How Simple Systems Create Time And Revenue With Cameron Tope

Your calendar is full, your brain is full, and somehow the business still feels fragile. That’s usually not a motivation problem, it’s a systems problem. We sit down with Cameron to get practical about business systems, checklists, and the Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS) from Traction, then we connect it all to the real goal: increase revenue and still have time to enjoy your life.

We dig into what “working on the business” actually looks like when you’re wearing every hat. Cameron explains why small, simple processes beat fancy tools at the start, using a rental property turnover as the perfect example of repeatable work that turns into chaos without a checklist. We also talk about credibility: when steps get missed, trust gets damaged, and a basic system can prevent that. From there we move into After Action Reviews, updating tenant qualifications, and the core idea that improvement is impossible if you never document what you did last time.

Time is the next constraint, so we share ways to carve out high-level thinking without pretending you can block four uninterrupted hours tomorrow. We use the ADD framework (delete, automate, delegate), discuss quarterly rocks, weekly cadence, and how to avoid shiny-object pivots by finishing the bridge before starting the next one. We also shout out Trainual as a training and documentation tool once you’re ready to hand work off.

If you want a clearer operating rhythm, better delegation, and fewer dropped balls, listen now. Subscribe, share this with a business owner friend, and leave a review with the one checklist you’re going to build first.

Transcript

Why Small Systems Create Space

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I think the big thing to allow you to get that space is focusing on the small checklists, the small systems, the small processes to begin with, Morris, because that's what happens.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

It's like 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. Welcome to the show.

Using EOS To Work On Business

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Well, tell us a little bit about how you do your business, because I think that seems to be the one place where most of us wind up in trouble. We wind up, you know, winding up on a plateau in our business. And it really comes back down to what are we actually doing all day long and how do we organize it and how do we run it? Tell us about how you run your business.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Yes, sir. I use EOS, the entrepreneur operating system, the book traction. That was the big, I think, unlock for me is like, okay, yeah, we designed a process or a system, and we've been working on that and checklists and making sure we can have a repeatable result. But that's just, you know, kind of below the line stuff or make sure you get from A to B the actual and how the system runs and being an actual business owner, that was EOS. And really that's what allowed me to have something that people use. And we've tailored things to it. You know, there's certain things I like and don't like, but I would say 80 to 90% is EOS to say, okay, instead of working in the business, I need to work on the business. And that gave me a framework to make sure that we're improving and we're going where we want to go.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Yeah, I mean, that's that's Michael Gerber at his best working on your business instead of in your business. Uh that's just, well, such a basic that many of us forget, especially when you're out there trying to build a business and you're you're you're the CEO, founder, salesperson, accounting manager, billing manager, janitor, and everything else under the shining sun. It's kind of hard to remember that you need to stop and work on your business from time to time.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

How'd you go ahead? Well, no, that's what I was gonna say. I think the big thing to allow you to get that space is focusing on the small checklist, the small systems, the small processes to begin with, Morris, because that's what happens. It's like, let's just use a rental property, for example. Okay, the tenant moves out. What happens? Well, if every single time that tenant gives you notice, you're trying to like figure out, okay, do I need to change the locks? What kind of smoke detectors need to be in this place? What am I checking? Okay, oh, now I got to line up these vendors to get this stuff done. And you it's chaos. Whereas if you just take a little bit of time and say, okay, I did this, I did this, I did this, and then I did this and this, and you just lay it out, it does not have to be anything fancy. I know AI and and all these automations and the software now, but if you just start with a basic checklist to get something out of your head on paper that you can hand over to somebody, that slowly allows you the space to say, okay, instead of just running like you know, on a hamster wheel, you can actually step back and say, Okay, perfect, that's running, but is this really lined up with this other part of the business? How is sales doing? Are we getting leads? I mean, you can really look at it from a holistic picture.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

Man, Karen, that sounds so good to me because I I'm a systems geek. I I just I feel like all my entire working years, I I could not have done it without having some checklists involved, even when it was just me, even if I wasn't going to hand that off to say someone else, here,

The Power Of A Simple Checklist

SPEAKER_00 5:18

take this and go do these things, make sure we're all okay. Just for me, because as an owner and a operator of a business, you got so much to do. I I forget what I what I've done, what I haven't done. Did I do this? Did I not do this? You know, did I lock the front door before I got into bed tonight? And those kind of things I did, especially at my age, Cameron. You'd you'd go through those things two or three times. A checklist keeps me in line every day. And there's one for my day, there's one for my week. There's, you know, I'm nut when it comes to these kind of things, but you're right. A system saves you time, it saves you money, but more than anything else, it keeps you from dropping something off the side of the table that's important. Would you agree?

SPEAKER_01 6:05

100%. And I think people have this, like, especially all the marketers and all the influencers out there, they want it to make this into something extravagant. It does not need to be extravagant, it just needs to work. So just start instead of getting intimidated by, oh my gosh, the system, I don't know exactly what that entails. That sounds so fancy. What kind of software do I need? Get a piece of paper. I mean, I've got my notebook over here and just start simply, just very simply. And the other thing, you know, Morris, it's like, how do you improve? If you don't know what you did last time and you ended up with a bad result, how do you know what you can improve the next time to get the result you're looking for, or at least get a better result? And if you're always shooting from the hip, it's just one of those where you know, you're just you're not implementing any of the learnings that you and your team have had over the years. And I just don't know how people get better without saying, here's what we did, here's what we got, did we like that or not? If we didn't like it, what do we need to change to get a better result? And I heard somebody say system one time is save yourself time, energy, and money.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Yeah, absolutely. That's save yourself time, energy, money, and credibility.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Because when you don't do something well, that's gonna screw up your credibility and that's gonna impact your next person you talk to. But if you have a system and that could be just a simple checklist on a piece of paper, and you know, it that's gonna keep you from being in a position where, oh, geez, that's all over the place, and I didn't get it done. It just, it just, it's incredible how those kind of things work. And you you mentioned a couple of things I I just want to touch on real quick. You talked about results, and that's the key to a system, in my opinion. When you have a system, you have something you can do on a regular basis consistently, that means not just once, but over and over and over again. And a good system always produces positive results when you use it properly.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Don't you think? A hundred percent.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

And if you're not getting that and you don't have a simple checklist, then how do you know what to change to get the better result? And I can tell you I've Morris, I've made a lot of mistakes. But what we do is we say, okay, we had to evict a tenant. So here's the the here are the qualifications we put that tenant through. What you know, we call them AARs after action reviews. Okay, we have the eviction. Okay, what what were all the tenant qualifications? What were their credit score? What was their income? What was their debt to income ratio? And then we'd say, okay, is there anything that we need to update on the front end to make sure we don't have that negative result? And yeah, I just think, you know, if you go from memory, it can work when you're, you know, if you're running a you know a small six-figure business, maybe you can do that. Um, I think that that's how people get burnt out. But the second piece of that is how are you going to get anybody to help you if everything sits in your head? And then you're going to get frustrated because you're trying to hand a checklist that lives in between your ears to a remote team member, or even if you want to automate it with AI, you have to get put good information in, garbage in, garbage out. So you'll get frustrated saying, Oh, these AI agents don't work, all these, you know, remote talent doesn't work, or oh, I can never find good people to do things the way I want done. It's like, have you set that team up for success? Have you given them clear expectations? Are they because there's a difference between having no checklist and doing what they think is best versus you giving them the checklist and them not doing that? That's a very different thing.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

And when you when you talk about giving someone else a checklist, you also have to empower them to take it and run with it and use their brain. Otherwise, you just got a robot, right? Well, and that's it. It's it's okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Hey, here's how what I know

Results, Reviews, And Hiring Help

SPEAKER_01 9:46

to do. Like here's what we have come up with. When you go through this, do it my way first. But then after you go through this a few times, I expect you to be the become the expert and you to make changes to this. And that's when you can really run a business from anywhere. Because if you're the one who always has to be the one to drive change and drive that better result, you can't grow. You're going to be limited because you have to be in every single decision. And you cannot be in sales ops, HR, and finance and do all the process all the time. You have to focus on one thing, get down to a good spot, and move on to the next highest value constraint.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

And adding a team member or adding several team members is that's work. And that's work that takes you away from working and being the top salesperson and being the the accounting guy and all the rest of this stuff. It's still those are things you've got to do to onboard new people and bring them into the process. And if you don't have systems, then you're dependent on whatever they've brought to the table, which may be great, and maybe you can just turn them loose, but that's rare. So you gotta teach them your business. You've got to teach them, and that takes time and effort and such. And I real quick, I got to do a shout-out for trainule.com. Trainual.com. It's a wonderful system that allows you to build a very rapid, very simple, very complete training course for people that include all the systems that they need to know. And it's one place where they can go for everything that has to do with what they need to do to be a great employee in your business. So I love it to death. And that's where I use with my clients that system in order to build these things so that we can hand something off to somebody. But before, as an owner and let's say a solopreneur, before you can do that, before you can create a bunch of systems, before you can have time to hire the right people, you have to take time to work on your business. Cameron, how when you were starting, how did you find time to stop and say, I'm running a business here and it needs to have certain things? What are they and how do I put them all together? Time organization kind of question, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 12:03

Yeah, you know, I don't know if there was one single event that was like, hey, you got to pull your head out of your rear end, and or you're just gonna work 80, 100 hours a week and end up divorced or end up by yourself. And, you know, I was working um a W-2 job with VP with British Petroleum in as a petroleum engineer in Houston. And, you know, that tumultuous market got me into real estate, which then, you know, I was like, okay, I can leave my W-2. And I think the constraint of time, like I was working full time, I was doing this stuff, it make it was like a necessity to make sure you had these things dialed in. And then I think once I started hiring people, that was when it was like, okay, I need to step back and carve out a little time, even if it's, you know, I've heard some people say this, and I do like this, even though my schedule gets a little crazy. Taking the first 20, 30 minutes, maybe even an hour if you have that of each day and looking for things that you can either automate, delegate, or delete. We call it ADD in the business. So, what can you automate? And not in that order. First, what can you delete or remove? Yeah. And then if you can delete it, what can you automate? And then if you can't automate it, what can you delegate to another team member? And so just kind of coming at it from that lens and then implementing the EOS system, you know, quarterly. So we have our vision traction organizer to look at our 10-year vision, and it goes down to three years, and then that cuts it down into quarterly rocks. So every quarter, I'm working with the team to say, okay, here's our rock for the quarter. What do each of us need to do to make sure that we hit that rock? And it helps when you have a main core focus, that rock, it helps get rid of some of the noise because there are a million fires and you just cannot put all of them out. You need to go, what is the main constraint? What is the main fire that's really going to burn us? Or what what is the, you know, they keep saying the largest constraint, right? If you unleash that or unlock that, that would allow your business to grow. And sometimes it's leads, and sometimes it's in operations. And I just think using that EOS system uh with the issues list and the weekly L10 meetings, that forced me to be able to step back and say, okay, these are the things to get better and better. As we add more properties, as we add more owners and more clients, it allowed us to deliver and maintain that level of service.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

So, Cameron, we had a real quick break there. I had a phone call, I had to take, but we're back now where we're talking about the operating

Making Time With ADD And Rocks

SPEAKER_00 14:28

systems that you use to run your business and keep things going. Finding the time to do that, I guess, is where I was going with this thing. Is how as a solo entrepreneur do you stop and find the time to say, I'm not gonna try and contact a new lead. I'm not going to try and do all these other things and work in my business, but I'm gonna take a half day or a day and I'm gonna work on my business.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

I think it's easier, you know, and I see this with my team. So I've had to coach them a little bit on they're like, okay, I'm gonna block out four hours and I'm gonna do nothing but high-level work. And I'm like, what happens? Well, I was gonna do that, but then something came in. Then an owner was pinging me, then this. So start small. And you know, it's like um atomic habits. The book, it's phenomenal. And it talks about just starting. If you want to build a habit, just start really, really small. If you want to floss your teeth, just start with one tooth. Just say, I'm gonna floss one tooth. That's it. And you'll find yourself going, okay, fine, I can do all three of them, or 10 of them, or 20, whatever. And uh, if you're in Ohio, it's only a couple. Um, but then you build that habit. It's about starting so small and easy. So I say that because instead of saying, I'm gonna take Fridays off every week and I'm gonna focus on that. I I found more success in just scheduling little things here and there, using EOS, using those those meetings. And then if you need additional, get up early or stay in late and just give yourself a half hour, 45 minutes. And then once you build that muscle, then go to the hour, hour and a half, and really get into some deep work. But start small. Don't try to you know eat the elephant all in one go. Do it one bite at a time.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

That makes perfect sense. And pardon me, I love the the other parts of EOS. I I got into that book and and I just love it because it does so many things that that are really critical to running a business, especially when you've got a team of people that you need to communicate with and be consistent with and make sure that your vision is being communicated properly so that they know what to do.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

Yes. Yeah, it's it allows, and you know, I heard somebody say, like, you think, you know, as a leader or as the the visionary of the company or one of the owners, you think that you over-communicate on the vision, but the team doesn't hear it like you think they do. So you have to say it, you have to be repetitive in that. And this EOS and doing it every weekly week and get it set up on a cadence, that allows you to share that vision and just recast that and make it more real, make it more clear to them. And they might even ask questions, say, Oh, hey, are we gonna do this? And you're like, Man, I really didn't maybe there's something I didn't explain very well because that's that's a different, that's not what we're doing. And so it allows you to to make sure that you can refine that image and that vision so that everybody's marching to the same beat of the drum.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

When we talk about this, a lot of times I'll talk about strategy and how you you gotta have an overreaching and overarching strategy about how you're gonna get to whatever it is that that thing is that that your vision is that you're focused on that you want to get to, or at least you better be focused on it. And you know, you gotta have a strategy to get there. And folks come in, and it's like, okay, you know, I'm gonna do this, this, this, this, and this. No, no, no. One. Give me one strategy right now. When we get that one up and running, then you can go to two, but no more than two for a while until we get to to where we're really generating revenue and we can move forward. Then you start looking at other strategies, unless you're general electric and you've got 22 subcompanies and and all our stuff. But that's really what it always boils down to is having a uh having a strategy you can focus on to get what you want, yes, and then focus to be able to stick with that strategy. Because the the hardest thing in the world is when I get a client or a friend that's you know, today it's this, and then next week it's oh, we're gonna go do this, and then the next week it's oh, well, we're gonna do this. And and it just seems to fracture everything, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Yeah, that there's so many good nuggets in there, Morris. I think so. One, that's that's a beauty of EOS of having the rock, the quarterly rock that you decide, which again should walk you towards your three-year vision or your vision, three-year vision, ten-year vision. That's one, so that keeps the main thing, the main thing, because otherwise, like you say, firefighting, stuff's gonna come in every single day, and it's just like, you know, all it feels urgent, but is it important? Is that

Focus, Finish Projects, And Closing

SPEAKER_01 18:54

really getting us closer to where we're going? And one other thing I see too, and I've done this where it's like, okay, oh, we need to do this. This is a problem, let's fix it. This is a problem, let's fix it. But until you complete that, and use the analogy of a bridge. If you stop 10 feet short when you're almost done with that bridge going across the river, the bridge is useless. It is not uh is not usable until you made that last that last foot, until it connects. And I see a lot of people build bridges and stop 10 feet short. They're right there on the one yard line, and then they go to something else. And it's like that last one, two, three, four, five percent is the hardest. The first 70, 80 is usually pretty easy, but that's the hardest. That might require a little bit more engineering, a little bit more thinking. And then they're like, okay, I'll delegate that or I'll come back to that later. That's almost done, and they go on. So they have a bunch of these projects that are 80, 90, 95%, but nothing done. The bridge isn't connected. So that's that's been something that we focused on a lot is narrowing the priorities, narrowing the KPIs, narrowing that stuff so that we can get the bridge built and then go to the next bridge.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

Oh, I think that's so important. And it it comes back to that that word, focus. If if you can't focus, and I don't know, a lot of us have ADD or ADHD or whatever the heck it is called nowadays, and you love to jump around, love to say, Oh, I'm a multitasker. No, you're not, ain't no such thing. But you've you're good at jumping from one thing to the next. The problem is you never go deep enough to get to the end of the project, yep. And you don't get it done. And that's what generates results in a business is getting it done.

SPEAKER_01 20:34

And the visionary and you know, they call it a visionary in EOS, where it's like the person that casts the vision, then you have the integrator, which is the person that is operational that says, okay, there's the vision, I'm gonna implement it. And they're really process-driven and operations driven. So if you're if you're not very good at the vision piece, usually though you can partner with somebody or get that. But the people that are traditionally good at the vision piece struggle with those details in the operation side. They're the ones that are it's shiny object. Oh, we could do this and we can add this vertical and do that. And it's fun and it's exciting to people. But at the same time, it's like until you get that built into the system, it's just talk is cheap. Like that sounds great. It sounds exciting to be able to add this different product or service. But until you have that bridge built, uh, yeah, I just think that the shiny object really can be a distraction.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

Well, I do too. And that's why I'm in the process of creating a course. Uh, actually, by the time this is done, the course will be out uh about how to increase your income and then have time to enjoy it by creating a personal operating system. Is if you don't have that personal operating system to tell you to do a weekly plan and then tell you what I'm going to do every day this week and have flexibility within that, uh, it just doesn't seem to work, at least it hasn't for me. So I thought I would share that with with everyone. So we're building a course to do that. Because again, if you can't focus on what you're supposed to be working on, you never Going to get to the end of that project, and your bridge is going to be 10 feet from completion. And that's not a good thing. Cameron, thank you so much for taking time to be with us today on the Commission Code. And again, I apologize for our little interruption in the middle, but uh man, it's great to meet you.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Likewise, Mr. Sims, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

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 Morris Sims.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.