SOP has to be owned so that when you see something that is wrong, so say something on the output comes out right, you get word of it and it's like wait, this right here, why is it taking so long to do it this way? Well, the SOP says XYZ. Okay, let's fix that. But you're not the one fixing it. It's the people you gave the SOP to, because they're the ones doing it right. Because if you try to manage right, micromanagers stay in there in that lane right, and so lawyers can micromanage because they're practicing law right next to the next lawyer, right? But once you become the business owner or the entrepreneur, you are now not in the department of fulfillment because you hired people to fulfill. Would you agree with that?

Speaker 2: 10:10

I agree that they should do that. Do they do that how?

Speaker 1: 10:14

do we get them out of that?

Speaker 2: 10:16

How do you get somebody to let go when they don't want to let go?

Speaker 1: 10:20

Right, so why is it that? Okay, so let's talk about that.

Speaker 2: 10:25

That might be a completely different rabbit hole. Why is it so hard to let?

Speaker 1: 10:27

go of things, that you just hired people. You're paying people to make you let go and yet you're holding on so tight. Why is that?

Speaker 2: 10:34

Because you have to have control over the output. It has to be done a certain way because that's how you see it as being correct but you have an sop that says how it's correct I have an sop, right right, it's not that detailed. I'm not questioning you. It doesn't take every.

Speaker 1: 10:56

OCD, I'm questioning all the people that you try to convince that they need to let shit go. Okay, I don't believe you John. You're going. Yes, welcome to my world.

Speaker 2: 11:04

This is why I get paid Something about horses to water, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1: 11:08

I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it. Right now I'm going to come and and and back John up here, guys, because there were people who told me that, like, and I, you know, quality assurance is a huge thing for business owners, which is what you you were, you were alluding to is. Like you know, we think we know best, which in a lot of times, in a tiny business, we do right, because in tiny businesses, we can't always buy the best of the best in talent. We're tiny, we have limited resources, right, and sometimes we can only hire ourselves out of a portion of our technical know-how, meaning that we're still in it, right and so, and and as for me, like in in media production, a lot, a lot of times I had been doing it for longer than some of these people have been alive, right, so, like it's, you know, so it's not necessarily that I wanted to hold on, it's that these people didn't know, like some of the things that you can't put in an sop, because some stuff is just intuition, experience, you know that, that knowledge that you can't put down on paper, and so I came to a realization that nobody's going to do it as good as you. Right.

Speaker 1: 12:21

I have to accept that whoever I hire will do it no better than 80 of my perceived way of doing it, and I have to be good with it and I have to be profitable in accepting it. Nobody's going to do it as fast as you. Nobody's going to do it the way you do it exactly, especially in services. I'm talking specifically service and production. You know, making products like that, that's a little different because, yes, you could just push the buttons and you have to do it in a certain order, but when you're doing it in service and you're working with other people, too many variables to do that right. Um, so what are ways that we can get from that horse at the water that won't drink to the buzzes of the world? Who took night? Uh, it took me 17 years to figure this out. How can we bridge that gap, john?

Speaker 2: 13:14

Probably the best way is to get an outline and get a visual of what that final product should look like before anybody starts working on it. In other words, let's start at the end, tell me what the end should be and tell me everything else that has to be a part of what that is. Like think about, think about like building a Lego structure, right, like, okay, give me the end result, tell me how many pieces I have to use of certain kinds, certain sizes, certain colors, and tell me the things that I can't do and then I'll go do the rest.

Speaker 1: 13:57

Right, and how long do I have to use the pieces? What if a piece is broken? All those things, right. And I feel like having somebody like you to talk to and put all that down in a way that other people could digest it before you made the hire would probably be a lot cheaper, Because now you get to play in a sandbox and look at all the pieces and go wait a second.

Speaker 1: 14:24

This is a custom piece that only Buzz knows how to use. I got to un-customize this piece Because otherwise I can't hire somebody to do it without me. Right? That's amazing. I love it. I love the fact that you use the Legos because I'm I love. The funny thing is like, because you have the, you have the thing and you do it the way the Legos say it was supposed to be done the first time, and then you tear it apart and you put it away and then you start making it your, your own way. It still ends up being the jet engine, but it's got your own flair to it, right? And if you're in services, that's what you want, right? You want the iterations.

Speaker 2: 14:59

You want your stuff. You want the monkey on the wing of the plane. Absolutely Exactly I love that.

Speaker 1: 15:04

So what other things in operations do you feel are the big whammies that tiny businesses are running into that you have to like consistently solve for them?

Speaker 2: 15:17

So operations as a whole I divide into three parts finance, backend, rev ops All right. So somebody who's in charge of operations should be overseeing all of those. The one that gets lost is that little slice of rev ops called delivery, and it's a huge one.

Speaker 1: 15:41

and you, I know exactly why you're laughing, because scope creep anyone yes, yes, scope creep and people saying they did their job and not doing it because you don't have any checks and balances and all the things.

Speaker 2: 15:57

Yes, project management, client communication, quality control, process documentation, all of that that all falls in delivery. I love that and there's so much focus on marketing what you do and selling what you do, and everybody celebrates when you get the sale, except you have to deliver the project.

Speaker 1: 16:23

Right, and your first SOP is Onboarding the client.

Speaker 2: 16:29

Onboarding the client.

Speaker 1: 16:30

Absolutely, it's the last SOP that people write, oh yeah, because they're like oh, we know how to get them in the system. Right, yeah, if you have a system, but fulfillment is the. In service-based businesses, fulfillment is one of the most difficult because um b in the b2b world it's highly technical. You can't just pull somebody off. You have people that write these books and say, hire the person, not the ability, and I believe that in a sense. But I say you can't. In our industry specifically, and I'm sure it's in yours, if people don't understand marketing, I can't hire you. If you don't understand marketing, I don't have time to teach you the fundamentals. You have to know the fundamentals, right, just like if you brought something and you're like hey, I needed a secondary consultant to work on this part of operations. Dot, dot, dot. They need to know the fundamentals of that. Now can you add the salt and the pepper and all the other spices that go along with that to make it? To level them up, hell, yeah, right, like if you're looking at two people going this guy knows it all but has a bad attitude. This guy knows some but has an awesome attitude. Yeah, I'm probably going to just train this person up Right, dumbed up, right, but that when we're talking fulfillment, like that's where people drowned.

Speaker 1: 17:56

I, when I took my business from uh, from a brick and mortar, we had 22 employees, 13,000 square foot facility and I went virtual in 2019. I, just I was done, I didn't want a facility anymore and uh, I sent, I told everybody I said you can work from home, but you can't work here, and and and we had one out of 22. Now, when that happened, I wasn't expecting only one out of 22 to bite on it. So I ended up with a lot of things on my plate and you could imagine how much that looked like for me and I hired one other person. So there was three of us that tried to handle all of this work and we found out how much waste was happening and that was down. This is at a 22. Now you don't necessarily have that problem at less than a dozen. I'm assuming, because I don't think I did.

Speaker 1: 18:43

Like people sitting around checking their emails and not doing their job. I think that would be pretty blatant if there was only five or six of you.

Speaker 2: 18:52

No, no, I mean, look there's. There's always ways to skin the cat, you know, especially if you have like one superstar in the business that does all the work. But yeah, for the most part you're right.

Speaker 1: 19:08

Yeah. So how can our, our tiny businesses, hedge as they're growing their teams and learning how to be a leader Cause that's probably something you help them as well with how do we help them hedge making those initial mistakes in getting their first few people on board?

Speaker 2: 19:32

The. The hardest part buzzes is finding people with the variety to be effective, because there's so many people that are specialists in one thing. So finding people that can do a variety of things makes your business more nimble and allows you to focus on multiple aspects of the business with multiple people.

Speaker 1: 20:02

I love that, and so and this is for the folks that got a lesson I mean yeah, because I mean you're the person wearing all the hats when it's just you, right, and do you want somebody just to wear one hat, or could you wear three of the hats?

Speaker 2: 20:18

If I can take three hats off your head instead of one, how much better does that make you feel?

Speaker 1: 20:23

So how do so? So, when you're recruiting for something like that, I mean is do you, how do mean, how do you approach that?

Speaker 2: 20:34

It depends on the business. It depends on where they are and what they need, right? You can't hire somebody that does finance and marketing. That typically doesn't exist, right? Right?

Speaker 1: 20:45

Unless you're an owner.

Speaker 2: 20:47

There has to be some interconnection. Can you find somebody that does HR and some bookkeeping? Sure, absolutely Beautiful Right, and so that's going to be more valuable than just outsourcing a bookkeeper and outsourcing some HR.

Speaker 1: 21:01

And now this is going to be one of my last ones, because I see this in my clients so much the office manager of a company that has less than six, yeah, yes. I feel like when they say office manager, just to just say catch all, because you know how many office managers are also the marketing director and they yell at me going, I don't care about marketing.

Speaker 1: 21:26

I don't know anything about marketing but the boss said I'm to deal with and they yell at me going I don't care about marketing. I don't know anything about marketing. But the boss said I'm the office manager, so I got to deal with the marketing. What can you do for me?

Speaker 2: 21:36

They're also the director of HR.

Speaker 1: 21:40

Which makes more sense than the marketing director. So is there a way? I don't want people to do that to their office manager because I feel like they I've seen great office managers who, in as a business grows, I feel could be the best executive assistant to the founder that they can possibly have right to the founder that they can possibly have right, actually, taking them out of a tiny business office manager into a small business executive assistant. I mean, that's one of the most important positions in a business, right?

Speaker 2: 22:20

So how can somebody set themselves up for success as they're looking at that catch-all person that's wearing a lot of the hats as they grow and that's one of the biggest challenges is that you get businesses that are at a certain size and they bring in people that are great for the business when their business is that size, but then the business grows and if the person doesn't grow with the business, the business outgrows the person, and that's how you end up with people that have been there for ten years but are no longer useful to the organization and there's so many owners that are just unwilling to have that conversation, even if they see it happening that they can't. Just I feel bad, I don't want to say anything, but they're holding me back. I can't. But they're such a nice person and they've done so much for the organization and they've been here.

Speaker 2: 23:18

Cut the cord. It's the best thing you can do for your business and it's the best thing you can do for them, because if they have to know it as well, there's no way they don't know it and by, like, I know one owner that actually helped them find a different job. Right, they did. They did right by them. That's great. There's no reason you can't do that, but you have to be aware of that.