Okay, welcome back to the Daily Mastermind. My name is George Wright III. I'm your host with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. And as you know, the Daily Mastermind is here to help you create your best life, your daily grind, your mental strength, your energy, your business. And today we have a literal masterclass on business infrastructure. We're super, Super happy to have someone that I've gotten to know a little bit over the last little while. Alicia Butler-Pierre, how are you? Welcome to the show. Hi, George. We're finally able to make the interview happen. I'm so excited. I know. What do you get when you take the two crazy busiest people you know and put them on a call? Well, it's an episode, right? So it's scheduled like six months in advance. I'm so happy to have you here. And for those of you that don't know Alicia, up. She's the founder and CEO of Equilibria. It's an 18-year-old management, operational management consulting firm, but her background was chemical engineer turned entrepreneur. We're going to kind of talk about that, but she's advised, designed, optimized processes for companies like Shell Oil, Coca-Cola, Home Depot. She hosts a podcast, Business Infrastructure, Curing Back Office Blues, which ranks in the top 2% in the world. And she's an international speaker, coach, author, consultant, and she's got an Amazon bestseller, Behind the Facade, the world's first published book on business infrastructure. We're going to get into that quite a bit, but Alicia, I love your mantra, to leave it better than you found it. So that's a quick intro, but I am super happy that we're going to be able to talk some business and business infrastructure with people today. So, thank you for taking your time. This is great. No, thank you, George, because you've done so much just to help me and my team. And we all really appreciate it. Well, I'll tell you, you've got a great team. You've got some great information. And one of the reasons I wanted to do this interview is I really wanted to get that information out. But before we kind of jump into some really cool stuff you have with business infrastructure, which will help people to scale their businesses, is the whole point here. Give us just a little bit of background and kind of the story behind, I mean, an engineer gone entrepreneur, like how did that whole thing happen? It wasn't planned. That's for sure. And what's funny is nothing really in my business has been planned, but that's the beauty of entrepreneurship, right? Yeah. As you, as you mentioned, George, I was working as a, a process engineer. So yes, I was, my degree was in chemical engineering. And for your listeners, many of us chemical engineers work as process engineers. My very first job was at a company called Monsanto, and many people are very familiar with Monsanto. And I'll just say this, don't judge me, okay? Because of the kind of things that they are known for doing. But I will say this, as a process engineer, George, I literally was responsible for figuring out if we were making, I was making Roundup, for example, which is an herbicide or a weed killer for those who may not be familiar with that product. As you are manufacturing anything, really, but let's say, let's focus on chemicals in particular, as you manufacture a batch, my job, if the chemist were to test, you know, a sample from that batch and they're in the lab and they figure out, hey, wait a minute, this doesn't quite meet the specs that it's supposed to meet. In other words, the quality isn't quite where it needs to be. Then my job as the process engineer was literally to go and figure out what went wrong in the manufacturing or the production of that particular batch to cause it to not meet the specification. So that's what I did. And that's truthfully, George, where my experience at doing things at scale, that's really where it originates. Because whenever people would ask me, well, what's the difference between a chemist and a chemical engineer? A chemist is in a lab. They're doing things like in beakers and flasks and things like that. Whereas a chemical engineer is saying, okay, Mr. Chemist, you've come up with this formula. I'm going to figure out how to design an entire refinery or a plant that can produce that at scale. Yeah. I love that because I think if you look at the principle of it, and by the way, the reason I bring up the backstory, a lot of times I don't kind of bring that up is that a lot of people don't realize that there's always business principles and success principles you can have in any job, any career, anything you have. But what I love about your career that went entrepreneur is your job was basically to take things that were happening and backfill and re-engineer the process to get them there or keep them there or make it better or one up it. And I think as entrepreneurs, because a lot of our audience is entrepreneurs, business owners and things, a lot of entrepreneurs are good at getting the things going and getting some things started and trying to create results. And they don't really even sometimes even know how they freaking got there. sometimes they just wish they had actually taken notes because, okay, we're getting this result, but now I'm starting to grow. I might actually have to systematize this. I got to figure out why, or as they grow, the wheels fall a little bit off the bus. And so now they're like, all right, where's it going wrong? What's happening? And so I love that you have that analytical mind because it's really actually not a common trait for a lot of entrepreneurs to have the detail a piece. So tell us, because you've really, I got to say, you really created, and I don't say this lightly, this whole concept of business infrastructure, even though logically it sounds like something every business needs. So what is business infrastructure? What do you, as you kind of got into your business and your entrepreneur journey, and maybe you can use this as an opportunity to explain how you kind of got into business infrastructure, but what is business infrastructure and how did you kind of get into that specifically based on your skills? Sure. So business infrastructure, the way I define it is it's nothing more, George, than a system. And I know you are a person that's all about systems, but it's a system for linking the people that you need in your business, the processes that those people need to follow in order to produce whatever product or service you provide, and any of the tools and technologies that you need to provide those goods and services. Business infrastructure is about linking those three primary elements such that things can be replicated in a repeatable, sustainable, profitable manner. You just said something that was so key that oftentimes we just hit the ground running. And we're throwing spaghetti against the wall when you think about it, right? And we're We're just, we're experimenting, especially when we're first starting out. Yeah. And what's going to stick? Because sometimes we might think we know what will stick, but the market, your customers, our customers will always tell us what they actually want, right? We go in thinking about what we think they need, but they always come back and let us know, well, this is what I actually want. Yeah. And our job is to actually listen and make sure that we that we can somehow align what we think they need with what they actually want. The way I got into this, George, when I started my company, so I left behind, you know, a career in chemical engineering, knew I didn't want to be in a chemical plant or oil refinery for the rest of my career. But there was something very poignant that I realized when I was working as an engineer, I didn't understand business. particularly, I didn't understand the language of business. Profit, equity, accounts payable, all these things. It just seemed like a completely different language. I went back to business school. I was working full-time during the day, going to school at night. Once I finished up my MBA, George, I decided to leave New Orleans. That's where I was living. And I relocated to Atlanta to thinking, oh my gosh, I have this engineering background. I have these business skills now that I've just picked up. I'm gonna blend those things together and get a job at Coca-Cola. And that didn't happen. Yeah, right. I don't think to go exactly like they think they're gonna happen. I don't know what that is with that. So after about two months of looking for a job, working for someone else, I decided to actually I decided that my time would be better spent creating my own opportunity where I truly could combine all of these skills that I had into into something that I passionate about So believe it or not my company Equilibria started back in 2005 as a professional organizing company George So for your listeners if you familiar with like people like Marie Kondo or the famous show Hoarders, that's what I was doing. And here's what I found, George. The people, the clients that I was attracting for whatever reason, the overwhelming majority of them were not chronically disorganized people. They certainly by no means were hoarders. They happened to be home-based business owners. And the reason things appeared to be chaotic was because they were trying to literally operate businesses from home and they just needed processes to keep things on track. It wasn't about making things look aesthetically pleasing or organized. They needed processes and systems in place. Over time, as a result of really paying attention to what they wanted and me tapping into my background, that's where the process engineering started to come into play. It evolved from professional organizing to business infrastructure. What they really needed was an infrastructure, something that solid foundation that they could start to build upon and one day get out of that home office and into an actual commercial space and their businesses really take off. I love that. I think that there's so much to unpack there because first and foremost, I think people that are listening to this need to realize that what Alicia did is she started with her knowledge, skills, and passion in one type of business. And by doing it and creating action and moving, it morphed into what it is today. And I think that's a very, very important principle for entrepreneurs. You know, sometimes they think they gotta have everything perfect, but it is about just following things that align with what you have. But the other point you made, which I really love is, you know, I always try to think of how our audience will benefit, how the actual entrepreneur out there will benefit. And, you know, they may be at home, just unorganized. They may be starting to not know what processes are even there because they didn't know, like you didn't know business. A lot of entrepreneurs don't start because they know business. They start because they have a passion. Or maybe they're starting their business, whether it's at home or in a company, and they're starting to feel some growing pains, right? They're starting to feel the stress, the pressures, things break down, things get lost. Is that like what are some of the biggest challenges you find businesses have that finally push them towards needing business infrastructure? Is it once they're scaling or before they're scaling? Because I think this is an important process in the beginning, but no question at some point you will need the processes. What are some of the pain points that people are experiencing from your experience of dealing with people? I'm so glad you asked this question. By far, the biggest telltale sign is when you have more business than you can handle, which is a great problem. Which is what you want, right? That's what you want. You absolutely want that. It's because they've worked with you, George, and your amazing team at the Daily Mastermind. And now they go from not having enough customers to having too many. And you'll always know when you have too many, especially when customers start complaining a lot more, like, oh my gosh, wait a minute, you said this would be, I would have this in, you know, by this particular date, it's a week later, what's going on with you guys, the quality starts to diminish, the results just aren't the same as if you had done it because you've been outsourcing it to other people or maybe delegating it ineffectively to other people. And because the processes are not written down anywhere, people are just doing things the way they think they should be done. So that is by far the number one reason. Another reason, George, is for those of your listeners that are watching us or listening to us right now, are you in a business that is heavily regulated? Have you been failing audits? That's another telltale sign. For think about businesses that require licenses of some sort, some sort of certification in order to in order to be able to function legally. Right. Another one is high employee turnover, just high team turnover. You might be working with a team of independent contractors and maybe now it's time for you to actually go from having independent contractors to actual full time employees that work directly for you. There's so many things, but those are some of the top three that I almost see every single time. Yeah, it's interesting because it's a different world now. And speaking to that last one, and then I want to back into the most important one, the big one you found. But speaking of the last one, you know, with this world of virtual technology now, it could be simply scaling your virtual office. meaning there are people that you look, you may not, you may be an entrepreneur like a lot right now that don't have a big team internally, but you have people externally. Well, you think that takes a lot of work until you put systems in place that allow you to integrate your people, processes, and technology. So it is so important for scalability. But speaking to that first one, you said, it's funny you say that because I've had companies so many, many, many times over, and even people that comment from the show. I had a group, in fact, just this holiday weekend that they wanted help expanding their marketing. And we were going into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, into these holiday times. And we did just that, you know, four weeks ahead of time. And they went from, you know, $100,000 in online sales to half a million in like a month. And, you know, beware what you ask for, because if you want to get a lot of sales, And then the problem is then your owner, entrepreneur, business steps back and they go, wait a minute. This is not what I wanted. No, no, no. It is what you wanted. You just didn't have systems in place to scale it. And so many people might be struggling with my business is running my life. The reason I'm all about mindset, business and money is because it's all connected. your stress levels, your anxiety, your excitement about the business totally diminishes when the brain damage increases, which happens with sales, unless you have infrastructure. Because I know guys that are running, gals that are running businesses that are multi, multimillion dollar international companies that have systems. One guy in particular has like 200 outsourced VAs, but it's totally systemized. Everything about it, from the onboarding, the recruiting, the training, the reporting, the KPIs, everything. So I think you're right. I think what people need to do is they need to learn to value. And the challenge, I don't know if you find this, but the challenge is you don't value it until you realize you don't have it. Exactly. And then you have to do all this backfill work. You gotta go back. So I'm hoping with this episode to kind of give people this awareness that it could be a great solution upfront, But when you get companies that are like, oh my gosh, I don't even know what to do about all this. And they probably can't see the forest through the trees. That's when you come in, right? That's when you or individuals like yourself or your processes and techniques put in place. What are some of the questions that you kind of need these businesses to ask themselves? What are business infrastructure type questions they've got to answer to really understand the problem? What should people be asking themselves around business infrastructure? Sure. I boil it down to four main questions. So if you listen to these four questions and honestly ask yourself if you can answer them, then you probably have your business infrastructure, whether you're calling it that or not, formalized in some way, shape, form, or fashion. Number one, what work needs to be done? What I mean by that question, George, is has the entrepreneur, the business owner, really figured out at a task or activity level, every single thing that's taking place in your company? What are the individual things that have to be done to keep things moving, to keep things operational? Number two, how are those tasks or activities organized into departments? I'm such an advocate for that because that alone tells, it tells me, a person like me, what your business looks like on the inside. I can tell you how many companies I worked with that are very successful And they at a crucial point where exactly the scenario you just described they go from a hundred thousand to maybe half a million. And all of a sudden they have to add more people to their team. Yeah. Well, what are those people going to do? Which goes back to answering the first question. How is that work organized? because that literally serves as a foundation for how you do everything else back office wise in your business. Number three, do you have an organizational chart? Yeah. And then number four, what are the processes? How is that work being performed? So if you identify what needs to be done, have you then figured out how is that work done? And this is what can trip so many people up, George, because when we think about processes, there's so many of us, I'm sure it conjures up images of the whole school operations manual. It would have been a binder on that bookshelf behind you. And it just collects dust. And, you know, business is moving at the speed of light nowadays, especially with the advancement of different AI technologies. Things are rapidly changing. But I want everyone, speaking of mindset, change that mindset. It doesn't have to be the old school standard operating procedure format where step one, you do this step two. You can take something as simple as your phone, use the audio recording device, recording software that automatically comes with whether it's an iPhone or an Android. Just start recording yourself talking about how to do certain key things in your business. Then upload that audio into a free transcription service. There's so many of them out there. And guess what? You now have, foundationally, a process that can easily be shared. It's in a digitized format. You can store it on Dropbox, Google Drive, wherever you keep your stuff. And that can easily be shared with people. To your point, George, we don't all have to be in the same space in order to get work done. There's so many digital technologies out there that make these things easier for us to do. We just need that business infrastructure to stitch all of these things together. Yeah. Take all of these different puzzle pieces together and form that one big picture. Yeah. And I do, I like how you put it into four simple questions because this is one thing I've learned after hundreds and hundreds of thousands of downloads. And I've been around business for 20, 25 years. We've trained millions of people at our events is that everybody's blown away or almost doesn't get that. Sometimes it's very simple. These four simple things are very simple, but they still don't do them. But these simple things and the devil's in the detail. And there's a lot of cool things that you have. We'll talk about some of your systems and things like this. But it starts there. And if you don't understand what you do, how you do it, who does it, and you don't have to. This stuff translates to your communication in your company, your culture in your company, and your ability to scale. Because, you know, look, at the end of the day, most business owners and entrepreneurs aren't getting in this to have more than a full-time job. And they're not getting in it so they can have more stress and more worries. So if you're going to do anything, do it right. It boils down to this. Now, I know that it is simple and it's for, you know, things to start asking yourself, but it can be complicated. And so I really like how you've created like systems and, you know, talk a little bit about your patented system for business infrastructure, because this is knowledge that I think, you know, everyone can kind of dig into and learn more about. But help us to understand how you've kind of put this together into your process specifically. I developed a framework for creating this very business infrastructure. And you said something so key, George. It's not the easy, I'm going to be very honest. It's not that it's difficult to put in place. It is time consuming. Because think about it. We're talking about, as you just said, taking a business from potentially doing $100,000 in sales to half a million and beyond. Things change. What got you to the $100,000 is not necessarily going to be the same things that will get you to the half million plus in revenue. Well, and I want to comment while you say that. I just want to comment. This is the same system that I'm asking her about. just if you're listening to this is, is the same system she uses for a company going from 1 million to 5 million or 5 million to 10 million or, and that's the beauty of it, right? Now the four questions can be much more complicated for those businesses, but the system that I want you to talk about is this thing you've created that is the system that organizes it at whatever level your business is scaling, right? Would you agree? Absolutely. You said it perfectly. So yes, those four questions that we just talked about, this framework is actually broken down, George, into seven pieces, if you will. And not every business has to go through every single piece or has to address every single piece, but that very first one you do. And just to kind of give a cliff notes version of what this overall framework looks like, suffice it to say, the reason that very first portion or piece of the framework is so important is because it's helping you figure out what your company looks like on the inside. In other words, at the task level, what needs to be done? How are those tasks organized into departments? Within each of those departments, who ideally should be performing the work, not who's doing the work now. Because just because you can doesn't mean you should. Got it. Right. And how many of us, especially as entrepreneurs, we're go-getters, right? We see something needs to be done. We just make it happen. But moving forward, ask yourself in a perfect world, if you had access to all of the resources that you needed, who ideally should be doing the bookkeeping, who ideally should be off, you know, doing the customer support functions of your business, who ideally should be engaged in the ongoing business development activities, right? Right. It's probably not going to be you. You, yeah, which is actually good news, right? It's good news. Right. And what that does, George, is it lays that foundation for everything else, all of these other elements of this framework, which include helping you come up with your job descriptions, your company's organizational chart? How do you organize your company's digital records? Because again, we have all of these tools at our fingertips. How do we keep that information organized? Because it's not taking up physical space, but you have a digital clutter now on your hands. You might have some things in this system, some other documents buried in another tool. How does someone new joining your team find all of this information very quickly so that they can do their jobs? It also does help you figure out how to organize the physical things that you might still need access to. And then there's two elements that focus very specifically on processes. And then there's that final element that also still, this is kind of an ode to the background in professional organizing, but that final element also does look at how is your physical workspace configured? Yeah. Because it does need to be set up in a way that encourages productivity as well as efficiency. So that's what the framework looks like, George. and again not every company needs every single one of those elements of the framework at first but you definitely want to have that that starting foundational element yeah and and i i think that i think it's beautiful and i and i just to kind of highlight for people that might be listening to this we're trying to keep it real high level because we're having you know this is an audio show it's not video we can't put a bunch of stuff up but i've looked at this process and i've looked at all these pieces that come together and whether you're a small or large business, when you're looking at job task analysis and organizational design and your records and your workspace and your paper management and your delivery timelines and what's your operations manual look like, those are all pieces that are factored into this. And I think that, you know, you guys obviously are very successful because you do an excellent job at a deep dive diagnostic and things like this But I think that what we really wanna emphasize today and the reason I brought you on is I really want to emphasize the benefits that people have that if you just put a little bit of time and energy into this, and you start asking the right questions, and you start putting the right systems in place, not only does it make it easier to scale your business, but your business can scale faster and your business can scale at a whole new level because it's not just about managing chaotic growth, which I think is what you do for a lot of big businesses, but it's about creating growth. And I think business infrastructure can absolutely help you to do that. So let me ask you this. Do you have any particular strategic tactical things that you could recommend entrepreneurs or business owners right now to digitize their business or anything in particular you just want to kind of add for some value for our show? Is there anything that you have you could recommend at a real tactical level for somebody to maybe try to implement to help them with this process? Absolutely. I am a huge fan of YouTube. I'm a YouTube junkie, George. So you know how I mentioned you can use something as simple as your phone to start recording how you do things as a way of getting your processes documented and better formalized. You can also leverage video. For example, you can use Zoom. If there is something, if there's a particular software and you want to show people how to do certain things using that software or how you do, how to navigate a certain system that you all might be using internally, use Zoom, use Loom. There are free accounts that you can set up with both of those services. And once you have those videos, you can upload that to a private YouTube channel that you can create, which again would be free. And again, these are all resources that you can use to get the information out of your head. And it's not onto paper, right? But it's in some format that is very easy to share with other people because you said something also really important. So many of us have virtual assistants that we work with who likely won't be in the same city as us. They could very easily be in other countries. They also have access to these same systems. That's the beautiful thing about tools like Dropbox and Google Drive and YouTube. my team uses a tool called Notion. We also use Slack. With the proliferation of all these AI tools, I'm sure you've been having the same issue, George. I feel like my inbox has just become a cold, dark, and scary place. I mean, it has been overtaken by the spam, right? And so Slack is, yet again, another free tool that my team and I use to have these very targeted concentrations. It's like instant messaging, but you can also share files. Yes, you can create channels. You can organize the things that you talk about into different channels or threads. It's a beautiful tool that we use. And Slack does integrate with Zoom and some of the other tools that you're likely already using. Notion is that tool that we use as our, that's where we keep all of our processes. Now, Notion does have a fee, but it's, it is. Oh, it's small. It has been. Yeah. yeah oh absolutely um we upload videos there we upload actual pdf documents google google docs that we might have google sheets it has been a game changer for us so those are just some some basic tools that i'd like to share with your audience that they can start looking into right now and probably it's tools they're already using you know things like you know you're already on YouTube, right? Not only do I love the suggestions, because those are really good. And you may have to kind of go back and look at, you know, and replay that section of the podcast. But the reason I really love those, I want to emphasize the very first thing you said. As business owners, entrepreneurs, especially if we're growing our business, sometimes we're too, we try too hard to make everything perfect. And we don't realize the benefit we can get by just videoing stuff you do. I can't tell you in hindsight how many times I've done this now and it's really benefited. I'll just be doing something and I'll screen record what I'm doing, or I'll just do it by myself on Zoom while I'm doing something. Because here's the thing, it doesn't take the perfect video to create a process. It just takes what do you normally do? In fact, what I've found is that when you take that video and you allow a virtual assistant or someone else to look at it that's good at organizing up the way you did it in a better way let them do that it doesn't matter if it's polished up so just that's a great just do it just do it just just get it out there and you you you hit the nail on the head george it can always be improved it's supposed to be improved it's not static it's not it's not a one and done you will constantly improve your processes. You will upgrade, possibly even change the technologies that you're using. None of this is static, but the most important thing is just do it. Just get started. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's not going to always look nice and clean and perfectly branded with your company logo on it. Just get it out there. Yeah. And I'm telling you, if you guys think about the principle here also. Why do professional athletes review the film? Why do people video themselves? Why do their coaches video them? Because if you don't ever capture it, you don't know where the process are breaking down, let alone to create the process. So I think this could be a great hack for a lot of entrepreneurs. I love that. You know, I can't tell you probably done the same as me. It's like when you hear yourself on video, see yourself on video, number one, it's kind of tough to do, but you pick up ways to improve. And so that is a great suggestion. I really love it. Well, I know we're short on time here and I know we're going to have, what I'm going to do is for those of you that are listening, I'm going to put some links in the show notes. That'll be because I know that Alicia, you have a ton of resources. There's articles and blogs and eBooks and there's courses they can take. And you may even want to do a consultation with Alicia or get them to come in and do some work. But there's a lot of stuff I'll link in the show notes if you're interested in really driving down into this seven-step system she has or even the consulting. But where's the best place for people to find you? Would it be LinkedIn? Where's the best place for them to connect with you? To find me, my personal website, which is aliciabutlerpierre.com. So that's my first name, A-L-I-C-I-A-B-U-T-L-E-R-P-I-E-R-R-E.com. And honestly, George, that's like a hub for all of the stuff that I'm into. So whether it's my podcast book, social media links, and yes, you're right, I'm most active on LinkedIn. Please connect with me on LinkedIn. And it'll also link you over to my company's website, which is Equilibrium. Got it, got it. Okay, well, I'll put all those in the show notes. You know, I highly recommend individuals, listen, if you're listening to this, just at least start going through that process. Go back to those four core questions. Check out her systems and processes that Alicia's outlined. And what we'll have to do is maybe have, we'll probably have, for those of you that are part of the Academy, we'll have Alicia come in and really drill down deep into some detail for our business owners and members in the Academy. But listen, everyone, I appreciate you being here. The goal here is to grow your mind, body, business, money, and all the above, and to create the best life you want. And that involves having a business that is not a big headache. It's a business that creates peace of mind, success, and opportunity. So I'm glad you listened today. Hit us up on The Daily Mastermind at The Daily Mastermind, Instagram, Facebook, or hit me up personally. Love to help you out. And once again, Alicia, appreciate you being on the show. This has been great. I think people are going to get a lot out of it. So thank you, George, for everything that you do, because George, everyone, I am going to plug you, George. You didn't ask me to do this, but you have been a godsend to to us at Equilibria. And I thank you so much for everything that you've done for us and for what you do for entrepreneurs as a whole. Thank you. Well, you're welcome. And as always, you know, I'm so glad we had this scheduled so we could get back together. But all right, guys, listen up, like and subscribe the podcast and we'll talk with you soon. Have a great day. Thank you.
