Driving Business Excellence: Harnessing the Power of Infrastructure with Alicia Butler Pierre

Driving Business Excellence: Harnessing the Power of Infrastructure with Alicia Butler Pierre

Sean: How does company culture play into this? Alicia Have you seen company cultures do a 180-degree turn because you’ve accomplished taking them through this entire process?

Alicia: What I’ll say is this I don’t know if I’ve seen that type of a transformation, Sean, But what I do notice is a greater degree of transparency that may not have existed before and sometimes. It’s not that people don’t want to share. They don’t know how to share or they may not understand the tools that are at their disposal to enable them to share information. I’ll give you an example. With my team, we are fully remote.

We’re in three different countries. So how on earth can we be transparent? We have to rely on digital technologies. And one of the things that we use is this wonderful tool called notion. Are you familiar with notion? I see your smile already.

Sean: I’m a software guy. I love, you know, if I could use a lot of software, I’ll use a lot of software

Alicia: A lot of people still haven’t heard of Notion. They’ve heard of Clickup or Monday.com, but they aren’t aware of notion but notion has been such a game changer for us, Sean because, as you know, it’s such a visual tool and I really cannot imagine how we would be able to operate. 

And this is not just, you know, I’m not getting paid by notion. You’re not getting paid by the notion to say this. But truly, I cannot imagine how we would be able to function as a team cohesively if it were not for that tool, because we put everything in there. We have our processes in there.

We have our production schedules in there, we have directories, we have us, we kind of use it as a CRM, our customer relationship management tool we use, we use it as a project management tool so we can track all of the different things we’re working on. It has been such a game-changer for us.

But it’s also by leveraging that technology, it has enhanced our ability to be transparent, which ties back into your question about company culture for us. You know, I’ll just use my own company as an example. Transparency is a huge part of our company culture.

The other quality or element that I’ve noticed within my own company as well as with the clients that I work with, is that educational piece. Believe it or not, most people do love to learn. We think that as human beings, we’re so wired to do things a certain way and only that way. And we resist change and it is true.

We are human beings, we are resistant to change. But it all depends on how that change is being introduced to us.

You have to sell it. And if you sell it as an exercise in education. Hey, Sean, Now we get an opportunity to learn a new tool. Wouldn’t it be great for you to add that to your skill set? Yeah, Add that to your resume.

Now, I always joke about Jody. Jody is in the Philippines and Jody did not know how. I started asking her if she could manage all of the graphics, all of the graphic design work for equilibria and she said, Alicia, I don’t know how to do that. I said I have a feeling you do Jody.

You may not realize you’re good at this, but I have a feeling if once you get in there and you start tinkering around and you learn how to use some of these different technologies, like Canva, for example, you’re going to you’re and she is brilliant at this. Erica, the person who’s Erica, is in Cebu. Erica is the person responsible for introducing us to each other.

Erica didn’t know what a podcast was Sean And now look at her. She’s booking me on all of these amazing, different podcasts. But she didn’t even know what it was yet. Alone had never listened to one before.

So that’s what I mean when I say that education piece. People like learning new things. There can be resistance to the change. There can be the. Well, I don’t know how to do that, Sean I can’t learn that. I don’t even know what that is. Well, let me show you. Let’s try. Yeah. And I mean in 2021 last year, I think Erica booked me on 71 different shows.

Sean: Wow.

Alicia: And this was a person who told me when I first met her, I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what this is. And I said we’re going to learn together. We’re going to figure this out together.

Alicia: I know you do the same thing because I know you ranked number one, you know, in Google search in the Philippines. So it helps when you are selling what you do or what your products or services are. It helps for you to be able to say, well, I’m not just telling you what I think you should do, I do this for myself as well.

You know, so that’s what I love about the work that you’re doing. Also, you’re not just teaching other companies or training them, showing them how to rank higher, for example, in a search engine result. You embody that with your own company. So. So, yeah, you have to practice what you preach, for sure.

Sean: And there’s a benefit to that. You could charge. You could charge an arm and a leg. No, I’m just kidding. Right. But you definitely could. What I mean is you could charge what you want to charge. Right. Because now you’re believable, right? I mean, it’s hard to charge what you want to charge if you’re not using your product or service.

The immediate, direct upside to that. I love how we tackled culture. I love how we tackled operations. Now, tell us some of the felt results. What are some of the felt results from your taking a startup company to finish this entire process? What do they see immediately? And they go, Aha, that’s it. Thank you, Alicia.

Alicia: One of the first things they see, especially the people who function in management or leadership roles, they immediately see why they feel so chaotic. They immediately can see, Wow, I’m not just doing what I think is just my job.

I’m doing the work of five, six, or seven different people that I’ve identified. This is why I feel like a chicken running around with its head cut off. That’s one of the reasons. Because you are. Yeah, that’s one of the first. They’re like, oh my gosh, I get it now. Okay, this is a problem Now that I know these other people that I need to get in place on my team now, I know how to go and actively find those people that I can add to my team so that I can take I can delegate even more and focus on the things that I should be focusing on.

If I’m a leader of this company. That’s one of the first insights or revelations that they have. Another is that they don’t have an appreciation until they start to implement the things that we recommend. They don’t have an appreciation for how it’s going to contribute to their profitability because they’re just thinking this is operations.

Operations is an expense, this is something that’s, you know, So yeah, you might help me figure out how to save money, but I have to pay money to figure out how to save money. So they don’t see from the beginning how it’s going to help them make even more money.

And the reason they’re able to make more money is that they are literally figuring out how to be able to do more with either less or the same resources that they’ve been using all along. And that’s thanks in part to the process piece of business infrastructure.

I’d like to share this fairly recent success story. This was a client that I worked with. We started our work together right before the pandemic in 2019. And it was so prophetic the way it all happened because there was a new CEO taking place, taking leadership of this 30-year-old company. 30 years. I am 30 years old. They’re in the payment processing business.

So they provide credit card terminals or machines to process credit cards to other small businesses. Very successful business. And so his team was thinking, we’re already doing well. Why? Why do we need to change? Yeah, the things you were just the things you’ve been talking about, Sean. There you go. And he said, no, I want to. It’s not enough to just do well.

I want to scale. I have this vision, and I need you all to work with me too. To make good on this vision. Yeah. And when I started working with them, one of the first things they realized was, oh my goodness, we have too many people. Right. We have too many people doing too many different things, so they had to figure out how to consolidate some of the roles.

They were able to push people or not push but transition some people into completely different lines of business they were bringing on. You know, they were, yes, the CEO had a vision. So it wasn’t that anyone lost their job. They just transitioned into something different and new. Wow. And I received a thank you card from them. You know, to shorten this story.

I received a thank you card from them quite unexpectedly last December, December 20th, 21. And the card said, Alicia, we did over 3 billion USD in business last year. That was just revenue. That wasn’t profit, but the revenue was the amount that they did in transactions. They said We can’t thank you enough for being a part of the team that helped make this happen.

So that business infrastructure, you know, obviously I’m not taking credit for all of that, not by any stretch of the imagination, but just to receive that type of recognition in the form of a handwritten card, which is very rare these days. Yeah. You know, we might get a text message or maybe an email thanking us, but for them to take the time to write something and put it in the mail to me, it warmed my heart. And it was just a true testament to the power of what business infrastructure can do when you get everyone in the same room at the same time rallying around an idea and you make that idea happen. It’s a wonderful thing.

Sean: I love it. Oh, my goodness. What a story. 3 billion. I wouldn’t know. Was this?

Alicia: I was shocked. I was truly shocked. And I think also, Sean because they were laying that groundwork in 2019 by the time the pandemic was in full effect in 2020. And more and more people think about it, more and more people are making transactions online and there were even more credit card presses.

There was way more credit card processing activity that was taking place as a result of the pandemic because so many of us just couldn’t get out the way we normally would. And so they were ready. They were ready for growth. That’s the point that I think I should stress here because they had done the hard work of laying down that foundation and putting that business infrastructure in place.

They were ready when the pandemic happened. So their business did well when so many other businesses failed during the pandemic, for sure.

Sean: And I don’t like it when business owners also think of operations as an expense center. You know, it is not an expense center. It is a brand. I see it as branches. You got more branches or you got another branch that looks when you reorganize and you go through the equilibrium process, it’s like you’re, you’re getting another branch or a point five other branch right on top of whatever branch you got already, and it’s going to add to your revenue and it’s going to add to your branding and your excellence level.

And it takes a certain type of maturity. I don’t know, maybe it’s time for experience. It takes a certain maturity for a founder or CEO to get to that level when you’re because when you’re in your first five years, you’re a street fighter. You know you’re out for blood and you fight for your business. And it’s hard to. Ingrained this in your head that, oh, operations is not an expense center. I’m building this.

So it helps me because usually in the first five years, the founder is the one closing deals, right? It’s usually the case. Yes. But yeah, I love this session. And Alicia, how would we get more out of you if we want to consult with you? We’re not Coca-Cola, but if we want to consult with you, we want to find out more about this. We’re, you know, we want that growth and reorganization in our operations. Where is the best place to contact you?

Alicia: Actually, the best place to contact me personally would be LinkedIn. You can find me there. Alicia Butler, Pierre And we are hell-bent on making this information as accessible to people around the world as possible. Sean: So to that extent, we are promoting a new online course. And if you go to smooth operator dot courses, that’s where you can find out more information about that course.

And of course, there’s always the book. Thank you for the name and there’s always the book. Also, you can always buy the book on Amazon. It’s called Behind the Facade How to Structure Company Operations for Sustainable Success. So again, those are some lower-budget ways of gaining access to the information.

Sean: Fantastic. And we’ll have those links in the show notes that just go to leadership stack.com or put it all on Google leadership stack Alicia Butler Pierre and you’ll be able to find these links just in case you’re driving. No, not when you’re driving, but you’re busy and you just want to click on the links.

Go there and you’ll find all of the links. Alicia, thank you so much for being here on the show. I’ve learned so much. I’m sure people listening in here are learning and have learned a lot and we are better for it.

Alicia: Thank you so much, Sean. I appreciate you more than you know. And hopefully, we will do some things together over there in the Philippines very soon.