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They're boosting e-commerce businesses to six and seven figures in revenue and cover everything from ads and social media influencers to making your website better. GSM Growth Agency focuses on taking businesses from startup success to bigger success going above and beyond to make sure growth sticks around. They're all about cool ideas, lasting partnerships, and making your mark in the e-commerce world. And be sure to support the podcast by ordering some logo merchandise from our online store. Listen to all of our sponsors commercials later in this episode and follow their links in the show notes to learn more about their products and services. Most people and businesses don't define leaders based on operational competence. They get focused on, "Can a leader communicate well? Can they solve problems well?" But I think the big lie, and I'm trying to expose the lie these days with clarity ops, but I think the big lie is chaos is normal and inefficiency and waste and bloat. These are normal, live with it and live with it and navigate through it. All right. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I got another exciting guest. So we're going to be talking about operations today and improve your operations. I know it sounds boring for me and Garret, but Garret's going to make it exciting. I'm going to talk about, I think, technology, all that type of stuff. And so if you are listening on your favorite directory and you can leave us a five-star review, if you're watching us on YouTube, like the channel, subscribe and keep us connecting to all the cool people that we're meeting these days. So let's get on with today's show. The dictionary defines an entrepreneur as a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk. People often start a business without much choice, perhaps due to a job loss or just being dissatisfied at work and they come up with an idea that they just know can be successful. They become entrepreneurs by accident. That is to say their success or failure happens by accident, not with intention. My name is Mitch Binehacker. I'm a corporate attorney and a business advisor. We're listening to the accidental entrepreneur. My podcast about how to achieve success on purpose, not by accident. Join me along with our monthly guests where we share our knowledge and help you get a hold of your business. And now on to today's episode. My name is Garrett Delph. I'm the founder and CEO of ClarityOps. We work with small, medium-sized businesses that are struggling with classic operational chaos and complexity that keep them from growing and scaling, and also often cause a tremendous amount of harm to their career. And so we're a professional operational partner to those businesses to help them break through and get newfound success. All right, Garrett. Let me turn that up a little bit. You can hear me. I can hear you. Okay, you're low again. I don't know what happened. No way. Yeah. Well, lean into the mic. Let's eat the mic. Yeah. That's better. Okay. Maybe sit right on top of it. Exactly. I don't know what it is. Riverside doesn't like your mic. It's too good. Oh, boy. All right. So let's talk about, because we're, you know, one of the things my pet peeves is that, you know, people don't pay attention to their operations. And as they grow, they got all kinds of problems and they definitely can't scale if they don't have, you know, operations in place and all the stuff you're going to talk about. Maybe we can go back though and talk about your background in business and corporate and all that kind of stuff to get us to where we are. Sure. Okay. Yeah. That sounds great, Mitch. Okay. So well, first of all, I want to comment this listening to the opening of your show. Yeah. You know, and how crazy disclaimer at the beginning. Well, that one, that's a good one. You're a good one. But I do am biased, right? But I appreciate your thoughts on, you know, businesses don't succeed by accident. That's true. They do not. They just don't. As a matter of fact, they go out of business nine out of 10 times by accident. That's the problem, right? Accidents really lead to success very often. They don't, man. They don't. So, well, as it turns out, I actually am one of one of yours. I'm an accidental entrepreneur. Right. I went to college, went to go, you know, pursued corporate America. I had a couple of really, great jobs that went, you know, about eight, nine years. Okay. And kind of the last year of that journey led me to basically knowing I didn't want to work for somebody else, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I didn't know what that would look like. Right. Started a couple of small businesses. I was single, so I didn't need much money. Right. And those actually led me to a career of all things, a photography. I became a wedding photographer of all things. It's really weird. Yeah. It's just I loved photography, but I'd never owned a camera. And so I bought a camera with my, that cashing in my 401k from my last job, all 13,000 bucks of it. Right. And started shooting and actually fell in love with the thing that I loved. That led me on a journey of a 10 year journey of building an international wedding photography studio. It wasn't like a hobby for you where you're taking pictures on the weekends. And then you said, you know what, let's start a business. You said you've never, like you never took pictures until that point. No, I'd never had. I'd never owned a camera. Okay. So funny. I appreciate the question because it just jogged the memory. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't have, I didn't have a job. It was a bit of money. Right. But I knew I loved photography. So I was going to check it out. So I bought a camera, but I didn't want to just be like out, not making any money. So I picked up a job driving town cars for rich businessmen. Ah, yeah. Right. And so what, but I knew there'd be a lot of sitting time and waiting. And I live in San Diego. So okay, while I was waiting for business people to show up from the airport, I'd go to the bay and have my, all my gear in the camera and I'd shoot night shots. You know, that's kind of how that's, that's really cool. I love it. Right. And then people are like, well, do you take photos of people too? That was like, well, sure, stay still. Have camera, we'll shoot, you know, right? Do you remember what you do you remember what you bought in those days? I want 10 Instagram. So you right? It was a, it was a, well, then it was film. So there was no, there was film, of course, of buying SLR, right? Exactly. It was a SLR and it was a EOS. The Canon. Yes, it was a US was Canon, right? Right. Because we, when I was younger, we were in Taconica and Minolta and what was just conica in those days. Yeah, Olympus. Remember they had a photo? Yeah. Yeah. So I shouldn't film. And then, you know, people, will you take, and I'll be like, yeah, I'll take photos of you, but I don't know how to do that. So there's no car chair. Right. Yeah. And then you know how it goes? You get a couple of good ones or people like, they tell friends and they're like, Hey, I heard you shot my friend. Yeah, that sounds funny, doesn't you shot my friend? Yeah, but there was no digital film. Like you had to, my grandfather was into this when he died. I went through his house. He had a dark room. He had, remember, remember those Raleigh box cameras, the one that you would like look down at? But yes, one of those I sold it to some collector. Yeah. And he would like hang that stuff in his basement. I remember when I was little in the dark room, you can't like, now you take pictures, you look at it, you can delete it and stuff, try again. Yeah, I think I was doing that then, right? In format cameras, right? Isn't that the movie in format? Yes, I don't know something. It was the film was like this long roll and you'd have to roll it by hand. You'd have to like you said, you'd have to look down on your neck, right? And the thing would flip up and you'd see, yeah, it was crazy. And you do a lot of black and whites that that way. But you couldn't. So that must have been hard, though, doing something that you loved, but hadn't done before, you couldn't like check your work until it was done in those days, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's hard. On the flip side, okay, it forces you to know your craft. That was the benefit. Yeah, you got to be good at what you do. You just, you have to learn light the hard way. Yeah. And you have to learn your, your tool, which is the camera, the hard way. Right. So that, that was, there's a good benefit there, rather than, you know, yeah. So yeah, we had to go to a good old fashioned film lab, you know, you take cans and drop them off and you pay 10 bucks per thing to have it developed. And then you go back three days later. And how they developed it mattered too, right? I mean, that's right. Yeah. Because I knew some wedding photographers or clients, and they use some labs out in the Midwest, and they had some very particular labs that they would use that develop things a certain way that they wanted to. Yeah. You know, really was an art in those days now. It really takes a photo. They don't appreciate it. There was, there was the development style, and then there was also styles of film. So you could buy film that was on the warmer side on the cooler side. You could, I think you mentioned you could, you could buy black and white film. Right. All that stuff is crazy. It's like the dark ages. Yeah. It's, it's like a long, a lost, lost world, you know, given away my age. Look, Garrett, we have, I know it's not even what we're talking about today, but we have these albums in our house with photos. I don't know what the hell they're doing with them. My mom's got them. I got them. The kids, we digit, we digitize a lot of them digitize a lot of them. Oh, did you? That's great. Yeah, because I was afraid, you know, what happened when you're pictures when you're young. They're like, fade. I have a picture of me and my mom. I'm a little baby. There's three pictures. I guess it was done at one of the studios, right, where you go and they put you in a little car or whatever. We did that too before the place went out of business. There was nobody going there anymore. Okay. It's been fading over the years. I don't know how to save it. It's going to fade away. So yeah. And you probably have a wedding album, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Those are, yeah. Those are, that was the photographer that used a special lab out of wherever. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, they did some great stuff. But okay. So, so you're a photographer now, because you got out of corporate America, which good for you, because it's corporate America. Thank you for covering corporate America. Yeah. Did you start to make money? A little bit. Okay. Not a lot. Right. But after about a year and a half, I did. And okay. I, you know, I think I accidentally fell in love with weddings. Okay. A couple of people said, well, you shoot my wedding. I was like, I will, but I'm not going to charge you, because I've never done it. Right. Let's see how it turns out. This is freaking amazing. Everybody looks great. Everybody's happy. They're all dressed up for your photos, right? Everybody, you get to see people dance like you've never seen dance before. You see, you hear great speeches. Yeah. It was really fun. Yeah. And it turns, as it turns out, you can charge a fair amount of money and make a good living. Yeah. And wedding business, sure. Right. So I was okay with all of the moving parts. So it ended up being serendipitously a really great fit and great transition. Yeah. I would say a year and a half to get to the point where you're making money is not really that long. Like, right, if I'm talking to business owners, I tell them, you know, if you come back to me and you complain, you know, I make a money in six months, that's not enough time. Yeah. You know, I'm with you, especially since you've never done this before. You had to learn the business and learn the craft and everything. Yeah. It's like planning a fruit tree, right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Where's my fruit? Like, right? Dude, it's still a sapling coming out of the ground. You gotta give it a year, you know, two seasons. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Okay. All right. So what happened? But that was a service business. Like you didn't have like a huge staff, right? You had like probably an assistant at one point. Yeah. So it grew over time. So I think the getting in the first three years, it was just me, but it kind of took off hockey stick. So I started getting a lot of inquiries more than I could handle and I had to make the choice. Do I raise my prices and create scarcity? Yeah. Or, or do I add more people? So I decided I wanted to grow. So I added a bunch of photographers, created a staff, you know, put marketing campaigns in place to be to be a national brand. Okay. And for which very thankful for my corporate America days and all I learned through marketing and brand awareness and logistics and, you know, you had that background. That was very helpful. Yeah, that was very helpful. Yeah, sure. And so that went, that was great. I think over that almost 10 years, probably photographed 500 weddings, traveled the world. It was really wonderful. Nice. About three years though, before that journey ended, is when the film lab died and when the digital media showed up, you overlapped that whole change. Yeah, it happened quick. It was sort of like AI. Yeah, it was like, it was disruptive. It was an inflection point, true inflection point. Right. Film labs didn't have a chance. They shut down everybody's buying digital cameras. Yeah. And so as a studio, now we were, we hit, we hit this really weird spot where you had to be now you, you were both the lab and the photography studio. Right. So you had two businesses compounded into one, but there was no revenue on the lab side. It was just this additional cost center in money and time, you know? Yeah. And so I was like, well, that's not going to work. And you had to change all your equipment, right? I mean, you can't just like start outputting digital pictures from. Yeah, yeah, we basically had a moment of silence for all the film cameras and right moved into digital. And then, you know, you buy all the software that goes with that. But now you have this huge workflow problem and huge bottlenecks because, right, you know, with film, you could shoot a wedding with 300 photos, but with digital, it's going to be 7,000 photos. Right? Because there's no paper. It's just exactly where it's clicking away. Plus, you don't have time. Like you figure, okay, we're done. Now we're sending it out to the lab. We work on the next job. Exactly. You know, it's, it's like other businesses, even in law, like when, when, when email started coming, it changed the flow in and out. So if I had work to do, my uncle, who's, you know, 20 years old at the main 10, 10 years, 15 years, he he refused to use email for a long time. And he's forced to because he would do work. He put it in the mail. He'd mail it at the client. That had time to do with the other work because it wouldn't take a while to get to the client and come back. Now people like they think you're going to do it like right there when you send them an email and you can't keep up with that flow. So I can imagine people were just like, well, aren't my photos ready? I mean, they're digital. Can we look at them tomorrow? That's like, right. Right. That's exactly what happened. That's exactly what happened. Right. Of course, because people had an expectation of on demand, right? All available. We could do our album tomorrow and get it done again. It printed. We have it by Friday. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So it's funny. You mentioned that. I forgot about that, but that was a real thing. So we had to flip the script and be strategic and start educating, you know, to educate the clients to manage their expectations, which is a whole thing, you know. Right. The last thing you wanted to do was go through 7,000 pictures, Monday or Sunday morning, Monday morning, right after an event all night, right? Yep. Yep. That's right. Exactly. So the way we dealt with it is I was like, okay, we need to become now experts in being a lab. So I took one of our guys and sent him to Adobe. This is like brand new. They just released it. Yeah. What was that? No, I'm saying it wasn't a lab where you took paper and you put it into a tray with chemicals. No. Now it was a computer system. Yeah. That I guess just graphic designers were starting to use. I remember the early Adobe stuff. Yep. Yep. Yeah. And they came up with a product called Bridge. And I think it was just their way of saying, all right, this is you go from Photoshop to this new, you know, edit photos in bulk rather than high retouch one at a time. I say, okay. But then you had all these other complexities too, by the way, you know, you had monitors. Your client had one kind of monitor. We had another kind of monitor. So we had to figure out what is monitor calibration and how do we make sure that what we see is what they're going to see. It was, it was messy, man. It was messy. And how do you treat the photos with all of these new digital tools? But that worked. It took a little while, but it worked. And then we scaled. Yeah. So we got through it. And then I began to watch everybody in my network and everybody in their network really struggle with this thing. I was like, wow, this is going to be common epidemic. This is going to be bad. Well, because most, I'm sure most photographers are not computer guys. Yeah. That's for technology people, you know, I sure wasn't. Yeah. Right. And you came out of corporate America. So you imagine the guy who's an artist all of his life and he paints and he takes photos and he wants to do photography and he's got a bit. And then this changes. It's like I had friends, friends, parents who were in the printing business. And when desktop publishing came around, which was about the same time, it killed. I mean, it just killed them. Because nobody needed their services. They may do it themselves. Nobody had a perception of whatever he did. You know, I had a business. Yeah. Fascinating stuff. But those are, but that's society. Like those are inflection points where industries change, which is why what we're going to get into is so important. Because I think the ones that recognize that change is the only constant that they have, right, will be fine, right? And we'll survive. It's the ones that freak out that, you know, the compute the phone companies just created automatic switching systems and you're a telephone operator on the board, right? And you're obsolete. God, not doing it anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So and you got to get retrained and maybe you're too old to get retrained, right? So, and that true target. That concept is hard for us humans. It is. This idea of accepting change is a constant. And then having the gumption and the grit to ride every wave of change, especially as a Minnesota, like that's, you know, yeah, those are the ones what the what's the word we use now, resilience from the pandemic. But look, let's take your industry, for example, or that industry, photography, for example, right? Yeah, there are people at all kinds of ages that are photographers. There's guys that've been in the business for 30, 40, 50 years. They did things to start, right? Those kind of inflection points, they can't survive that because they're not going to go back to school and like learn how to do computer, write graphics. This is not going to happen. So it's really, yeah, it's so it's not just saying, I'm good with change. It gets to the point where you're over the fence and you can't come back and do the retrains. It's going to happen us too. Yeah. Yeah. Even already with some of the stuff with my, see my kids doing like, I'm not going to, well, you know, learn that. You know, my sister, for example, is a very good artist. She's a graphic designer, but she learned on certain systems and then started doing other things. And if she went to go back to graphic design, I don't think she could do it now because the whole industry's changed and the computer systems are different and you got to learn the new software. That's a really interesting topic, Mitch. Yeah. I think about that. I think the only way to continue to ride the wave, even as you get older, is you need to have committed to iterating quarter by quarter. I agree. That's the only way. Otherwise, to your point, the learning curve that you need to go through to catch up to the new models and the new ways, it's too steep. It's insurmountable. Yeah. It is insurmountable. Right. And you know, if you don't build in systems, which we'll get into a little bit, I'm sure, into your business, where your business is salable and transferable, you also have no way to exit. Oh, yeah. You just add a business and just obsolete. So if it's something that you could sell to the next person who's 20 years younger than you and does know and does have the time to learn and retool the businesses, so then maybe you got some runway to off into the sunset. I think it's something people have to start considering because things are changing very quick. Oh, my gosh, you know, yeah, this is depressing. Fearfully exciting. Fear if I like that. That's an optimistic, that's an optimist's view. Fearfully exciting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they said that during the election, right? Well, they say we're, we're nauseously optimistic. I think the words that the people were using at least on the Democrats side. Anyway, so all right. So we're still stuck now in your, the end of your tenure in the photograph, photography business and the world's changing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yep. So, I saw that. And originally, I was like, okay, well, here's maybe just a fun little opportunity to create a second channel of revenue. Okay. And I think partly I had, my dad had instilled in me this thought process growing up. He would remind me almost militantly every year, he would say, son, remember, every five years, you should be prepared to make a significant change in your life. Yeah. So that you keep up. Whatever that is. Your dad's a smart guy. You know, yeah, I really, he lots of, he sent lots of great things my way. So that was me. I was like, okay, I probably am not going to be a photographer forever. I don't think I'll probably get bored if anything. So here's something that I know how to solve the problem because I already did it. And I wonder what it would look like if I solve it for what I, I can already see is going to be a giant industry problem in the domain. Yeah. And so partnered with a couple of buddies that were also photographers and launched the world's first digital media photo lab. And so now photographers, no matter where they were in the world, as long as they had an internet connection, they could come home from their wedding or their portrait gig and upload their photos to our business. And then we would edit them and then send them back digitally. So it was like not DIY, but it was kind of like a butterfly for professionals. Well, it was really classic. But you did the work. They didn't do the work. Exactly. We did the work. Right. Because at that point, the industry didn't have the skills to most of them, didn't have those skills to touch the photos. 99%. Yeah, that's why. So there was this break to do that because now they probably all the new young and up and coming photographers, they have those skills. Yeah. Yeah. And now these days. And that's a fascinating topic too, by the way. But so here's what it was. It was they didn't have the skills, but they had to have the skills, but they didn't have the skills. They had no choice, right? Exactly. And there were no choice services like Shutterfly yet or any of that stuff, right? Yeah. And even Shutterfly was an editing platform, is a printing platform. Right. It's a compilation. You know, you can make a book, put it there. You can't fix anything, right? Yeah. So it was stage three in the workflow lifecycle. You shoot at stage one, you have to edit it now at digital media, edit it stage two, and then you push it to a Shutterfly or a smug mug or whatever you want to make, right? And that's where you get to see the finished images and then order them for print. But it was that second step that we all had to DIY because there was no solution. Right. But it was like trying to figure out how to fly a spaceship, like these editing tools were very complex, very cumbersome, didn't scale. Yeah. It was really difficult. So it, but like I said, we figured out how to do it. And so we're like, well, let's sell it. And so that was a separate company. You started a new company. That's right. A tech company, basically, that built this site. It was all online and so forth. And that was your market list. Okay. Didn't didn't know it at the time. Didn't know it was going to be a tech company. Right. Turns out it was right. Yeah, of course. What do you think it was going to be like an artist community or something? Like honestly, Mitch, I even then I couldn't even spell tech, much less really understand what it meant. Right. Yeah. But you came from the corporate world. So, so if you're doing this right in at this point, maybe not with the photography business, because that was more of a hobby that became, right? Did you write a business plan? Did you sit down and say, okay, this is the problem. No, I mean, yeah, did it. Yes, but no. Yeah, like you had things written down, but it wasn't that formal and you write your goals. Yeah. You know, but I don't think I ever, ever written a formal business plan. Right. You push whack, you know, yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, as you do it more, you get better at it. It doesn't have to be a formal business plan, but you do have strategic planning and you do put it together a certain way. Right. That's right. Yeah. It doesn't be graphs and charts. Yeah. Yeah. But you do have to work out the financials of the business, right? The marketing side of it and exactly how we're going to get this product to people and who do we need to run the business? Those are like the four main parts, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. All those things are covered, but you know, which I think we'll probably get into underneath those four main parts are 100 different, tiny parts underneath each bucket to make it. That's in this is very hard. I always tell people, look, those are the four parts, but that doesn't mean you stop building the plan or working the business, right? You got to keep drilling down. You have to. Yeah. And then keep iterating and then continuously improving. And then, you know, chopping off the legacy, pruning the legacy, you're replacing that with the new and it's a constant cycle. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, well, how'd that go? It went pretty good. Okay. Extremely painful. Right. But it turned into it's, it is the business that where I made most of my career revenue. And it culminated into, you know, employing over 550 employees worldwide. I really grew. It really grew. Yeah. Well, just because it turns out that everybody shoots photography in the world. Right. And the internet makes the world flat. So as long as we could get our message to anybody in the world and market to them, and of course, deliver on our value promise, then we had a business. Now, what year was this? What's the timeframe? Yeah, that was. So that was 2006 when I had the idea. Okay. And launched March of 2007. Now, was the internet, was the infrastructure? In the, it wasn't like I couldn't just upload a photo, right? Especially if it's a lot of data. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. You're suddenly all these stories are coming back. It's right. We're used to drop this stuff. I remember that. I don't know who I was working for at the time, but like large graphic files, they would drop this drop box now. But yeah, right. When we started, we couldn't use the internet. So we did not build the business using the internet. We built the business using kind of like what Netflix did, using mail. So you would ship us your hard drive. And then we had careers all over San Diego, and people, and we would send what at the time, what we called our expert in home lab studio team. They would go to your house because we hired you as an editor and they would quality control your environment where you would edit because it needed to be quality controlled. And then we would set up hiding places when we had our couriers delivered hard drives that would ship into our headquarters. And we'd drive them to your house. We'd hide them under car wells in bushes in backyard dog houses. Yeah, it's crazy. What are you talking about? There were like lock boxes or places where you know? Oh, no, no, no, that's too nice. It sounds like geocaching. You're like, hi, coordinates. Exactly. Yeah, that's crazy. So we had like five full time drivers. That's all they did is they curried these. We called them dot packages. And that's that's how the file transfer what they call the FTTP file transfer protocol or something. FTP. Yeah, there was none of that. Well, it existed, but the data was so large. Yeah, because they're photographs, right? It wasn't like word files or like nobody saw me that's coming, you know? So it really was, you know, building, jumping out of the plan and building your wings on the way down. Yeah, yeah, wow. But so it was a lot of competition, right? So, yeah, right? At the time. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, it's true. I think it took, it took probably about five years of a slowly working in to and growing with the internet. Right, the technology started catching up. Yeah. Yeah, and finally, we got to a point where I paid 20 grand to our local internet provider to run fiber to our building. Yeah, that was a game changer. Those are like T1 lines. Exactly. A huge pipeline. Yeah, before. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I think you get up to T3, right? At some point, whatever we did. Yeah. Yeah. So that became a game changer. And then there's a bunch of really cool, fortunately, technological advances that actually happened at the application level, the software application level, and at the image level, where we could shrink a file size by 30 times and then transport that through the internet super fast without any loss or degradation to the native image. Like the early days of zip files, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, right? You're compressing the data. That's right, man. Yeah. Interesting. So did you, and then we'll take a break in a minute, did you exit that business? Did you sell that business at some point? No. No. I didn't. I didn't exit. It's still living today. Oh, okay. Yep. It's still lonely. But I have leaders running it. Yeah. Okay. And I'm the chairman of the board. That's right. You no longer sweep the floors. Yeah. Look, that's the ultimate business owner's dream, right? To, well, I mean, selling is great. But if you're still running your business, you don't want to be the guy who's going to the general meetings on a daily day basis. No, no, I guess it depends, right? It's contextual. But for me, no, I would agree with you just because of other opportunities and other loves and passions. And I think also, at this stage, better suited, my skill sets are better suited for other ventures. Some of the stuff you're doing now. All right. So let's take, let's jump on a couple of minutes of commercials and then we'll come back and we'll start talking about, well, what you doing now operations and how we can help people. All right. Love it. I'm going to mute you now then. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Here's a word from our sponsors. Looking to market and grow your business, or perhaps you're just getting started and want to hit the ground running. A weber is the best choice for online email marketing and automation of your business. 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Perhaps you're facing challenges and scaling ads for your store. Are you feeling lost when strategies have no success? GSM Growth Agency is your reliable partner in overcoming these business challenges. Feel the impact of collaborating with a team dedicated not only to short-term goals, but also to building long-term partnerships and achieving sustained success. Embark on an exciting journey to redefine the possibilities of e-commerce and create a legacy of unparalleled excellence. Take decisive action now. Follow their link in the show notes to receive a complimentary audit of your Shopify store conducted by a GSM expert. Propell your e-commerce game to new heights with GSM Growth Agency. Follow the link in the show notes to learn more about all of our sponsors and now back to our show. All right, so we're back. All right, so we're talking about, well, you got it, not got out of, but we're talking about your photography business and how it evolved. That was a good conversation, right, because that happens in a lot of industries and it's happening now. So, you know, there's a lot of things. Look what happened with the pandemic. Everyone's working from home now. You know, my children, I don't think they're going to have any idea, but one wants to be a doctor. So she'll go to a hospital or whatever. You got to do that in person, but even that industry, right? There's going to be a lot of telemedicine, not necessarily seeing people in person ways to diagnose without literally being in front of people. Oh, yeah. So, but my son lives in New York City. His company's in Minneapolis. They haven't traveled sometimes, but for the most part, he works at a desk in his studio apartment in the city, you know? Oh, it's, it's so crazy. So to survive. I mean, we, my family, we use Kaiser. Yeah. And they have pretty much gone to virtual appointments. They do basically face time now. That's Kaiser Permanente, right? Yeah, right. You don't have to drive down to go see your doctor anymore. They just hop on a, on a telephone. Yeah. I mean, assuming that you, you're properly diagnosed, the efficiency of that is ridiculous. You're like, yeah, assuming they don't have to touch you. Yeah, that would be kind of hard if they want to feel a lump on your neck, you're like, what is, how does that feel to you? Okay. Well, you know, it's probably fine. You know, we've got to watch that. You know, what's that thing? By the way, little known fact, I don't know if you know this little off the top of Kaiser Permanente, do you know where they started? They didn't start in healthcare. You know what their first, one of their first companies were? No, they own willies. They, they, they were in the car business. Come on. They sold to Jeep, I think at some point, come way back. Yeah. And then they got with, they sold out again, they got in healthcare and I mean, they're conglomerate, but that is the strangest thing. Is that crazy? I was listening to some podcast or something about, you know, it was probably a podcast about like Jeep versus, you know, Bronco or something like that. It's like the epitome of a pivot. Yeah, you like that. Well, came up. So it just popped and I do, I got ridiculous things in my head. So, yeah. So, yeah. So you, you keep running the conversation. Let's take this along and I want to see where we end up. Oh, yeah. Sure. So, where are we at? We were talking about, well, we were starting to get into like the stuff you're doing now and how you got into it. Like there's got to be a talk about a pivot. You got to move from, right? There's got to be a bridge in between there, right? Yeah, for sure. For sure. So, you know, we talked earlier about our, you know, employment scale and that also came not only with people, but process and that process sort of had two very critical path legs. You know, one is just classic instructions, guidelines, you know, general rails for what people do on the daily in all functions in the business, whether it's IT, sales, marketing, production. Operational guides, basically. All ops. Yeah. All ops, right. HR, yeah. But then there was the tech side and scaling tech and understanding all of those moving parts and how all of these pieces come together. And because that business was so unique, there was no roadmap for the business I was building. Okay. And which meant, you know, sort of like when Lewis and Clark went west, they came up on and faced challenges that they had never heard of or seen and so they had to figure stuff out on the fly. Right. And that ended up basically being the majority of my journey, always facing, you know, bears, Indians, floods that I'd never seen before. No deaths in the wild though potential. So you're good there. What was that? We weren't going to die in the wild. So that was good. It sure felt like it, man. I'm sure it did. No, but that's part of the journey, right? You're in, you were just at a weird time and, you know, like if it was a hundred years ago and you were a Luddite, you would be doing the same thing. So you were at a weird time right around like the late 90s into the early 2000s, there was a lot of things changing. And there were these transitional industries where, you know, HR, everything was becoming more tech, you know, related and you didn't really know that stuff, right? Because you're in your business, you said, what was it to say, 500 employees or something? Yeah, 550. Yeah. In one location, or they were all over the place? All over. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that's hard to manage. Yeah, it was. And you had no operational background? No, from corporate? No, nothing. Nothing. No, like I was in the beverage. My entire journey in corporate was, you know, wine and juice. Oh, that's funny. Okay. So I mean, I knew logistics issue. Yeah. Yeah. I knew how to sell and manage. Yeah. So the, you know, where I was going with that is I went to the market to look for tools and I couldn't find them. And so I had to build my own tools. And really, the culmination of that was frameworks, assessments, systems, tools, and templates. And these all were just homegrown. I know I'm in home built. But increasingly, I began to see clear proven evidence that it worked. Okay. And worked really well. And that was, that was pretty cool. Yeah, that was gratifying to see that all right, with a little, you know, some teamwork and some commitment, we can solve our own problems so that this thing can achieve its vision and mission, you know. Okay. And I had about five years ago, where we really kind of plateaued and, you know, saw great, really great success, at least for me. I had this epiphany and it was based on a story I had learned from AWS, which Jasky told he went to Bezos and he said, Hey, we just spent a decade building these amazing e-commerce tools for Amazon, bespoke the Amazon so that we could win. We should resell those tools to the market because I think the world could benefit and so could those businesses. And that was the birth of AWS. Yeah, I'm sure. And they already had the marketplace, right? So they had built in customer list. Well, yes, they, they, yeah, they had, you know, their pipeline for leads. Yeah, I think they're the leading web web services company in the world now, right? They are. Yeah. There's no doubt. There's no doubt. Have you ever been to their reinvent conference in Vegas? No, I would not. Oh my gosh, it's just unbelievable. But as it turned out also, they were right. You know, those tools were agnostic and domain agnostic. And I would say small, medium and large size business agnostic. So if you're in tech, they had the entire suite of tools. And there's something in there that could benefit you that you could buy from them. Yeah. And that was my epiphany five years ago with the tools, the frameworks, all these things that I built for my digital media business. And as I began to kind of push in and drill in a little bit and look at the marketplace and business domains, my conclusion was the business world still continues to focus on sales, marketing, and leadership. And it continues to ignore ops. Right. And my hypothesis, and also my conviction, I'm biased, is that it is in the engine room, what I think was Carnegie said, he calls it the engine room of success, which is operations, where the magic lives and where the power lives and where the rails live for scale and growth and ultimate success. Yeah, because it's an engine. Right, of course. Well, I posit this or offer you this thought, right? Are you a good leader if you're not really paying attention to ops, to your operations? Because you can't, you know, I look at and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I look at it as one goes hand in hand with the other. That's the biggest problem with leadership in small business, right? They don't have operations, they're doing everything themselves, they're putting people in the wrong place because they don't have an operational structure, and they don't have an operational, you know, framework, yeah, or even belief or, you know, whatever, their leadership is not good. They're not good leaders. You know, I feel like that statement, Mitch deserves us being in a very large hall. Right, telling a lot of people. Right. And, and they have a really great discussion. Yeah, because you're leading a company does not make you a leader. Yeah, I would also argue, and this goes back to what I was saying a second ago, I don't think most of the business world amalgamates great leadership with great ops. Yeah, I don't think they do. I agree with you. And so I think most people would probably, I agree with you, but I think most people would disagree with you in business that you know, if a, if a leader doesn't pay attention to the engine room of the success that makes them a bad leader, because most people and businesses don't define leaders based on operational competence. They get focused on can a leader communicate well? Can they solve problems well? But I think the big lie, and I'm trying to expose the lie these days with clarity ops, but I think the big lie is chaos is normal, and inefficiency and waste and bloat. These are normal live with it and live with it and navigate through it. But don't solve it and don't attack its root. Right. I think that's the big lie. That's right. I'm looking to expose. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think I'm not suggesting that like a good leader has his hands in the engine room. Take care. I'm saying he builds people around him at different layers, filters down to good operations, right, you know, and gets reported to not necessarily visits the boiler room on a regular basis. Maybe visits every once in a while, right? If you're one of these ridiculous cruise ships nowadays, these Royal Caribbean not so ships, yeah, is not going down in the engine room. I'm not saying he's never done that. I hope he's done that, right? Yeah. But he's not going to do it on a regular basis. But that has to do with having competent people, right? And building a management structure and people that work for you. But that all feeds down operations, people knowing what they need to do on a daily, weekly, monthly, let's say quarterly basis, right? People that know what their job is and who they report to and what their role is in the company, which I think leads to better, you know, employee satisfaction and writing people take ownership and things like that. It's the leaders that are trying to lead the company to don't do that. I think they lose. There's a disconnect because they're not in the engine right between the people that are working down there and shovel and coal into the engine and the guy who's out there like leading the company, you know, gets all the yeah, yeah, perspective. So it's fascinating. Yeah. I agree with you where. So I'm. I think I might be a weirdo. But as it turns out, part of this journey for me in terms of making the engine of a business akin to a Formula One car was, yeah, because I want to win. Yeah, but mostly I'm allergic to chaos. And I just can't. Are you too stressful? Yeah, I need to know. And I'm constantly getting organized and constantly making lists. And then you lose control a little bit for a while. I got stuff on my day, then I got to go through it again, rebuild your systems like you said, or then you get a note that they're updating something that you use, some tool. And you're like, Oh, shit, that's not going to work anymore. Yeah, I got it. And then I got to find a new platform where they change the fee structure. And I'm a small business. And I'm like, you know, what? That's just not cost effective. And I got to find a new platform. I got to go through three different tools. So that's always going on. But yeah, and then it makes me nuts. I don't sleep at night. I get stressed out, you know, me too. It's because it's not going to stay and it's you can't avoid it like it's always going to happen. So you just try to manage as best you can. Yeah. So here's the rub. Here's the rub. Yeah. Now that I actually am weekly, I'm proving my hypothesis as I as I now go out and work with companies hand in hand, my hypothesis continues to be proved, which makes me very happy. That means you're right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so here's the rub. When great leaders are who are well organized, delegate to other leaders to build, maintain and support the operation. The degree of expertise, even with highly paid managers that go into architecting, what I would call great operations for high profit, sturdiness, speed and control is the edge case. And this is, this isn't the wake of even very high revenues. Right. Right. So let's say, let's say revenues of 100, 150 million. Okay. And and more. And so it's really fascinating that when you have product market fit and you have a great business model, you can have a mediocre ops engine, which causes a tremendous amount of chaos, stress, low happiness. Nobody wants to be there, right? Yeah, employment churn. Yeah. And the business still succeeds. But and this is part of my journey. It is at the cost of humans. Well, that's the problem, right? The business doesn't exist without humans. Corporations don't just operate in and of themselves. There are actually people that have started these things and go to work and whatever. So I think that if you have a fine tuned company and all cylinders are firing on all levels, that does not mean that, you know, everything's working or making money or intense, whatever, if there's if it's not good for the employees. Yeah, I know that sounds very liberal, but you know, what? What's the point? Well, I think that is the use. I agree with you. Yeah, by the way, I think Jay, I agree with you. Yeah. Yeah. You do. I think Gen Z agrees with you. Yeah. Well, clearly, I mean, they are like, like my kids are like, they think, and I'm not sure if it's true, that there's no question that the companies need them more than they need the companies. And I don't think it is true. But that's their attitude. It's probably a good attitude, because they I just had a woman on my pod because I had a few of them. But this one woman wrote a book, how would it be a digital nomad? And she and her husband travel the world. They don't not have a home. She's a writer, like some sort of a writer. He also has some remote job that he can travel around. They don't have a home. They have and they've had a child on the road. They have a child. They go see his parents in like he's he's from Scandinavia. So and she's from the United States. So they pick up their mail and they go to places, but they their entire world belongings, which they like the the finite control of it is basically in a suitcase, right? Or a backpack. That's right. And they travel the world because they want to live that kind of a life. And they've built it so they can do it. And one of her, well, that's how she gets paid. It's amazing. You're asking to write the book. Yeah. I mean, I don't think I could do that, but it sounds exciting. I couldn't. But now the chaos of just the I don't I love to travel and be places, but I would rather do it where I had, you know, everything somebody picks me up, takes me there, private jet, you know, that would be great for me though. You know, we were, I'll tell you a quick story. It's going to make the podcast anyway. We were out in Tucson visiting my daughter's parents weekend, and we're traveling back. And in Tucson, there's no good way to get from Tucson, probably from Tucson, San Diego, but not from Tucson to Newark airport in New Jersey, right? So my wife gets an email that our flights have been canceled. And we're now booked through like Utah to LaGuardia airport landing like the neck. It was take like a whole nother day, but it'd stay over, I'll tell whatever. So I'm like, how is that possible? Like what's going on? Apparently the rest of the world thinks that if you land in one of the three New York, New York airports, you're within distance of each other. But it's not true. It's like a $300 Uber ride to get home from there. So that's not might as well be Philadelphia, right? We find out that because the first leg from Tucson to Phoenix was delayed, we wouldn't have made our connection flight. So American just cancels you out, doesn't tell you and rebooks the flight. Garrett, if I could tell and I'm not a stressful kind of guy, I kind of take it. I can't even tell you how stressed I was like, we had to, you know, take the car. They're dropping to Tucson. We drive to Phoenix. We couldn't get on that plane. We got the last two seats. We were in first class because I paid some extra money to upgrade. So we could sleep because it was a red. I got bumped out of that. Oh my God. And I'm still fighting with the air airlines to get the money back. Like, I don't understand my life that I want to have control over my client's work. Yeah. This was just like two weeks ago. Oh, it was. Yeah. So we're still trying to get money back from the part of the flight that we weren't allowed on. Unbelievable. And customer service. Yeah. So I'm not, I don't like, I don't deal well with, and it all worked out. We got home, you know, on the set and the flight everything. But yeah, I can't, I can't do that. And I don't feel like you're efficient. Like the company's really doing well when it's not, you know, when you don't have a grip on organization of what's going on. Because stuff happens that you don't know about. Yeah. Yeah. That's too late. It's, it's, and that story, like we both probably would agree, I think you'd agree, also crosses paths with core values. And what the company believes in and stands for, and specifically how they want to treat their customers. Yeah, what's important to them. And then does that get carried out through leadership all the way in the front lines? Yeah, clearly, clearly, I freak out who cares. We just got to fix the system. We got two people, they're going to be stranded here. We're going to get them here. Yeah. That's our rule. And we'll send them an email after. Like what? You know, it was like an hour to get through to them to even talk to them. So yeah, so I can't even imagine. But do you come into companies? And it's just like total chaos. I mean, totally, really. Yeah. And I think that is the thing, by the way, I want to clarify, the reason it satisfies me. Yeah. Is because I've spent now a significant amount of time investing in and building up clarity. All, all based on this premonition on this hypothesis. Yeah. And I'm like, okay, I'm so happy I'm here to help you guys. Because every time I have a new engagement, I reinforce the message. I know your revenue is great, and everybody else is full of anxiety. But this is normal. Yeah, it is. Unfortunately, we're going to solve it. Right. And what's fascinating about the solution and the breakthrough is you get a two-fermitch. Yeah. You get scale increased revenue, high happiness, right? Low stress, employment turn goes down. Right. Because they're satisfied. They're happy to be there. And then a little closer to other benefits come along with it as the relate to the success of the business, which is fascinating. I was going to comment, Gen Z. Yeah. You know, I think the thing about Gen Z is they have had a heart and mind change. They watched prior generations when at the cost of people. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so now they're like, I'd rather not have a job than be subject to having to live in constant stress and be paid for it. Right. Yeah, you can't even have enough. Right. Yeah, right. Because that's what ends up happening. You get compensated to stress out while you're at work. And then you don't get compensated to take that stress home with you. Right. And I think that is, in my opinion, in a way, I think that is the big heart and mind shift with Gen Z. Yeah. You know. Well, and I think maybe it's because of the tech industry or whatever, they started realizing that you can actually have a job and be like happy about it, be satisfied. You know, our older generations before us, you worked and you go to the company, you know, and that's kind of like was the perception of work even through the media and movies and things like that. So I think and then I think the pandemic pushed us like 15 years ahead of where we would have been that would have taken 15 years to get there. It just jumped all, you know, all because, you know, we didn't have any of these tools, these connectivity tools now where you can work from home. Now it's easy. Yeah. We all we all do it. So yeah, I think I think that if you want to be successful, maybe this isn't always true, but I think it's important for society and from my point of view, you should be branding your company not just from a consumer standpoint and a customer standpoint, but from an employee attract and attraction standpoint. I know a woman who's in, she does employment, you know, like recruiting and stuff. And one of the things she does with her clients is first teaches them how to brand their company for the employee, because that's what Gen Z looking for, right? They want to know what kind of an environment I'm coming into, you know, can I work from home to it? Am I going to have a good time? Is this going to be like, I think salaries by the last thing they ask about, right? They want to know they could pay their bills, but they also want to know that it's not going to suck the work of this company. Do you know, that's really? So that's what she does. And she says it's important. And the smart employers realizing that if they want to attract and retain people, they got to build a culture that does that in it. That matters. Yeah. I totally 100% resonates with me. Yeah, absolutely. So how long you've been doing all the operational stuff? Yeah. Was a client always clarity ops from the beginning when you started the company? Yeah, clarity ops. So, you know, hitting the ground, engaged, serving clients about two years. Okay. That's a newer venture for you. Still new. Yeah, still new. How many clients have you brought through the door that you've worked through your process so far? Nine. Okay. And that doesn't those are, you know, completed. That doesn't include the current engagements. Got it. But I am still continue to be fascinated by the truth of it. You know, and I think it coincides with the nine and 10 businesses go out of business stat that most businesses are in shambles internally. Yep. And, and it's a rough road. And it's operationally, it at the root of it, it's operations, it's management of expectations, what people do, how they do it, and having controls around those. And, you know, Mitch, that the fascinating thing is everything is complex if you don't understand it. Oh, for sure. Because you're in a black box and you don't know what you're dealing with. Yeah. The good news is there are basic principles that solve these things. And if you apply them, they work like magic. You know, that's the irony of this whole thing, because I do know that there's basic principles and you and I know them because we've been dealing with this stuff a long time, some of which I figured out as a lawyer, some of it you figured out as a business person, but people still fail and struggle. They don't spend the time, you know, to learn like from an operations standpoint, if you want to someday build value and sell your business and exit your business, your operations have to be spot on. Your people have to know what there's, you know, where they're sitting on the bus and how to do things. If you want to scale your business, that's the quickest way to fall on your face is to try and scale a business that operationally is not ready to do it. I was talking to somebody earlier, there was a guy I met. I don't know if he's been on the podcast or interviewed him. He coach, let's say coaches, I don't know if he was that loose word, right? People for scaling, like he comes in, he's a scaling guy. So he comes in to scale. There's people that he won't take on his clients, because he says, you are not ready to scale. And I don't do that. Like maybe if I can figure out who it is, I connect the two of you. I'm right here. You know, he doesn't do that. He doesn't do operations. You have to have the operation in the scale. So it all comes back to, and I think your hypothesis is correct, it all comes back to the operation of your business. And when you get started, that's why you write a loose business plan, because you need to have operational manuals for product development, sales, personnel, marketing, and finances. And then those all drill down and develop and other things. And if you have all those operations, people are working together and they understand what it does, what it's supposed to do, they are happier, definitely. And you can then do those other things, like scale or sell or exit or whatever. Yeah, yeah, guys, 95 years old is just, I want to sell my business and it's showing no profit, because he's running all kinds of expenses through for most of his family. And you're the business broker now trying to convince the buyer all these, what I call magic math, they're going to add back things into the business to create like profits that didn't exist before, to buy this business instead of it being a fire sale. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard. And I think you just keep, what do you do? You just keep preaching the good word, right? I mean, just keep doing what you do. You'll never run out of clock customers. I'll tell you that. Yeah, I mean, based on the evidence, the answer is, no way out of customers. No way. People are knocking all of a sudden, learn from you, and they're all going to wake up and start doing things properly. It's just not going to happen. You could write a book, and I tell attorneys this too, is nothing wrong with giving away your how to do things because nobody's going to start writing contracts because you taught them how to do it. Nobody's going to start fixing their companies because you put out a book. If you follow my book, your company will be fine, and people will buy the book. You probably should do that. You write a really good book on operations and how it fits in everything, right? I'll do a forward for you, whatever. And it still won't put you out of business. Like, that's the irony, right, of the whole small business market. You can give away everything. Yeah, there's no way it's going to put you out of business. Just not going to happen. Yeah, rarely if ever will anybody take any of that information and go be productive with it the way you would. And if the people that will, they can find it other places anyway, and they probably will be your customers to begin with. So that doesn't matter. Yeah. The people that are going to talk to me and then use LegalZoom, we're never going to be my clients to begin with. So who cares? Just help them. You know, one of the best investments I ever made early on was I hired a full-time consultant for, when I say full-time, we met with him one week out of a month for probably seven years straight. Oh, wow. You know, and that was honestly, probably critical path to our success. Because I do think we all need advisors that know what they're doing and coaches to, oh, I love what Jeff Weiner said. He said, "My job is to be the chief reminder officer." Yeah, that's a good, that's a good term. I like that. I thought so. I think so. Because, you know, when you're leading a business or you're a leader in a business, we have so much distraction and crises and problems that we're dealing with. And it's really easy to get knocked off, you know, to get knocked off the stand and to have somebody there that is not emotionally attached, that has a, you know, has a, can step back. They're not all tangled up by all of the moving parts. Of course. It's so valuable. Yeah. No, emotional attachment just clouds your vision. Yeah. It's honestly, from having been an operator for 25 years, it is so refreshing to now go in and help businesses. And I get to play that role. Right. And go, "Oh my gosh, you guys, I can see it. Don't worry." Because you don't have to stress and anxiety that they have to clouds that they can't see. The clouds are vision. They're all the time and they just, you know, they just see plaid every day. And that's all they see. Yeah. And so, earnestly, I, I, I purpose to cheerlead because I'm like, "You guys, this, this is so solid, but we're gonna, one client, we just engaged with six weeks ago, we're recovering on pace to recover two million bucks from the gross profit." Wow. Wow. And that's just because their internal ops were so tangled up, their org chart was upside down, out twisted around, you know. And their finance people are trying to solve it with a P&L and, you know, using financial metrics. But all that does is tells you where to go cut, you know, or rearrange. It doesn't solve the operational problems, you know. Very good. Very good. Well, I'm sure you and I can talk for hours about this stuff. Maybe we should. Well, I definitely want to stay in touch. I could tell you that. What's the best way for people to like learn from you and connect with you and learn about Clarity Ops? What's, are you big on LinkedIn, your website? Well, what is it? Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for asking. LinkedIn's great. It's my handle is my first and last name, Garrett Delph. Okay. And then the website ClarityOps.co. Okay. C.O. Okay. Yeah. There's lots of content there and a contact page and all that fun stuff. All right. Well, we'll put links in the show notes. And I guess from our conversation, there's a book in there somewhere. So you definitely have to put that on your-- You got a hook on your list. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. All right. Well, Garrett, I can't thank you enough for spending some time with me. We'll go to credits and just stick around a little bit. Thanks so much, Mitch. Really appreciate it. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Accidental Entrepreneur, opening and closing music written and performed by Howie Moskovich and made to order music. For information about Howie and his music services, please follow the link in our show notes. If you like the podcast, please tell others about us. 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Keywords: operations, technology, photography, business growth, digital transition, entrepreneurship, corporate America, change management, wedding photography, scaling business, photography, business growth, operations, technology, entrepreneurship, digital media, scaling, leadership, frameworks, success, leadership, management, business operations, chaos, employee satisfaction, Gen Z, work culture, operational readiness, Clarity Ops, business success
Summary: In this conversation, Garrett Delph shares his journey from corporate America to becoming a successful wedding photographer. He discusses the importance of operations in business, the transition from film to digital photography, and the challenges of adapting to rapid changes in technology. The conversation emphasizes the need for businesses to embrace change and continuously iterate to remain relevant in a fast-paced environment. In this conversation, Garrett Delph discusses the evolution of his photography business into a tech-driven operation, the challenges faced during growth, and the importance of operations in achieving business success. He shares insights on navigating industry changes, building tools for efficiency, and the critical role of operational frameworks in leadership. In this conversation, Garrett Delph and The Accidental Entrepreneur delve into the nuances of leadership and management, emphasizing the importance of operational efficiency and the human element in business success. They discuss the chaos often present in business operations and how it affects employee satisfaction and retention, particularly in the context of Gen Z's evolving work culture. The dialogue highlights the necessity of having a solid operational foundation to scale a business effectively and the value of connecting with experts like Clarity Ops to navigate these challenges.
Takeaways
Businesses don't succeed by accident.
Accidents don't lead to success very often.
Garrett transitioned from corporate America to wedding photography.
The wedding photography business can be both fun and profitable.
The shift from film to digital photography created new challenges.
Managing client expectations became crucial with digital photography.
Adapting to change is essential for survival in business.
Continuous learning and iteration are necessary to keep up with industry changes.
Businesses need to build systems for scalability and transferability.
Change is the only constant in the business world. It's essential to adapt to industry changes.
Building a business often requires creating your own tools.
Operations are the engine room of success.
Growth can lead to significant challenges.
Leadership must be paired with operational awareness.
The digital media landscape has evolved dramatically.
Understanding your market is crucial for success.
Continuous improvement is necessary for business longevity.
Scaling requires a solid operational framework.
Innovation often comes from necessity. Leadership is not just about being in charge; it's about understanding operations.
Chaos and inefficiency are often accepted as normal in business, but they shouldn't be.
The success of a business is deeply tied to the satisfaction of its employees.
Gen Z prioritizes work culture and employee well-being over traditional job security.
Operational readiness is crucial for scaling a business successfully.
Businesses often succeed at the cost of employee well-being, leading to high turnover.
Effective operations can lead to increased revenue and lower employee stress.
A well-structured organization can enhance employee satisfaction and retention.
The pandemic accelerated changes in work culture, emphasizing flexibility and employee happiness.
Consulting and expert guidance can significantly improve business operations.
Titles
Navigating Operations in Business
From Corporate to Creative: Garrett's Journey
The Digital Shift in Photography
Embracing Change in Business Operations
Scaling a Wedding P
