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[Transcript starts at 1:00]
What is up y’all? Welcome to another episode of FitBizU. I’m your host, Jill Coleman, and today we are gonna talk, we’re gonna get a little nerdy with it. We’re gonna talk org chart now, organization chart. And I wanna talk about this because I know I have some people listening who are at the level where they are starting to maybe bring on some team members.
And I wanna share with you guys a little bit about how it works at Jill Fit. I’m gonna take you behind the scenes at Jill Fit and share with you a little bit about who does what, where people go, et cetera. Now, One of the things that, um, I know you guys know this, I’ve talked about bringing on team quite a bit the last couple years because we have, uh, but for a long time at Jill Fit, I was what I would consider a glorified solopreneur.
And at the time it was great and it worked out for many, many years. In fact, a lot of my peers had brought on different team members. And for me, I always sort of just, you know, didn’t wanna do that. I always avoided it because for me, I liked the autonomy of being, not having to, you know, anyone to report to me.
I didn’t wanna have a bunch of meetings on my schedule. I was very much like an autonomy driven person. I wanna be able to take a vacation, like just go off, you know, wherever for like four weeks and not have to talk to anybody. And it was great for as long as it was. However, what I realized was that yes, you, if you wanna go fast, go alone.
But if you wanna go far, you have to go together. And when Jill Fit had some big, big goals back in 2021, uh, I realized that I couldn’t do it alone. And I had tried already, and I think I shared this before in 2018, I joined a mastermind and it was, uh, like, it was a mastermind of kind of like a who’s who of internet business.
And I remember thinking to myself like, this is gonna be the year, Jill Fit’s gonna blow up, we’re gonna, you know, hit seven figures. We’re gonna have all these people, whatever. Remember thinking back, like now looking back at that, I don’t know how. I thought I was gonna do that. I think I just miraculously was having gonna have more butts in the seats in my programs.
Because if you think about it, when you think about the end of the day scaling or getting to a different revenue level, you just need to service more people, right? You need to make more sales. And in order to make more sales, I needed people helping me. So that I could show up in my zone of genius. And the thing that I’m the best at now, there’s a book, uh, that’s called Rocket Fuel, and this book was recommended to me again I think in 2018.
I remember at the time I was kinda like, this isn’t for me. I just like having a lean business. I don’t really, I don’t care. And honestly, like I didn’t really pay attention to how much money I was making. I was making. We call it gillionaire. I think I’ve said that before where it’s like somewhere between half million and million dollars for a number of years.
But for me, as long as I had enough money to live and enough money to do what I wanted, that was totally fine. Then in 2021, I was overwhelmed with clients. Again, a good problem to have, but because of the pandemic, so many people came online and were just dying to learn about internet business and how to do this, and so because of that, I just completely overwhelmed myself with clients, people wanted to work with me, and I just kept saying yes. And so, uh, early 2021. In late 2020, I was literally on Zoom like most days of the week, like eight hours a day, right? I was working with a ton of people one-on-one. We had a bunch of different group programs going, and I was like, I can’t sustain this.
This, to me, is the exact opposite of autonomy. This is the whole reason why it got into internet business was to not have all this stuff on my schedule. And I found myself in what I call an autonomy trap, where the idea that I wanted to have my own business, I didn’t wanna be in the gym 70 hours a week.
I just ended up now creating a prison of my, of Zoom, right? So now, instead of the gym, it’s my desk I’m at for, you know, 40 hours a week. And so I realized that I needed people to help me and we had to figure out how to take all of these clients and organize them better. I joined a mastermind and also I started taking on team members.
Now the book was called Rocket Fuel. It’s by Gino Wickman, and this is my first like foray into understanding what exactly a, having like a right hand person would be. Now I, if you guys have emailed to Jill Fitt, you’ve talked to Sarah, who is, um, she’s the head of customer success. She’s the head of fulfillment, she’s the head of coaching, so she does everything in the business like.
Uh, customer success-wise, live events. She does customer service. She does the coaching side of things, and she has been great and she went full-time with me last year, so she actually took on a lot more responsibility recently. And this book, Rocket Fuel has this concept that there are sort of two people at the head of the company.
There’s the person who’s the visionary, and then there’s the person who they call the integrator. And I was doing both of those things for a decade, right? I was the visionary. I was like, where are we going? I was the content creator. I was the coach, I was doing all the front facing stuff, and I was also the integrator, which is I was doing all the backend stuff.
Writing all the sales pages, uh, sales emails, creating, uh, landing pages. It’s just doing all the tech stuff, right? That’s not, Sarah didn’t do that stuff, so I was doing all of that. And so the first hire that I had in 2021 was an integrator position. Now, this isn’t just a VA position. I think we think about this from the perspective of like, okay, this person is just gonna be like a task master, right?
There’s, uh, they’re gonna be like a TaskRabbit. They’re just gonna be doing all these things, and I just give them a to-do list. I knew that I didn’t want that because to me, that’s just management. That’s not what I wanted. Now granted, I do have to do some management now, and obviously some leadership in the team, but I wanted someone who just.
Knew the business, who knew the business, my business as well, if not better than I even did. So what I did was I started really stepping up as the visionary in the company. So what that means is content creation, product development, um, The coaching, any of the front facing stuff, right? So I could show up in that full capacity, the things that I’m the absolute best at, that no one else in the business can do, by the way.
And then I brought on someone to sort of come behind me and make it all happen. And that’s really what the integrator position is. It’s not just me giving them like a task list, not giving them a to-do list, and still having to manage them. It’s not them sitting there and waiting on me to know what to do.
This person is proactive. They know where we’re going. It’s their job to help fulfill the vision that I lay out. And so this integrator person is like, technically, if we’re talking about org chart, this person is sort of like right underneath me. They actually manage the team. They run the meetings, they run our, our staff meetings.
They’re in charge of making sure that everyone is doing what they need to do in the business. So that, again, that I’m freed up to do the things I’m the best at that keep, uh, the business going and the integrated position is massively important. And it’s hard because sometimes you ask yourself like, how do I find this person?
Now? It’s a combination of you finding the right person. But also training this person. And I was surprised that when I found someone to do this, they actually like knew the business already. I think sometimes we think, oh, this person’s gonna be just a VA, that I’m gonna hire someone from overseas and then I’m gonna have to like spend hours and days and weeks like training them up.
You can find someone who already knows the software you use. You know, we use Active Campaign, Kajabi community, uh, Lead Pages. We used all these different software. Like this person already knew how to use all that and knew how to. Integrate all those things, and if they didn’t, they didn’t ask. They went and found the tutorials on how to do it.
And so again, this is a different feel than just having a VA that you are like managing. So in a way, the integrator position probably is the most important person to start with in your business because. They’re the ones who make everything happen in the business. And so for us, if you think about sort of, I’m at the top of the org chart, right?
I’m the visionary right at the top, right below me is the integrator position. The integrator position again, oversees the rest of the company and the rest of the people do making sure they’re doing what they need to do, all that kind of stuff. They also oversee all of our sort of, um, like operation stuff.
So right now, if you go to upwork.com or you go to indeed.com and you’re looking for someone who’s an integrator, Chances are you’re probably not gonna see that job position. You’re probably gonna see something more like, uh, head of operations or a project manager that’s probably, or like a coo. That’s essentially what an integrator is.
So I can be the CEO and then the COO comes behind me and makes everything happen. That’s the integrator position again. This book is really great in terms of breaking all of that down. Then you can think about, we sort of branch out from there. So if you’re thinking about an org chart, we have me at the top, we have the integrator position right below me, and then everyone else sort of branches out from there.
Basically, underneath the integrator is three different tracks. So the first track is the growth side of business. So this is the the growth arm of the business. Now, if you think about it, growth is everything that happens before the. So this would include social media, this podcast, um, this would include email marketing, lead generation, ad spend, right?
Uh, Instagram and Facebook ads, Google Ads, seo, stuff like that, right? How are we bringing people in to our ecosystem? How are we bringing them in? So this head of growth right now, the head of growth is still like technically me, and I’m sort of tag teaming with my integrator . But underneath that we have someone who does the podcast stuff.
So we have someone who manages FitBizU, who manages the Best Life podcast, um, who manages our YouTube channel and creates our blogs. Shout out to Courtney. So Courtney handles all of the podcasts and then gets them onto YouTube and gets them onto the blog for us. Just additional content, I’m still doing my social media, my Jill Fit social media, and then the other part of the growth team is our ads.
So we have an amazing ads guy, Andy, who does all of our lead generation ads, all our sales ads, all the manage, all the ads spend, et cetera. So he’s under the growth side of the business. You can think about growth just being everything that happens before the sale, okay? Everything that happens before the sale.
Then the second track, the one that’s right in the middle is gonna be your operations. Your operations arm of the business is like all the not sexy stuff. This is where like your bookkeeper goes. We have a bookkeeper, we have an accountant. Is we’re legal. If you have like a, you know, if you have a lawyer, if you have, uh, someone like, you know, your, maybe your, uh, what’s it called?
Like if I had a personal assistant, it would all go under that middle track and your integrator is managing the middle track. Okay. And then the last side of it is the final third track of the business or final arm of the business. And this is the fulfillment side. So if growth is everything that happens before the sale, fulfillment is everything that happens after the sale.
And so Sarah is the head of fulfillment. So as soon as someone purchases and becomes a client or a customer, Sarah’s the one who takes care of them. So she does the customer service, right? She manages all of our recurring billing. So people default on payments or whatever.
She’s in charge of making sure that those are full. She’s in charge of all of our payments stuff. Uh, she’s also in charge of live events, so when we bring in people too, she does all the correspondence with hotels, making sure that our event spaces and our venue spaces are good to go. She does all client gifts, so you know, if you’ve ever gotten like a gift or a happy birthday or something like that for me, Usually Sarah’s handling all of that side, and she also handles the coaching.
Remember when someone becomes a client of ours, now they are getting some level of coaching, so she heads up the moderation 365 certification. She heads up the, uh, one-on-one coaching our nutrition coaching. She also manages the guest coaches we have for business. She pays all of them, schedules them, so she’s in charge of all of the coaching.
It’s a massive, massive part of the business. But as soon as someone purchases, it’s like, okay, Sarah, that’s your person now, that’s your client, that’s your customer. And of course, I’m there helping all three tracks like every step of the way. But if you wanna think about like, if you can kind of picture it in your head, that’s the simplest way to think about it.
Now, of course, you can always have other people who help you, like designers and you know, videographers and stuff like that. And just deciding like, okay, when I bring a contractor, Who manages them, right? Who manages them? So probably the integrator, maybe Courtney and the growth team. If we bring in a videographer, right?
Maybe she’ll start managing them. Uh, Sarah manages, we have some one-on-one coaches that Sarah manages because they’re in the fulfillment side of the business and the coaching side of the business. So think about. Okay, can I potentially maybe bring in an integrator and or bring in someone for fulfillment?
So maybe they’ll start with just customer service and then they’re moved to other things to make your, your clients feel good, to make them make sure that we’re delivering on what we’re gonna, that we’re trying to deliver. So, I don’t wanna go too deep into it, but you can kind of envision this in your head.
Let’s start here. And thinking about out of all of those things, chances are you’ll still do the growth side of your business, right? You’re the content creator. You’ll probably still do most of that, but can we bring in someone to handle customer service and to oversee the client experience? And can we bring in potentially an integrator and even start them at like five or 10 hours a week as you start building?
Our integrator is gonna be going full-time, hopefully at some point. Uh, In the meantime, you can certainly bring someone in, even a customer service role for like five hours a week. To kind of start there, let me know if you guys like this topic and if you want me to do more on hiring, we can definitely talk more about that.
Maybe I’ll bring in the integrator to sort of share that with you guys. There’s a lot more that we can talk about here, but gimme some feedback. If this is, if this resonates for you, if you wanna learn more about sort of who does what in the business, uh, we can definitely do a second episode on this. But I did wanna get this down so you guys have a visual.
And if you are in a position that you are ready for something like this, then I’m excited for you. Keep me in the loop. Let me know what you need. Thanks for being here, you guys, and we’ll see you on the next episode. Bye.
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