Break Through Operational Bottlenecks & Scale to the Next Level with Jhana Li – EP 166

Interview with Jhana Li

Break Through Operational Bottlenecks & Scale to the Next Level with Jhana Li

Featured on This Episode: Jhana Li

✅ What she does: Jhana Li is a distinguished figure in the field of operations, particularly in scaling digital businesses. As the founder of Spyglass Ops, she has garnered a reputation for her expertise in creating efficient and scalable operational systems. Jhana has an impressive history of working in operations. Over the past five years, she has held significant roles, including being the COO of two 7-figure startups, leading multiple remote teams of over 20 employees, and serving as an operations consultant to over thirty 7- & 8-figure online businesses. Furthermore, she has been an operations coach to hundreds of digital startups, their CEOs, and their operators. She leads the Ops Academy at Spyglass Ops, a program designed to equip operators with the necessary skills to build scalable business foundations. The curriculum includes modules on scalable systems, SOP & task management, and A-player team building, all aimed at transforming operational managers into effective leaders who can streamline business processes and drive growth​.

💬 Words of wisdom: “Finding the right person in the right role literally can make you six figures in a week.” – Jhana Li

🔎 Where to find Jhana Li: LinkedIn | Instagram

Key Takeaways with Jhana Li

• Why visionaries need operators
• Why operators are key to a thriving business
• Do you need an operator, COO, or CEO
• Difference between an operator and a CEO
• What got you here won’t get you there
• Did you build a business or buy yourself a job?
• The costs of doing it all yourself
• Moments of great change are moments of great opportunity
• Tripling operational productivity with AI
• Best advice Justin got from Richard Branson

Jhana Li on Putting Your Energy Towards the Most Valuable Activities

Free Strategy Session 

The Lifestyle Investor Insider

Jhana Li Tweetables

Resources

• Spyglass Ops
• Spyglass Ops on LinkedIn | Facebook
• Jhana Li on LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook
• Agency Lab
• The Ops Spot
• Ryan Casey
• Orangetheory Fitness Studio
• Cameron Herold
• Higinio “H.O.” Maycotte
• FeatureBase
• Dinesh Gauba
• Stephen Backholm
• Maverick 1000
• Maverick Next
• Richard Branson
• Necker Island

Rate & Review The Lifestyle Investor Podcast

If you enjoyed today’s episode of The Lifestyle Investor, hit the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, iHeart Radio, or wherever you listen, so future episodes are automatically downloaded directly to your device.

You can also help by providing an honest rating & review over on Apple Podcasts. Reviews go a long way in helping us build awareness so that we can impact even more people. THANK YOU!

Connect with Justin Donald

• Facebook
• YouTube
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Podcast

Get the Lifestyle Investor Book!

To get access to The Lifestyle Investor: The 10 Commandments of Cashflow Investing for Passive Income and Financial Freedom visit JustinDonald.com/book

Read the Full Transcript with Jhana Li

Justin Donald: What’s up, Jhana? So good to have you on the show.

Jhana Li: Hey, Justin. I am thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.

Justin Donald: Yeah. This is going to be fun because we get to talk about operators. We get to talk about really the glue that holds the business together, especially for a non-operational founder.

Jhana Li: Yes.

Justin Donald: So, I’m excited. This has been a long time coming. You joined us. You joined the Lifestyle Investor Mastermind for a session that was just phenomenal. Really, we’re kind of talking about we had back-to-back sessions on buying your time back. And I just think one of the best ways to buy your time back is if you’re an entrepreneur hiring people that can function at as high of a level or higher of a level than you can that can really remove you from the business. And I know you agree because your business is based on it.

Jhana Li: Yes, exactly. That is what we help our clients, our entrepreneurs do all day every day.

Justin Donald: Now, before you got into this business, you were kind of traveling the world, right? Like, you’re kind of like touring around North and South America. You had a van packed with your stuff and you were living life. So, how on earth did you go from world traveler to owner of a large operations company?

Jhana Li: It’s a fun story. I like to say that before I found operations, I was literally directionless. And that was true because we were in this van and we were like mapping things out 2 or 3 days in advance at the furthest, and it was also true in life. Like, I didn’t know what I was going to be doing specifically with my career and my boyfriend, who I was traveling with, was scaling and starting a digital marketing agency at the time. And so, I was watching him start this digital business two feet across the table from me in this van every day and we were talking things through. We were troubleshooting and solving problems and brainstorming. And that is really where I got my introduction to business. And where operations factored in is that I was seeing a bunch of stuff in his business as we were talking it through that he was not seeing.

And through a series of odd events, I stepped into his company for what was supposed to be like a 30-day stint on his team to fill in a gap and I eventually became that company COO because once I got in there, it’s just so obvious to an operator when they look at a business. It’s like giant neon signs everywhere, pointing towards gaps and inefficiencies and leaks and where things can be better. And it’s not the visionary’s natural lens to see the business that way. And so, when I got in there, I just started fixing things. I didn’t even know what I was doing. I didn’t even know what operations was. But one thing led to another. I had the opportunity to coach in a community with hundreds of digital startups, gain a ton of data from that about the patterns of success and failure when it comes to successfully scaling your startup. And after enough time and enough data, I realized that nobody frickin knows what operations is and they really should if they want to scale successfully. And so, I started Spyglass Ops to help be a stand for operations, help educate entrepreneurs on how to utilize this growth lever so that, as you so beautifully said, they can both scale their business but also scale themselves out of the weeds and buy back their time.

Justin Donald: Well, I’m so excited to spend time with you because I shared off-camera before we hit record, just that I wouldn’t function in this world, in business, just in life without operators all over. I mean, I’ve got operators that are overseeing every business that I own. I have an operator that kind of oversees our family, an operator that oversees Lifestyle Investor. We did a really cool podcast episode with Ryan Casey walking through his cool path and unique track of running a couple of the biggest Orangetheory Fitness Studios out of over 1,300 nationwide.

Jhana Li:  Amazing.

Justin Donald: And he has no need to work for money but this guy just loves what we’re doing, loves what we’re about, and is such a systems guy. He’s a total operator. And together, I just think when you have someone that is a little bit more on the visionary side of things or a little bit more on the big picture, you get an operator in play and it is a true one-two punch. One plus one equals five, right?

Jhana Li: Yep, totally. It’s the absolute power couple and we do a lot of power couple coaching actually in my programs because when you’re really able to dial in that relationship and that yin yang, you unlock compound growth and compound potential. Because the reality is, is like a visionary, their genius is starting things and getting their hands dirty and making something a reality. Where they struggle is with the follow-through and the consistency and the scalability because by design, they build everything around themselves because they are their own greatest asset. The job of the operator is to then come in and build a system that can carry all of that genius forward without continuing to rely on the visionary to be the person in the weeds moving it all and making it all happen. Because at some point you reach your limit or you want to start your next thing or you want to scale your portfolio and you can’t do it if it’s just you moving everything forward every day. And so, operations is there to help you get the same effect but without your own time and energy being the only resource that gets you there.

Justin Donald: Now, let’s talk about what you did after becoming the COO of your boyfriend’s business because you became COO of another startup. So, you have had two very successful startups that you were kind of running those businesses, and I’d love to talk about that a little more. And then you’ve coached so many people, hundreds of people, hundreds of companies through your systems and your processes. And I’d love to dive into that and really kind of create a bit of a how-to episode.

Jhana Li: I love it. Let’s dive in. Where would you like to start?

Justin Donald: So, yeah, let’s talk about the next company. What did you do afterwards and how did you kind of even retool your toolkit going from one startup to another?

Jhana Li: That is a fantastic question. So, my next company was called Agency Lab. It is now called Agency Lab. It’s a coaching program for digital marketing agency owners. And so, there were 500 plus when I was working there. Agency owners in this community, they’re receiving live training, online curriculum, and I was both the COO for the company as well as the Head Operations Coach for that coaching community. And in terms of my own personal development, it was absolutely amazing because I had literally hundreds of businesses coming to me, pulling back the curtain on their problems, and just like laying it all out on the table, I was able to learn and see and gather so much data so quickly and start to piece together patterns when it comes to what actually works and what keeps people stalled out or small.

From a COO perspective, I also had the opportunity to shift from running a marketing agency, which is like done for you service based to a coaching program, which is a totally different model and start to stress test my own operational thinking in multiple business models. And that has served us so well now in my current business because we work with all types of businesses. Yes, we work with coaching programs and marketing agencies, but also info products and consultants and SaaS and e-com because the same operational best practices apply. And this was the opportunity where I got to really learn that by stress testing the same ideas in different businesses and seeing what data the business gave back to me.

Justin Donald: Yeah, I love that. So, I find one of the biggest, I guess, mistakes or issues that operators have or that business owners have, first of all, it’s the lack of operators. Secondly, it’s trying to find the right operator when they do. And third, it’s like just completely missing and hiring the wrong people. So, how do you make sure that you’re coaching the people that work with your company into good processes, even around the hiring process?

Jhana Li: Yep. And this is such a viable example because it literally happened today where a client of mine had hired the wrong operator and was perpetually disappointed. That’s how he described it like, “I had all these expectations for this person but I didn’t know if my expectations were too high or if they were just the wrong person in the role,” and he was driving himself crazy for months trying to reconcile this gap. He finally let that operator go. He just got his new COO in and he messages me and like says, “My COO just saved me six figures this week because he found an erroneous pixel on our ads and I was burning 50K in that ad spend up until now and I didn’t even know it.” So, finding the right person in the right role literally can make you six figures in a week. Like, it is that powerful when you’re a scaled-up business. In terms of finding the right person, that’s where it starts.

His biggest takeaway, I was interviewing him this morning, was that, “I didn’t even know what operations was. I didn’t know what my operator was supposed to do. And so, when I went out and I hired this first person, I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I was going for a competent person who seemed detail-oriented and kind of organized, and I trusted them.” That’s not operations. That’s just like a good buddy with some organizational skills. And so, I think the first piece is that it’s really important that an entrepreneur determine what are the operational needs of my business, like what level of operator do I need? Do I need just an ops manager to run and manage my day-to-day systems and team? Or do I need a COO who can bring a decade of strategic thinking and experience to the table and help me take my business to the next level? So, that’s the first question to answer is what level of operational expertise do you need in your business? And then what are the specific skills and competencies that this operator needs to bring for my business?

If you have an incredibly systems-intensive company, something like SaaS, they’re going to need to have a ton of technical knowledge just to be able to work well in that environment versus if it’s a super team-intensive business model, well, then they need team leadership skills more than anything else, right? So, there’s not a right operator. I think the big misconception is that there’s like a unicorn hangout spot with all the best operators in the world and we all just hang out together. That’s not the thing, right? There is a right operator for you and you need to know how to build the hiring funnel, the fishing rod that can go fishing in any pond and attract the right operator for you because that’s a very specific person.

Justin Donald: Now, let’s dig into a little bit more on the clarity between the two roles that you mentioned because I see a lot of people that have an operator but they think or act like this person is the COO. It’s the person that’s running the company the day-to-day when really they’re not quite skilled or qualified for that yet. You also see this in the financial world, in startups and early-stage companies where maybe they’re calling someone a CFO who’s really like a VP of finance. Right?

Jhana Li: Totally.

Justin Donald: And so, how do we differentiate between the two of those and what’s really needed?

Jhana Li: Yep. Yep. Great question. So, I break down the operations role into actually three tiers for digital startups. Entry level is an ops manager, middle management is a head of operations, executive and C-suite is a COO. The short overview of these three roles, in ops manager is focused on the present day. They are in the weeds with your team, with your frontline team, optimizing systems, managing tasks and SOPs, making sure the right work gets done, and optimizing the business as it exists today. Your head of operations is layering in leadership skills, so they’re also now managing others and getting the highest performance out of them. They are starting to look into the future, see what is coming down the track based off of the strategic vision that you’ve set for them, and saying, “Okay. I need to proactively start shoring up components of this system or this infrastructure or hiring team in order to prepare for what’s coming.”

A COO is making the strategic vision with you. They are bringing in experience and market knowledge and product knowledge to the table to say, “You want that vision. Here is how we will get you there.” And I can say that because I’ve done it or I have that business owner level of acumen and thinking. The COO on the flip side, to your point, Justin, I see a lot of people hire a COO and they get really frustrated because this person isn’t down in the weeds building SOPs. Yeah, you hired a strategic thinker. That’s what a COO brings to the table, right? And so, it’s also a matter of like how much work needs to be done. If you just need somebody to roll up their sleeves and be in the weeds in the day-to-day with your team, that’s an ops manager, not a COO.

Justin Donald: Yeah. Good. I mean, very powerful distinction. Very important distinction. And I just think that this role or these roles, I mean, anything around operations, if you are not operationally oriented, this is a game changer for your business. Today, I would not buy a business like I literally wouldn’t do it if it didn’t come with an operator that I felt like had the staying power to be there a long time and is really good at their job or that I know someone that I can hand select, that I can put into that role. I literally would not buy a business otherwise because otherwise, I’m buying a job and that’s a dangerous place to be with the exception of if you’re trying to transition from W-2 to business owner, then, okay, maybe that’s different where you already have an expectation of what you’re going to work and maybe you have budgeted that time because you’re going to give up the W-2.

But outside of that, I think we’ve got to be careful because I see a lot of people that go and buy a new company. We’ve got a ton of people in our mastermind that they either want to buy a company or they have recently bought a company or they’re in the process of buying a company. And the thing that I urge them to do is make sure that operator is in place because otherwise, you may be biting off more than you can chew.

Jhana Li: Otherwise, you are the operator.

Justin Donald: That’s right.

Jhana Li: Most visionaries I know hate nothing more than operations. And so, you’re forcing yourself to fill this role that feels unnatural, that is hard, that you procrastinate because you don’t like it, and it’s not how your brain works. And it’s just not a value-add thing to do because you’ve got your genius that’s going to drive growth to this business. And it’s the best thing that you can do is give yourself the permission slip to not have to be your own operator and believe that there is somebody out there who is better in the role than you are.

Justin Donald: And the other interesting thing that I see that happens in business and I’ve experienced this from one of the many businesses I’ve started is you kind of build one system and that system works and it works really well and you might be able to upgrade it and tweak it. But at a certain point after that company scales, you hit a plateau and the system that you once built that works so well does not work anymore. And you literally have to redo the system at a different scale. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Jhana Li: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, operations is essentially the skeleton of your business, right? It is what keeps all the parts moving together and working together. And it’s like a beetle outgrowing its exoskeleton. At some stage of growth, what got you here will not get you there because you’re handling more complexity. And the system that you started with wasn’t designed for complexity. It was designed for simplicity. Right? And so, it is the job, again, of the operator and the savvy operator to be continuously evolving the systems to meet the needs of the growing business and to know that when we have 20 employees, it’s a different game and we need different things than when we had five. When we have 50 clients, it’s going to have to look different than when we had ten, and to know what it’s going to take to get the company there because I see it going one of two ways. Either we work this existing system up until its absolute limit, everything is on fire, all the balls are getting dropped. It’s absolute chaos. And then we waste six months having to rebuild the entire thing. That’s an option. Or evolving it a little bit in real-time all the time so that the systems are constantly upgrading and evolving marginally and you never have to do a full reset because the operator is keeping pace with the needs of the business.

Justin Donald: And a strong operator can do that. You know, for me as a business owner, it is not my strength to build out the systems. I can do it. I’ve done it. I’ve been a COO. I’ve been a CFO. My skill set is not best utilized that way. So, at times, I can be a chameleon and I can play the role that I need to play, although it is super exhausting for me to play those roles. Like, at the end of the day, I am just wiped out as opposed to the roles that I feel like I’m wired for, which is building relationships, spending time with people, vision, strategy, big picture, and even strategic partnerships.

Jhana Li: I love that you called that out, Justin, because I think of it as ROI on energy. The beautiful thing about entrepreneurs is they’re like, “Well, I’ll just outwork the problem. Okay. I get to the end of my day drained. Who cares, right?” But if you’ve got finite energy every single day, are you putting that energy towards the highest leverage, most valuable, and growth-driving activities that also happen to light you up and make you excited to wake up tomorrow and do it again? Or are you putting that energy towards the things that are going to take you longer than they should because you’re bad at them, leave you totally drained and exhausted at the end of the day, and with no residual energy for innovative or creative thinking? One of those is going to move your business forward faster. And so, I see entrepreneurs be very self-sacrificing because they will just outwork the problem. When you reposition it as this is actually how it is costing your business money, do not live in your zone of genius, all of a sudden, we’re willing to make a switch.

Justin Donald: Yeah. Some people have to hear it as a money-lost opportunity or situation, even though the real selling point is you’re miserable doing those things. Stop doing them. Hire them out to a professional who’s going to do them better than you, is going to enjoy doing it and is going to buy your time back to do more strategic thinking.

Jhana Li: Sounds like enough to me. I wish it was enough but I find entrepreneurs to be just so damn resilient that they will be miserable and make themselves miserable for way longer than necessary, and they will only get themselves out of that place of misery when you can tie it to the bottom line.

Justin Donald: Yeah. You know, I had a business that I was in, and one of the mantras is that work ethic is the badge of honor and that you can just outwork whatever the situation is. And by the way, I’m really glad that I have the skill set and the endurance and I guess a mindset around that work ethic because it did serve me really well in a season of my life. But this season, that skill set is not as applicable. I would rather work smarter. I would rather hire more strategically, hire more skilled, more experienced people. But I’m glad to know if push came to shove and everything imploded around me that I can just reach back into my tool belt and work hard and do what I needed to do. But I do think that figuring out how to work smart over working hard in the long run is going to serve most people, if not all people, much better.

Jhana Li: Yeah. Well, and it comes down to what do you want, right? Because that’s an amazing safety net to know that you could fall back on and to know that you’ve always got your own back. That is huge for confidence and your ability to make bold moves. And if you are approaching every task or project or initiative from a place of how am I going to get this done, then what you are accidentally creating is a business that is fully and wholly dependent upon you. And I’ve seen clients, most of our clients when they are so backed into a corner by this mindset that they’ve literally grown the company to the absolute max limit that it can grow with them being the central focal point for progress. And then we have to figure out how to extract them from a company that has organically built to revolve around them and cannot let them go.

Justin, like to reflect back to you, you’re about to take five weeks off for the holidays with your family. That is literally impossible if you don’t have operators and operations running things for you and with you. If all of those companies were reliant and dependent on you and your brilliance to get things done, you could do it, but you would not be taking five weeks off to spend time with your family. And so, what do you want? It’s the Lifestyle Investor. Do you want the lifestyle component of that? If so, this is an important skill to learn.

Justin Donald: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. And just the other thing to consider, if all of this isn’t enough of a selling point to focus on that lifestyle, your company will be worth more. People will pay more for it if it is not based around the founder, if it is based around true SOPs, true operators, and systems that really work regardless of who’s in running them.

Jhana Li: Yep. Absolutely huge. It’s not an asset if you have to be there to make it forward, like move it forward, then it’s just a well-paying hobby.

Justin Donald: That’s right. Now, I think one of the things I’m most excited to talk about is this season of the world of the economy that we are in right now because we are about to experience the largest wealth transfer in the history of the world. I’ve talked about this on a number of episodes and I’ve seen statistics on it anywhere from about $75 trillion to $105 trillion, changing hands from baby boomers to millennials. And a lot of this is going to come in the form most certainly of just, I mean, dollars transferring over but I actually think a lot’s going to come in the form of real estate and businesses. And when I look at the business front and I look at a lot of the people that are running businesses, baby boomers, people that want to retire, many of them, their kids don’t want to take over the business. Maybe they don’t have kids but if they do, a lot of them don’t find that interesting or they don’t have the desire to do that. So, a lot of these people are just shutting down their business because they don’t think it’s worth anything because it’s built around them or revolves around them, not recognizing that their client list is important, that their relationships and experience and name brand, you know, the branding and the area is important and people would pay for it.

And the ones that do get that and sell it, they’ll sell at a reasonable multiple. I mean, I’ve seen it. I’ve done it. I’ve bought some businesses this way. We’ve got a lot of people in the Lifestyle Investor community doing this. And I think we’re going to see a ton of it over the next 5, 10, 15, probably even up to 20 years. So, I’ve got to imagine that this creates a huge opportunity for you, for your company, people needing resources here but I’m not sure if you’ve even looked at the stats or have known kind of what is about to happen. But I’m curious your thoughts on this. With such a big wealth transfer with businesses and real estate and all these things changing hands, and by the way, be careful with real estate because at the beginning it’s passive income but if you buy enough of it and you don’t have a team, you again are the operator and you end up running a business and it becomes a job. So, I’m curious your thoughts on this wealth transfer.

Jhana Li: Yeah. It’s interesting. I always revert back to shock doctrine, which essentially says in moments of greatest change come moments of greatest opportunity. Because when things aren’t changing, when everything is the status quo, there’s essentially no forcing agent and there’s no incentive to change. When all of a sudden you’re in a moment of crisis or massive overturn or massive overhaul, the ground is shaky, people are seeking other solutions, and they are willing to change behaviors, decision-making very, very rapidly. And so, moments of great change are moments of great opportunity and the question is, how can we as entrepreneurs and investors seize and maximize the opportunity recognizing the challenges that come with it and the reason that other people are missing and not wanting this opportunity? So, if we take the example like give me an example of a business that you have seen that fits this criteria and exited recently.

Justin Donald: Yeah. We’ve got a number of people in our community, actually, it’s interesting. In 2022, one of the things I said at the beginning of the year is I think the economic climate is going to change. The season for selling a business is now. If you ever thought about it, if you ever wanted to sell, sell this year. We had 23 people in the Lifestyle Investor community in our mastermind that sold companies and probably about 15 the year before. So, it was an uptick from it. But we see people that sold service-based companies. We see people that sold technology companies. We saw people that sold, I mean, several of them in the SaaS business, enterprise SaaS, others of them service. But, I mean, we’re still talking like tech companies too, maybe not specifically SaaS. So, we’ve seen all kinds of stuff and real estate companies, you name it, we’ve probably seen it. We’ve got a guy in our community that has a very large portfolio of funerals or funeral homes, rather, and ancillary products.

Jhana Li: Okay. That’s interesting. Let’s take that example. That’s fascinating. So, guys, I’m just winging this, right? So, you are a funeral home in a small town somewhere in rural America, and you have been running this company for however many decades and you want to exit it to your kids but your kids don’t want to run a funeral home, right? If you’re the investor entrepreneur, how is this your opportunity and how are there constraints and challenges? Well, it’s not a super sexy business, so you have to be in the know enough to see it through that lens and see the opportunity to even want to go after it. And then you have to take into account that this like where is the competitive advantage that you can bring to this? This is a company that probably is totally reliant on local organic networking and marketing. It’s fully revolved around the relationships that these people have been able to build with their community for decades of running this company over time. They probably run on very little technology, if any, but there is enormous potential there because they’ve built this homegrown business that has the most solid foundation you could ever hope to imagine.

And so, if you can be the entrepreneur that steps in and brings technology, brings cutting edge marketing and sales solutions while maintaining and capitalizing on the organic relationships and the strength of that brand and reputation, you’ve got a winning business foundation that’s due for a 50-year technological overhaul. And all of this stuff to you is like the back of your hand, the easiest thing in the world, all the better if you can do it in partnership with an operator who can bring the actual execution and day-to-day. You know, I’ve never worked at a funeral home, but it’s a certain set of steps that needs to happen every single time. It’s a certain type of person that will be able to make loved ones feel safe working with you when you know the right people to plug in and the right workflow to build around them. That is something that can be systemized and replicated really easily because they’ve already worked it all out. You’re just bringing some technological upgrade to their existing system.

And so, in that type of example, Justin, with the right strategic thinking around, what is my job in all of this? My job is to see the opportunity, do the deal, make sure that this is smart financially and strategically, and then plug the right person and the right technology into the puzzle and then let that person do their work. That’s your job.

Justin Donald: Yeah. No doubt. And even from the standpoint of like I believe if we layer in technology even to some old mom-and-pop business that doesn’t have it, like that’s the value add, that’s where you’re going to get the business to become worth more. In that example, one of the things that’s really taking off is people using the ashes of loved ones that were cremated to actually make diamonds or make gemstones. And that’s becoming more popular.

Jhana Li: Amazing.

Justin Donald: And I envision that’s going to be more popular in time than an actual burial than, you know.

Jhana Li: Interesting. So, like take advantage of new cross-strategic opportunities and bringing new innovative ideas into these traditional businesses that could be done in a new way, taking advantage of global networks and economies, AI, remote teams. As young entrepreneurs, we have all these tools in our tool belt and they feel really natural to us. And so, it’s hard for us to imagine that some other businesses is already utilizing that, like, what do I have to bring to this situation? But to your point in this wealth, this generational wealth transfer, when’s the last time you saw a boomer using AI? Like, the opportunity is there.

Justin Donald: That’s right. And how else do you envision using AI an operational, I guess, from an operational standpoint or integrating AI with your operations?

Jhana Li: Yeah. So, Cameron Herold, who I think that you’ve had on this podcast as well.

Justin Donald: Yeah. Love Cameron.

Jhana Li: Yeah. Cameron’s amazing, and he and I started an operations community together called The Ops Spot, and AI is one of the hot-button topics in there right now because we as a collective of operators are asking ourselves the question, how can we incorporate this in a way that does right by our teams, in a way that makes them feel safe, in a way that has them utilizing it and not just us in our own jobs as operators and what we do every day, but we’re essentially responsible for rolling this new technology out across an entire company and how are we taking advantage of the new tools. So, there’s a lot there but in terms of how do I see it changing the landscape for operations, the operators that are not afraid of AI and specifically the operators who are able to build team cultures where the team is not afraid of AI like the team isn’t using AI under the table to get their work done in half the time and then going and getting another full-time job.

The team where that person is actually saying, “Hey, I figured out how to double my productivity with AI and I’m actually bringing that to the business and to the table for everyone to benefit from,” that I think is the rule of operations when it comes to AI. How do we scale it so that everyone is utilizing it in their own roles, is unafraid to share their innovation and what they’re figuring out in real time with this company? Because I think the competitive advantage with AI is who can learn it the fastest. And if it’s just you as an operator or just you as a CEO, being the only person fiddling with these tools and trying to figure them out versus the competitor next to you team of exactly the same size but everyone on that team is utilizing AI and trying to figure it out, they are going to outpace you because they are just going to learn faster.

Justin Donald: No doubt. We just had our big annual Lifestyle Investor Mastermind retreat this last week, which is kind of the end all be all of what we do. And it’s just such an amazing event. And we actually brought in my good friend H.O. Maycotte and he leads a company called FeatureBase. He has a lot of success in that space. We brought up some other experts from our community, Dinesh Gauba and Stephen Backholm to do an AI panel to just extract all the ways that we can use AI today in our businesses and not just in our businesses, in our daily lives. There’s just so much to incorporate in so many ways to be more efficient and not just more efficient, like actually get better results and not just shrink the amount of time into it but to actually have a better product.

Jhana Li: Yep, absolutely. And I think the key there is it’s a math problem. AI is exponentially accelerating. And so, it is literally impossible for any one person to learn all of it, right, every tool, every way that AI can make your life better. So, how do you crowdsource it across your networks, your communities, your team? Everyone is working on their own little piece of this big AI puzzle, and collectively you’re learning and leveling up much faster. I see a lot of CEOs trying to do this in a silo where it’s just them playing around with these tools by themselves and figuring out how to incorporate it by themselves. And so, I love what you’re talking about, which is essentially leveraging your community and the experts that you have so that people are able to learn from each other faster.

Justin Donald: I love it. Now, let’s do a real practical how-to because I just mentioned we’ve got 23 mastermind members that just exited their company. They’ve got capital. We’ve got a handful from this year as well. I’ll get the final count as the year wraps up, but it’s way less this year than the last three years. We probably had 10 to 15 three years ago. We probably had 15 to 18 two years ago. We had 23 last year. And then this year is like just infinitely less. I mean, I don’t even know if we’ll get to ten because it’s just such a different season. But we’ve got all these people now that want to buy a business but they don’t want to do the work the way they were before. They want an operator. So, how do they go about finding an operator and how do they go about training an operator? And where does Spyglass Ops come into play?

Jhana Li: Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So, we handle the recruitment side if that’s something that our clients need. If you’re not already bringing an operator to the table, then, yeah, you need to plug that gap. And I always say, again, it’s not about the pond you’re fishing in. It’s about using the right fishing rod. So, we’ve created a hiring funnel that step by step by step by step breaks down exactly how to identify your perfect fit operator and then reverse engineer a hiring funnel that will attract them, whether that’s ops manager all the way up to COO and regardless of the type of business that you run. So, the solution is there and the solution is a system, right? And it’s DIY, it’s done for you, whatever your flavor is. The other thing we do, Justin, is we audit businesses. That’s actually where we start working with our clients. We audit businesses and we audit teams and probably 40% to 60% of the time we find what we call hidden operators, which are people with operational talent, operational drive, and a way of thinking, but they don’t have any official training or experience in operations.

And so, our core offer actually is operations coaching programs so that we can take that person. If you know, like, and trust them and you want them with you, we can level them up with the operational skill set so that they can turn around and execute all of this that we’ve been talking about in your business without you having to go out and incur a really expensive salary to stack onto your leadership team.

Justin Donald: That’s awesome. I love it. And something else that we should mention. Just today, you received an incredible award called The Maverick Next Award, and I’d love to hear what that is and celebrate it with you because this is a big deal.

Jhana Li: Thank you. Oh, my gosh, I’m so excited. This is on the topic of community and leveraging community. The Maverick 1000 is a community of change-making entrepreneurs leading and creating disruptive industry and companies across all sectors that you can imagine and across the world. Maverick Next is a much smaller community, specifically for entrepreneurs under 30 who are receiving mentorship and connection with this larger community and essentially it is about nurturing the next generation of change-making entrepreneurs. It includes three days on Necker Island with Richard Branson. It includes learning from some of these incredible entrepreneurs, as well as peer-to-peer networking. And so, I am very excited and got that news today. So, super excited about that.

Justin Donald: Well, I love it. Congratulations. I think there’s probably no one better that you could spend three days with than Richard Branson. I had the privilege and luxury of getting a week on his island and really getting a chance to speak with him and hang out with him every day of that week, which was cool.

Jhana Li: I can’t wait.

Justin Donald: And the crazy rare opportunity of taking a picture on the beach with him with a double rainbow in the background, which is so, so crazy that it just worked out. Yes. Super crazy. But with a lot of people that are notable or have some sort of notoriety or reputation, we can talk about Hollywood. We can talk about professional athletes. We can talk about big-name entrepreneurs. I always have this big expectation. And so, rarely do those people live up to it. And I had a really huge expectation of Richard Branson. He’s someone that for me, I mean, I would say is a top five-person that I looked up to, learn from, dug into his content, his books. And so, I had really big expectations and he exceeded them with flying colors. He is just a wonderful person, really kind, really smart, really down to earth. It was incredible.

Jhana Li: You know, and hearing you talk about Richard, actually, I think there’s an opportunity to bring this full circle because if you guys don’t know Richard Branson, he’s the founder of the Virgin Empire and they have successful businesses in everything from cruise ships to literally spaceships and everything in between. And if you look at his track record, the way that he builds businesses now is kind of exactly what we’ve been talking about, Justin, right? He brings his zone of genius, his incredible brand, and his incredible network. But the first thing he does is find a CEO, his operator, to build and launch this next component of the Virgin family. Richard Branson is not individually overseeing the spaceships being built and the cruise ships being launched. He’s showing up and doing crazy marketing stunts and connecting those people and his leadership team with the right people in his network.

He is bringing his absolute zone of genius to the table to make that venture a success but he is not running the day-to-day of any of those businesses anymore. And it’s the reason that he’s also able to have the freedom, the flexibility, the lifestyle, the adventure that he does. I think Richard Branson, he’s also one of my favorites because he exemplifies this principle at the highest level and we can all aspire and recreate that success at our own levels, even in the form of, again, who is the right person to plug into this company within your portfolio so it can run without you.

Justin Donald: That’s right. He owns over 450 companies.

Jhana Li: I didn’t know that.

Justin Donald: Successful companies. Like, this is just absolutely mind-blowing. But the best advice that I ever got from Richard and I just took pages of notes every time I got to hang out with him but the thing that he said that really stuck with me that even forced me to shift the way I was running and operating Lifestyle Investor, which was like a passion project turned business. And so, for me, it was a little different. I wasn’t so quick to outsource because it’s what I love to do. It’s amazing. So, I wanted to be a teacher inside my own brand, but I still need someone that can run the day-to-day at a high level. And so, he gave me the nudge that I needed and he said, “The best thing you can ever do to be able to scale businesses is to hire really great people and get out of the building as quickly as you can.” And that was it.

Jhana Li: I love that. Yeah. And it is an important refrain that even if you are invested in or working on a business that you love, that is your passion project that you would do every single day even if nobody paid you to do it. If you really love that business and want to do right by it, it means honoring how you are able to uniquely contribute to it and allowing other people to come in and slot into the areas where you are not as strong. That is you doing right by your business is putting the right team in place and getting out of their way.

Justin Donald: Yeah, no doubt. Well, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate your time on the show, Jhana. Where can our audience, our listeners, those watching on YouTube, where can we learn more about you and about Spyglass Ops?

Jhana Li: Yeah. So, the best way to check out us and how we serve people is on our website, SpyglassOps.com. You can also check us out on Facebook. And, Justin, I believe we have a bit of a free giveaway for the listeners as well. Yeah?

Justin Donald: We do. Yes.

Jhana Li: Amazing. So, guys, I want to give all of you what we call our bottleneck breakthrough detector. I will make sure that the link is in the show notes for you. Essentially, this is a way of you identifying in five minutes or less what is the number one biggest operational bottleneck currently stalling out your growth and preventing you from scaling to the next level. We’ve taken the data from the hundreds of companies that we’ve worked with. We’ve plugged it into this really easy-to-use survey and it will spit out the number one thing that you need to focus on next in order to unlock your scalability. And if it was me, I would take that survey and then I would give the answer to your operator so they can go to work clearing that bottleneck for you.

Justin Donald: That’s right. And if you don’t have an operator, you know that you need to just get plugged in here at SpyglassOps.com.

Jhana Li: We can help you out.

Justin Donald: So, they can do the magic that they do and work their genius. So, hey, I’m a believer in what you do. I love what you have built. I love the value that you’ve added to Lifestyle Investor Mastermind community. And I’m just so excited for more ways that we can get together and work together and partner on things because I think it is truly endless, all the things that we can do and all the ways that we can offer value to people just in our networks.

Jhana Li: I love it, Justin. This is just the beginning.

Justin Donald: Fantastic. Well, I love ending every episode with a question for the audience. And the question is this: What is the one step that you can take today to move towards financial freedom, and maybe it’s to move towards operational freedom by implementing something that Jhana taught you today that you learned about, but what is that one step that can really help you live the life that you desire on your terms so a life by design, not what most people do, which is a life by default? Thanks so much and we’ll catch you next week.

Jhana Li: Thanks, everyone.