0 (2s):
Light that spark, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like The Hustle Daily. Today we're pulling a classic episode, from the archives, and we'll be breaking down how to implement systems and build a team. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Amy Porterfield into EOFire Studios. Amy is the host of the online marketing Made Easy Podcast creator of Digital Course Academy and she helps thousands of online entrepreneurs build a life and business they love. And today Fire Nation, we'll talk about having, a system in your company or business is essential, how to focus on different sections of your company or business, the use of business tools and software and how they can help you and your business grow faster and so much more.

0 (48s):
And a big thank you for sponsoring today’s episode goes to Amy and our sponsors,

The Goal Digger Podcast hosted by Jenna Kutcher (53s):
The Goal Digger Podcast hosted by my good friend Jenna Kutcher is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Gold Digger Podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business acts, inspirational stories, and so much more. A must listen episode is one of Jenna's recent on everything you need to know about affiliate marketing. Listen to Gold Digger, wherever you get your podcasts

Thought-Leader (1m 19s):
ever thought of giving a TEDx talk, it's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. In four time TEDx, speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought-Leader can help you get there. Visit Thought-Leader.com/fire to join Taylor's free trading where he teaches you how to land a TEDx Talk and spread your message to millions.

0 (1m 40s):
Amy Porterfield, thank you for joining me once again on Entrepreneurs on Fire and you've been a guest multiple times over the years. I can still remember how nervous I was to interview you back in 2012 and I was just like, what? We

1 (1m 54s):
Were babies.

0 (1m 55s):
We were babies. Girl, you haven't by the way, visually aged a year. I mean thank you. You still look amazing. Obviously there's people who are watching this video can see and tell and man it's just been like this journey we've both been on. We've done different things. And one thing that you know I found very interesting, you know, and this is why I asked you to come and be a feature on my book in this part was when you left corporate America, you vowed to never ever like build a large team. You're pretty adamant about that. As have I been by the way over the years and I still only have three virtual assistants to my entire team. But something changed for you at some point in the past couple years. Tell us about that.

1 (2m 31s):
Yes, so I was, you know, ready to never ever build that empire. And then what happened was I started to see success with selling my digital courses. And I wanted to do more so that I could help more people. I wanted to sell more courses, I wanted to be more available for my audience, I wanted to support them in bigger ways. And I couldn't do that with this really small team that I had. And so I thought, okay, either I go out and make a bigger impact and reach more people and build my team along the way, or I just kind of stay smaller with what I wanted to do and just keep a small team and keep a smaller business and my why of supporting people.

1 (3m 17s):
There's this girl in a cubicle right now knows she's made for more, wants to do something on her own, doesn't know how to do it, I have to reach her. I'm obsessed with that. It meant I had to have a bigger team to do so. So my why became bigger and I wanted to sort support more people so I decided to grow my team. Something

0 (3m 35s):
That you inspire me by, by the way is right now because of that decision that you made, you have literally created countless dream jobs for people that are now working for Amy Porterfield helping you spread that vision. You are literally feeding families, paying mortgages, sending kids to school. I mean, you're doing incredible things in this world. So I just wanna commend you for that and the bravery and the courage that it takes to build a, a large team. Believe me, I do not think is small. In fact, I know it's huge. So congratulations on that. And let's talk about the significance, you know, the significance of Implementing systems and building a team.

0 (4m 16s):
'cause you couldn't just build this big team and have no system. So talk about that systems significance.

1 (4m 22s):
What happened was, as the team got bigger at first we didn't have a lot of systems and what I kept hearing was, oh, I didn't know that. Or I wasn't told that by my team members or what do, what's going on, what's happening? And it was driving me crazy. I took it personal like, come on, you guys get it together. And then I realized, wait a second, I have put zero systems or processes together. It has become the foundation of how we do business. So we have different standard operating principles for everything we do. We have different tools that we live and die by. We know how we do business by the systems and processes. It literally, we couldn't do what we do without putting these in place.

1 (5m 4s):
And let me tell you, they have taken a while. It's been a lot of trial and error. Usually a system comes about because something's broken. Oh, that didn't work. Let's go back to the drawing board and put a system together. And sometimes we don't wanna do it because it takes time, but then we just know the pain of not having it. So it literally is how we do business.

0 (5m 22s):
And Fire Nation, that's what you need to be working towards is just getting there, jumping, building that parachute along the way down because you never know what's gonna come until it comes. And then Boom, okay, now let's identify it. Now let's fix it. Let's be stronger for that next time. Let's become anti-fragile as Nasem Telleb would say, that's the critical part of the process. And Fire Nation, when we get back, we will be breaking down Amy's four different departments. So let's thank our sponsors.

Hubspot (5m 48s):
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Thought-Leader (6m 49s):
Do you have a message inside that you know is meant to be shared with the world? Giving a TEDx talk is one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And Thought-Leader can help you get there. Thought-Leader is a speaker coaching company that has helped over 550 and counting coaches, speakers, entrepreneurs, authors, and experts land TEDx talks. Thought-Leader is not affiliated with Ted or TEDx, but they're able to get these results because their founder Taylor Conroy is a four-time TEDx speaker himself and past EOFire guest. You might be thinking a TEDx talk. Sounds great, but where do you start? Taylor has put together a free training that is going to teach you how to land a TEDx talk. And as little as 90 days join Taylor, learn exactly what 10 x organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online and more. Visit Thought-Leader.com/fire, join Taylor for his free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart and out into the world where it belongs. That's Thought-Leader.com/fire.

0 (7m 50s):
Among the many things that I admire about what you've done, I love the fact that you've broken your team out, your entire company out into these four different departments. I mean, you have a marketing department, a content development department, community department, and an operations department. So talk to us about those four departments. I mean, I know we don't have to go into super depth on each one, but just a few things on each.

1 (8m 14s):
And this took years to develop. I could have gotten there faster if I had a model. So anyone listening right now, this is something you can start to put in place right now and you don't have to wait 10 years into your business. Hmm. But this is fairly new. A couple years into my business I realized that there were different, different sections of the business that needed focus. So marketing runs all the launches, evergreen and live launches, it's all there. And social media and marketing, the podcast. And then community is all our free and paid Facebook groups. They are in there. They are focused on the people that we serve and they are encouraged to increase engagement in all we do.

1 (8m 54s):
And then we have content and content. That's my baby. When I worked at Tony Robbins, I was the director of content. So I always have my my hands in the content department a little bit. But that is all about creating our digital courses, writing our outlines for our podcast, putting together all of our freebies. It all happens in the content department. And then operations would be, now that I have a bigger team, we need unfortunately guide, what is it called? Policy guidebooks for like the company. I don't even know the

0 (9m 25s):
Word, the regulations, how

1 (9m 26s):
Sophisticated I am. Yeah, right. But wait, when you have a bigger company, you need all the policies in place and everybody needs to be able to get to them. So we had to put that together. And then HR and payment processing and customer support. So a lot falls into operations for sure. So, and every department has a director. And then I meet with the directors once a week so that they have access to me and I have access to them. And this is how we run the business. I

0 (9m 55s):
Love it. And Amy, we have gotten to the final bring it home question for us because listen, there's something that I know people want to know, that the fact you use software, you use tools to just make running your team, your business easier and better. So give us a little insight on a couple of those systems, a couple of those tools, and then we'll say goodbye.

1 (10m 19s):
Okay, so we do not use email inside of our company. Nobody in my business, my team members do not email each other. We communicate through Slack. So quick conversations like I aming, Hey, did you check this out? Do you have this kind of conversations? 'cause we're virtual, it all happens through Slack, but the business happens in Asana. A-S-A-N-A, Asana is my tool of choice for project management deadlines, who's doing what, when they're doing it, how they're doing it, links and resources. All of that is communicated within project plans inside of Asana. That is also how we do business. It's inside of Asana.

0 (10m 58s):
Fire Nation, listen to the master, follow the system that works. Like you said, Amy, I mean if you had had some kind of system, some kind of model to follow years before, things would've been so much easier, things would've been so much better. But you didn't and you had to learn the hard way. And that's okay because you got there. You're here now and we can learn, frankly, you know, from some of your struggles, some of your obstacles, some of your challenges. That's kind of part of why we do what we do. And, and I just wanna say thank you so much for number one coming on, sharing all of this knowledge with us today. Like we don't take it for granted. Number two, thank you for being part of my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success.

0 (11m 43s):
You are a critical part. You are one of 17 all-star Entrepreneurs. I got to contribute to this book, every one of them, just an a plus entrepreneur to give their thoughts, their guidance on that part of the step, which is a 17 step roadmap to financial freedom and fulfillment. And if you're hearing our voices right now, and it's before March 23rd, it's not too late to pre-order this book. 'cause when you pre-order, you're getting all three of our journals literally shipped to your door. It's $150 worth of journals shipped to your door for a pre-order for other amazing bonuses. Uncommonsuccessbook.com, Uncommonsuccessbook.com.

0 (12m 27s):
Amy, thank you for sharing your, your thoughts, your wisdom, your experience, your knowledge with Fire Nation. For that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

1 (12m 38s):
John, I am so excited about the book. This is the book that I wish I had when I was starting 10, 11 years ago. So I am so honored to be a part of it. But more importantly, I'm so excited you got this book out there and you're gonna get it into the hands that people can now fast track their success and learn from all of our mistakes. So congratulations, this is going to be such a valuable resource. Thanks

0 (13m 4s):
A lot. Amy, you are a rockstar. The Gold Digger Podcast hosted by my good friend, Jenna Kutcher is brought to you by the Hubspot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Gold Digger Podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business acts, inspirational stories, and so much more. A must listen episode is one of Jenna's recent on everything you need to know about affiliate marketing. Listen to Gold Digger, wherever you get your podcasts ever thought of giving a TEDx talk. It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. In four time TEDx. Speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought-Leader can help you get there. Visit Thought-Leader.com/fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx Talk and spread your message to millions.