Stop Juggling; Your Business Isn’t A Circus, Damon Flowers

What if fixing one system could change everything? We dig into a practical path for sustainable growth—starting with a single high-impact focus—then show how to turn that win into a repeatable operating engine that won’t crack when you add more leads, customers, or capital. No fluff, just a clear sequence for founders and operators who want revenue gains and time back.

We break the business into patterns that hold across industries—marketing, sales, product, fulfillment, operations, finance, and legal—and explain why order matters. First stabilize by removing near-term risks and single points of failure. Then lay the foundation with documented processes, clarified roles, and essential tooling. Only after that do we optimize with dashboards, KPIs, and sensible benchmarks. Growth becomes the fourth step, when you can safely pour demand into a machine that’s built to handle it.

From there we get tactical on systems design. Define the exact workflow you’re solving, validate it manually, and apply crawl, walk, run before you automate. You’ll hear a step-by-step example of a content engine: a “signal” layer to scan market trends, an AI-assisted drafting process to produce a quality newsletter, and a distribution track to syndicate across platforms. The result is faster output, stronger authority, and clean data loops for continuous improvement—without burning your team out.

The conversation also explores how operations is becoming the hub of modern companies. By centralizing vision, goals, customer profiles, offers, fulfillment steps, and team responsibilities into a single operating engine, you align humans and AI on the same source of truth. That’s where AI shines: drafting content in your voice, analyzing sales calls, surfacing insights, and triggering workflows with context. When you train AI like a teammate and measure like an operator, you compound results. If this resonates, follow along, share this with a founder who needs it, and leave a quick review so we can help more builders scale with confidence.

Transcript

Finding The One High-Impact Fix

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The question I like to ask is if I could, if I could just fix one thing in my business, or if I could just systematize one thing in my business that would have the biggest impact, what would it be? That forces us to really think through of the hundreds or thousands of things that we could do, right? We're really identifying what we think is going to have the biggest impact. Um, oftentimes what I'll do is I will write that down and then I'll say, okay, great, let's assume that we we nail that. What's the second thing that would have the biggest impact in our business, right? We'll write that down. Maybe we'll come up with the top three. Next is focus, right? So it's really focusing on and making sure that uh we're attacking those things, that we're not getting derailed by 50 things that we're trying to accomplish this week or this month or this quarter.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Welcome again to the Commission Code Podcast. We appreciate you taking the time to listen and join us here today. We're here to help you increase your business revenue and have time to enjoy it. I'm your host, Morris Sims, and I've been consulting and training business people for, well, let's just say over 40 years. We're focused on increasing revenue and having time to enjoy it. After years as a professional salesperson, I spent 32 years in the corporate world. I retired as vice president and chief learning officer of the sales department of a large insurance company where we designed and built and delivered training for over 12,000 professional salespeople. Now I get to consult one-on-one helping people grow their business and organize themselves to make the most of the time they have. We also build online courses to support business owners in their work as they strive to build the business that they've always wanted. Our objective is really very simple. It's this.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

So we get a lot of benefits. Uh so that's kind of the story of or the nexus of modern operators, if you will.

Are Businesses Really That Different

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Oh, it makes perfect sense. And it is so so very important. Where you where do you begin, though? I mean, you you go and you talk to somebody that's running a business and maybe they're struggling in several different ways and places. Where do you start with a client? What do you what do you begin with?

Four Phases To Prep For Growth

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Yeah, also a good question. Um, you know, from the outside looking in, or if we've been kind of involved in our own business for several years, we tend to think that every business is unique. Every business is different. We tend to tend to think that, oh, well, my business works differently. I have different types of prospects or customers, the way I fulfill, et cetera. But after you've seen hundreds or thousands of businesses over time, um, your own, uh, those that we've bought and sold, those that we've invested in, those that we've consulted with, uh, mentored, you really start to see that business runs pretty much the same, no matter whether you're in brick and mortar or SaaS or private lending or real estate or e-commerce, et cetera. You have various components that that always have to be in place. You have marketing, for instance, uh, and the idea of you know exposing your message to the world in a way that connects and resonates with prospects who uh have a problem, pain point, and need your product or service. You have sales, the ability to convert then that prospect into a customer. You have your product or your service itself. Uh, then you have, of course, the fulfillment. How do you deliver that product or deliver that service? Uh as well, you have the operations that tends to kind of make the whole thing sort of run together uh well. And of course, then uh we have finance and we have legal. So really the truth is, you know, if it's a you're running a half a million dollar company or a hundred million dollar company, and again, in various niches, it all really does run the same. So when we come into a business, we actually look at four phases uh that are necessary to prepare that company for growth. Because it turns out that not all companies are ready for growth. In fact, the vast majority aren't. Growth, in our view, means that you could dump a lot more prospects or a lot more customers in the business. You could dump a lot, you could spend a lot more money, for instance, on marketing. Um, you could maybe take on money through, you know, private, private angel, capital, uh, VC, several other means. But by inputting more into the business, the business doesn't break. Most businesses are not prepared for that. Uh, even freelance businesses, right? Uh taking on more business then leads to what? It leads to breakdowns in fulfillment, uh, you know, breakdowns in operations. Um, and so the the business is kind of always sort of in this loop or this wheel, if you will. So there's four phases. Um, the first phase is stabilizing. That really means taking a look at the business and making sure that there's nothing that's going to take the business out in the short term. Um, oftentimes that's meeting payroll. That could be, you know, you've got one merchant account that uh, you know, everything runs through and it's your chargeback rate is high, for instance, as an e-commerce company, and you're at risk of losing that merchant account, that's a bad thing. If it happens, what happens? The business can no longer sell product. Um, so in stabilizing, we're taking a look at immediate risk. Once we stabilize, then we move on to the second foundation, which the second phase, which is called foundation. And that's where we're really building the brick layer, if you will, to support the growth of the business. Um, I'll go through these kind of quick and then we can dive in if you'd like uh here in just a moment. But the third phase, then, once we've got the foundation built, is we're optimizing the business. This is where we're making sure that the dashboard, for instance, for the business is in place. And the dashboard tells you, for instance, like on a car, you know, I'm running out of gas or the engine's overheating or uh transmission's getting too hot, right? Uh the charge is not happening. In business, though, we want to make sure that we understand the performance indicators, right? So how much am I spending, for instance, on marketing to acquire a client? Uh, how many clients did I bring in this last, this last month as an example? Um, how many support tickets or complaints did I get? So the dashboard and understanding the business, the last part of optimization is making sure that we are dialing in the business compared to other businesses in our niche. Uh, for instance, if you're an e-commerce business and you're spending 80% of your revenue on marketing, um, that is not sustainable. You know, there is a there's a specific metric, for instance, for e-commerce businesses on how much typically you should be spending. And so we want to dial the business in to make sure it's uh it's it's working in those parameters. And then the last stage is actually growth. That's where we, the founder, can begin to step away a little bit more. We can again input more customers, more money, and know that the business is going to be able to handle it and grow sustainably. So, kind of in a nutshell, that's what we look at when we come into a business. Some businesses are past the stabilization point. Some businesses need a lot of foundation work, some businesses are ready for optimization. And uh very, very few businesses are just ready for growth. Oftentimes, if they are, uh they're they're really not talking to us. That's not a not a good fit for us.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

When you when you do that and you begin to talk about operations and systems, tell me how that works. I mean, it let's let's get to the basics, I guess, when it comes to systems. I I love systems. I'm an engineer by education, and I'm telling you, I just love building systems. But it what's your view on that? How what is a system and and where do you start? What's the most important system a business owner needs to think about?

Where Systems Work Best

Defining A System That Solves

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Yeah, so uh I'm I'm gonna come back with uh with a high-level answer, not because I want to evade the question, but because it's very important for listeners uh to think about the answer for your business. So the idea that um, you know, all of us as mentors, as guides, as coaches, teachers, et cetera, we want to be able to teach people to fish, not to just feed them, right? So let's unpack this a little bit. Um, operations and systems is a tool, but we need to understand uh how to implement it, where to implement it, why we implement it, things of that nature, right? So let's start with the the theory, the strategy first, and then we can talk about the tactical. So one area to look at is um what are you focused on in the business today? Some business owners are, for instance, focused on really tightening up their fulfillment. Other business owners are really focused on improving their sales. Other business owners are very much improv uh focused on um generating better marketing so they have better leads. So wherever you're focused on in your business, that's the appropriate place to begin focusing also on systems. Okay. Um, second is we want to really implement the 80-20 rule, which is, of course, most people have heard this, the law of the vital few. Uh, you know, 80% of your effort produces only 20% of the results, and therefore 20% of your effort produces 80% of the results. So as business owners, we have a limited amount of time uh for ourselves, if we do have staff, you know, for the staff that work for us, we want to be very careful about how we deploy those resources. So that's another layer we want to begin thinking about. And the question I like to ask is uh if I could, if I could just fix one thing in my business, or if I could just systematize one thing in my business that would have the biggest impact, what would it be? Uh that forces us to really think through of the hundreds or thousands of things that we could do, right? We're really identifying what we think is going to have the biggest impact. Um, oftentimes what I'll do is I will write that down and then I'll say, okay, great, let's assume that we we nailed that. What's the second thing that would have the biggest impact in our business, right? We'll write that down. Maybe we'll come up with the top three. Next is focus, right? So it's really focusing on and making sure that uh we're attacking those things, that we're not getting derailed by 50 things that we're trying to accomplish this week or this month or this quarter. Um, some other thoughts, too, is uh we want to make sure that we we crawl, walk, run. We don't want to be systematizing things that we haven't tested or that we haven't proven in our business, right? So, as an example, you wouldn't want to necessarily go fully systematize this new marketing engine to bring in leads for off LinkedIn or somewhere else if you haven't even tested that that is working for you. Because again, you're spending a lot of resources on something that is completely unproven. So we want to focus our systems on those areas that we know works for our business. We've manually tried it, it's worked manually. We've started putting some process around it. Really, that's when it's primed then for us to start building a system around it. So I know I didn't go into specific detail for you know, for the question that you asked, but I hope that that will maybe give listeners some ways to think about how to answer it for themselves.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Oh, I thought that was perfect, man. Absolutely fantastic. That uh that definitely answered the question. And I I think you're right. I mean, it if if we don't focus, everything else is going to fall apart because now you're you're real shallow and you're not getting to the root of the matter, and you're not uh identifying and working on the thing that really is most important to your business. Uh you're working on 15 things, and none of us can do that, it just doesn't work. So I think you you hit a real nail on the head there, man. That uh that's absolutely true. So once we do figure out, okay, it's marketing and in marketing, it's it's how I make myself visible. What kind of systems would you create in if that or to choose one of the others? I I I guess, David, what I'm trying to find out is what exactly does it mean when you say, let's create a system? What is that? What does that mean to you?

Building A Content Engine With AI

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Yeah, okay. So in order for us to think about creating a system, we want to get first very clear about the problem or the or the workflow that we want to solve for. This is huge. Um, if we're not clear about it, then we're gonna be chasing this problem or this this workflow for a while. And we're gonna be building something that doesn't actually do what we want it to do. So let me give you an example. In our own business, uh, for the last several months, we've been really uh for when we first started, we provided a lot of thought leadership. A lot of we we generate a newsletter that goes out every week that helps business owners understand, for instance, how to apply modern operations, modern AI, modern operations in their business. So for us, content was very important. And we began to generate a lot of content through newsletters, through social media, et cetera. We knew that that was going to be a big part of our business. Well, that, for instance, being one of the primary drivers in the early days of our business meant that if we didn't have systems, we were now going to be doing a lot of manual work, which takes a long time, and we wouldn't be able to get our message out as strongly. So uh we decided to build systems around that marketing engine. And so, for example, again, getting very clear about what's this, what's the source, what am I solving for? Uh, for us, we wanted to be able to generate content very quickly, but we wanted to be high quality. We determined that we wanted to be able to syndicate or distribute that content to a range of different places. Okay. And we wanted to make sure that we had um access to the pulse of the market. Um, we call that signal. So we wanted to make sure we we understood what are people struggling with, what are business owners struggling with, what's being talked about, for instance, in operations and systems, um, what trends are taking place, what new technology is coming about. And so when we identified that, for us, we sat down and we built a couple of different pieces that bolt together that uh now are our content engine. So, one, we built an AI agent that does a scan of the web every week and it's looking for high impact signals uh again in our niche. What are what are what's technology, what technology is happening, what people are saying that is a relevant fit for our audience. That's the first piece. The second is we built an AI agent to be able to publish our newsletter because we wanted to make that our core uh central piece of of uh of writing every week. And so um we trained and tailored that agent to be able to produce that newsletter uh very well. It does probably 90 to 95% of the heavy lifting, uh taking into account our own knowledge and the knowledge coming in from our signal reporter. And then the third is distribution. So we set up again how do how do we use AI to be able to distribute that content to a range of different places from LinkedIn through Reddit to X and uh Blue Sky, a number of a number of spots. So we went to work, we we built those agents. We didn't try to perfect it. This is something I would really encourage folks. Don't try to perfect it. You want to build a version one. Get it out there, uh, start using it, um, start testing it and refining it. And then as those three pieces began to come online, we bolted them together week after week. We just began improving and improving and improving, improving that process. Uh, so today, that process, months later, takes a fraction of the amount of time that it took in the beginning. Um, and what it's produced then is the goal that we had wanted, which is a lot more interaction, visibility, authority, engagement, that kind of thing. So um kind of to summarize again, we want to be really clear about what it is we're solving for. We want to make sure that we're taking this uh ready fire aim approach. So we're putting together version one and shipping it. We're getting it out the door. And then we want to be able to week, week by week, just uh enhance, refine, you know, improve it along the way. We don't want to expect perfection from the beginning. So if we do that, we now start to have a real live system, in this case, a marketing engine, a marketing system that works. And now we can begin to point our attention towards the next thing. So remember what we talked about earlier. Uh, what's the one thing that would have the biggest impact once we solve for that and we get that to 90%, you know, 92, 94%. We never want to get it to 100. That's not that's not feasible, it's not possible. And then we look at number two. So we go to work, okay, what's the second area, right? And we now begin to focus on it again, that crawl walk one approach. So manual first, then developing the process, and then starting to systematize it. So I hope that answers your question. We could dive in a little bit more on kind of what a system is. Um a system can range anywhere from automation that happens, you know, uh things happening behind the scenes that you don't have to manually do. Um, it also can mean, of course, using AI. Uh, but it really starts with whiteboarding out or getting a piece of paper and drawing out what is the workflow that I want to happen.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Wait a minute. I'm gonna take notes. I can talk on this. I learn more from doing these podcasts than the audience does. It's just it's amazing. So when you say system, you're you're particularly uh well, not maybe I wrong word. When you say system, I hear AI. Is that where you're going here?

Workflows, Process, And Automation

SPEAKER_01 21:43

So today I I really do believe AI is a part of every system. Um, but in our system, we want to think about uh a workflow. So end to end, how should it work? We want to think about a process that is a part of that. So if a if a staff member of yours is is doing work that contributes to that workflow, that needs to be built into a process. If you as a freelancer or working on commission work, for instance, uh if you are a part of that process, then you you still need to document it. Like let's say a process that maybe you run every month. Every month you sit down and you close the books, let's just say, for example, um you need to write up a process for how that works, right? So that when you start to do that batch work once a month, it now starts to flow easy. You don't have to rethink what am I doing step one, two, three, four. Once we've got that process built, now we want to start to look at, okay, where in this process can I automate or can I systematize to remove time and remove cost, for instance, from getting this work done? And in in many cases, how can I do it so that I can unlock the ability to do a lot more than I would be able to as an individual?

SPEAKER_00 23:06

That makes perfect sense to me. It really does. I mean it just it makes perfect sense. Damon if I could ask you one more question and then we'll wrap this thing up your back to to your marketing system you you mentioned your your signal system. What are you hearing from that? What are you hearing is the the pulse of the market for those of us that are out there running our own business?

The New Operating Engine Trend

Training AI Like You Train Staff

SPEAKER_01 23:34

Yeah great question. So um what I would tell people is is that we're we're obviously moving very quickly um especially with operations especially with ai uh some things that I can I can say for sure are happening. These were kind of theories at the beginning we started to to talk about these we started to develop and integrate these in our own business but we're now starting to see this play out. I won't talk about the things that we that are not we're not seeing playing out but the things that certainly we are seeing playing out one is that modern businesses are starting to build around operations. Operations is becoming more of a hub of the of the company and that hub then speaks to you know like a hub and a wheel right there's a spoke out to marketing there's a spoke out to sales there's a spoke out to product and service but operations is transforming in in ways where operations is helping marketing do its do a better job of marketing operations is helping sales do a better job of sales um helping develop better products and better services. So that's kind of one trend and away from the old hierarchy of you know CEO and then under that is president and then off to the side head of marketing and off to the side head of technology that's that old paradigm is is really breaking up. Another area that's changing is we started to see a pattern happening where individuals and companies were starting to deploy tools and agents, right? So an agent for this and an agent for that and I hop on ChatGPT and I'm asking some questions and then I or Gemini or you know perplexity Claude Grok pick your model or I, you know I sort of have this tool that does this thing over here and I have sort of this tool that does this thing over here. We're we're really starting to move away from that what you're going to start to see over the next several years is more of an operating layer or an operating engine, an operating system where the company and its its knowledge, its information is all contained in one place. And this is what a big focus for us on modern operators is the idea of an operating engine or an operating system that where the let's just say the vision of the company, right? Where you want the company to go, that's in the operating engine. Where you want the company to be at the end of this year, that's in the operating engine. The roles for instance of your staff members and what they focus on and and the responsibilities and the outcome that's in the operating engine. Projects and and targets that you're working on for instance on a quarterly basis or a monthly basis that's in the engine who your customer is what they want how you serve them how you fulfill them what they say about you that's in the engine as well and something very cool happens when we start to think in those ways. What happens is that you and if you have staff start to become very aligned around where we're going and how we get there. And that alignment means that everybody's rowing in the same direction we can now start to make faster decisions. We can now start to move quicker. But here's where it gets even more interesting when you have that sort of operating layer that includes the context of your business and now you start to leverage and layer AI on top of that, AI now has access to the same information, right? Where you want your business to go, where you want to be at the end of the year, who you serve, what their pain points are, you know, what they say about you, what products and services you sell, how you fulfill. And so now it's very easy to start training up an AI agent to do things in your business like developing newsletters or marketing copy or analyzing sales calls and telling your you or your team how to improve to convert more customers. And the sky's the limit I mean you know in terms of what AI can do when it has access to that to that knowledge or that context in your business. So that's another big area that we're going to start seeing changes in uh over the next several years. Wow I it it just sounds so cool and a whole level up from what years ago I considered a system would be a a stepwise process that is documented somewhere and then taught to individual real life people to go out and do this uh this brings a whole new idea to light man I love it yeah and and the idea of uh process and AI it it's really kind of old school meets new school because you know in the olden days we wanted to develop a process make sure that a staff member knew it and they could execute it you want to think the same way in terms of your AI right you're telling your AI this is this is who you are you're the bookkeeper you're the junior marketer you're this you're the you know the SDR um here's all the information that you need and here's what I want you to go do right so we're training AI in the same way that we train staff if we get really good at training staff uh and and understanding you know how to how to bring clarity to our business uh and developing these processes these workflows these systems then we can start to layer them on top of one another and that's where we have an exponential unlock.

Resources And How To Connect

SPEAKER_00 29:18

Man it sounds so cool. Damon thank you so much for being with us today. I learned a lot and I'm sure audience did as well man thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

How do we contact you if somebody wants to get a hold of you yeah uh we have a uh resource uh on our site modernoperators.com forward slash start and uh there's three or four ways that you can kind of enter and play there whether you want to sign up for a newsletter or if you want to uh book a discovery call with us and let's sit down and and figure out uh if we might be a good fit to help you uh move your business into the the modern age so that's perfect so it's modernoperators dot com slash start that's it all right this has been great by the way thank you it has been great it's been a lot of fun and as I say I've learned a heck of a lot and I bet our audience did as well Damon thank you so much for being on the Commission Code today.

Closing And Final CTA

SPEAKER_00 30:09

Thank you Morris appreciate you well that does it for this episode of the Commission Code podcast. This is the place where we want to help you find the commission code to success in your business. Remember go to MorrisSims.com for more information and in the meantime hey have a great week get out there and meet somebody new and we'll see you again next time right here on the Commission code. Best wishes I'm Morris Sims