How Madi Waggoner Builds Teams That Run Without You

[00:00:03] Hector: Hello and welcome to another episode of the How to Scale of Business podcast. My name is Hector Sania Esteban, and I am your host for today, our special guest is Ms. Maddie Wagner, and she's someone who helps remote startup scale by fixing gaps in systems team and operations. And so what I love about what we're gonna talk about today is , the things that you do like, the keystone sort of habits, if you will.

[00:00:24] Hector: We impacting one thing is gonna impact everything in your business. So Maddie, , welcome and thanks for joining us.

[00:00:30] Madi: Thanks so much, Hector. I am so glad to be here. Can't wait to dive in.

[00:00:33] Hector: I do think it, it probably sometimes the context and the story isn't warranted, but for someone who's always in your sort of roles, I'm always curious. Somehow someone ends up. in a position, in a role like you, because think it's so needed today, especially for a lot of the entrepreneurs who are very visionary and they're very, you know, , idea oriented and they start a business and realize that it's more than just ideas or it's more than just, you know, there's so much more to it and it really takes someone like you to come along.

[00:01:05] Hector: And help us get all the things dialed in. So, , I'd love to hear a little, you know, what the key points along your journey were, and then we can sort of talk about, you know, some of the specifics and how you help businesses.

[00:01:15] Madi: Yeah, for sure. So I started out just working with tech startups. I actually took one of my earliest jobs. I took a design course from this design education company. They had courses and boot camps, and I just loved their. Experience. So I reached out to them and asked them, how can I support you? And that started this journey of with, I was with them for three years and we built, I was like employee number three, and we grew up to 23, 24 by the time I left.

[00:01:43] Madi: And that was one of the first. Points because I got not only the opportunity to work directly with founders and help them scale their vision, but also work directly with our customers. And in that particular business we also worked with mentors. We had design students, and we also had mentors. So there were a lot of different people involved in this.

[00:02:00] Madi: And I took a lot of things that I learned there around like. how do you look at customer retention? For example, we had this one problem with our bootcamp where our students, we gave them this like two week grace period to withdraw if they felt like it wasn't a fit after getting their feet wet with it.

[00:02:15] Madi: And we really didn't have the best retention rates within that two week period. So I dove into it. I did interviews, I looked at the data, and what I found is that we weren't actually matching students and mentors in the best way. So. I restructured our entire application process for both our students and our mentors.

[00:02:31] Madi: And what that whole result was that we matched them based on their learning and mentorship styles, and our retention for our students went up by 50%. And there are different things like that that allow people don't understand that operationally you can have direct revenue impacts on.

[00:02:48] Hector: there's a couple of things that I, heard in there that I, I'd love to talk about, and one of them is. Is this idea of, of KPIs. Whenever I talk to someone who has, and, no one has your genius, but, individuals who are, you know, of the operation sort of space, or I know fractional CEOs are becoming more and more prevalent or it's just becoming more, of a, a thing in the space, , is that KPIs undoubtedly comes up and it's like, what are you tracking?

[00:03:12] Hector: What are your numbers? And me being like the visionary, creative. I'm like, oh, idea. Like, you know, like how cool is it? You know, how shiny of an object is it? How much energy is sort of, but my feeling about the particular, you know, project or idea and so I would just love to hear, . Your perspective on KPIs and numbers and, if it's a blind spot, that is it just me or are there other businesses that are sort of suffering from that same sort of, you know, riding and driving blind sort of syndrome?

[00:03:42] Madi: It's definitely not just you. It's very common across the different businesses I work with because I've seen this that. When anyone, regardless of their background, regardless of their tendencies, when they step into this CEO founder position, they become the visionary. They have so many ideas where they can take the business.

[00:03:58] Madi: They have so many options. I like to say that when you're a business owner, you have. So many opportunities and ways that you can go, but also you have so many opportunities and ways that you could go and it becomes very overwhelming. So trying to determine what numbers should you be focusing on can be very challenging.

[00:04:17] Madi: So when I work with founders, what I help them focus on is what are the most important things to you? What are the most important things in the business? Okay. Can we get some. Clear numbers and things that we want to focus on to help make sure that we're moving in the right direction. And that can, in some cases, that's, , like a percentage increase or a dollar figure, or in some cases it's a yes no.

[00:04:37] Madi: I once worked with a client where they'd been trying to launch a course for two years, and they knew that their audience wanted it, they wanted it out, but they just couldn't get it done. And they were planning to sell it for five KA seat. So it was a good revenue generator as well. And for them, what they needed is they needed someone to come alongside them and essentially create an outline from what they wanted to cover and then put that into a system so that they could actually get it done.

[00:05:01] Madi: And that's what I did for them. So they went from two years. That's being kind of. On the back burner trying to get it moving to us, launching it three months after I started working with them. And for them it was a kind of more of a yes no of like, let's just get this thing done. So it's off of our minds and we have it out there.

[00:05:16] Madi: And then at that point, they were able to take what we did with that particular course and how more specific revenue goals off of that. How do we optimize it? How do we ensure that our students are getting good results? So when you're thinking about. What numbers are important? I always recommend that you have someone with you who has kind of more of an objective perspective on it.

[00:05:37] Madi: Versus, like, your ideas can go all over the place and you need to have someone who can say, yes, I love this idea. Let's talk about this for a few minutes. I'll take some notes, but then I'm gonna put it in our little file over here because it's gonna distract us from something else. So you need someone to help you focus on the right KPIs, the right numbers, the right focuses, and it can be really hard to do that when you're in this place of being a visionary.

[00:05:58] Madi: But we also need the visionary role as well. So it's more about just having the right people in those seats. Even if they're part-time or a consultant, it helps so much when you're in this role as an entrepreneur.

[00:06:10] Hector: Yeah, I think that what it seems to do as you, grow is it just gives you insight into the health of your business and the way that you might, you know, recently I've been monitoring my, my steps and I've, you know, I've been trying to hit the, you know. That certain KPI there and I've bought a food scale and I'm, you know, measuring my calories. and I think one of the interesting things in that regard is you just, sometimes you're surprised by how much calories are in a certain thing, or, or, you know, when it comes to our business, , and we've started tracking things, I'm, sometimes surprised by either.

[00:06:39] Hector: Good or bad, you know, a number is when it may seem or may feel fine, but then when you actually get some data on it, you're able to bring, like you said, that objective perspective, which I think it is, , so critical when someone's running a business.

[00:06:53] Madi: Yeah, exactly. And there's so many times where I've come into businesses, I say, well, what are your numbers here? What are your expenses? And they can't tell. Me oh, I have to go and figure this out. And I've worked with some clients where our first goal is just to get insight on those numbers of how many sales are you actually making, and then what's your total revenue?

[00:07:11] Madi: What are your revenue sources, especially if they have multiple revenue sources. And then what are your expenses? Because oftentimes they just start hiring because they feel overwhelmed, because hiring. Can be a big line item in your budget. , And in some cases they don't actually need those roles or in some cases they hire the wrong people.

[00:07:27] Madi: And if you don't start measuring these things, you can't get an objective perspective on, like you said, the health of your business. So there's definitely some things that are like softer ratings that maybe aren't hard numbers, like I like to tell founders. , Just start writing a list of things that are driving you insane and get those things down and see, because if you can see it on paper, that can help.

[00:07:49] Madi: And that's just even one step further of like getting clear on what has been ambiguous. Because if you leave it all up in your head, it just kind of stays there and you can't be objective. You can't make clear decisions. So whatever it is that feels ambiguous, I would say start looking at the numbers, get it down on paper, whatever that looks like, just start moving in that direction.

[00:08:08] Hector: Are there any other blind spots that you find, , businesses either reveal themselves through this sort of data collection and sort of this, you know, fact finding or, you know, getting these insights. , Is there anything that emerges more often than not after you go in and start to look at some of these numbers?

[00:08:28] Madi: Yeah. So with every client that I work with, I basically do an audit on their business. And I call this, , the seven day scale plan. And the whole point of it is to identify these. Hidden things that they likely aren't seeing. A really big one is how they communicate with their team members, whether they're contractors, whether they're full-time, whether, whatever it is, because most of the time I hear that people are texting or emailing and using those kinds of tools in order to stay on top of business communication.

[00:08:55] Madi: But what needs to happen is it needs to be like, if this is a real business, if this is a legitimate business, we have to be intentional with our communication, not only in the tools we use, like I recommend using a project management tool and a tool like Slack for your two main communication pieces. I.

[00:09:10] Madi: But also in how we use them, we have to keep communication on particular tasks or projects in the project management tool because then the information is available to everyone there. Everyone can trust that the information is there. Even in how we organize information. If say someone on your team were to send you a message, if they use the same general template and they.

[00:09:29] Madi: Bold the thing that's most important to you, and then they bold and underline the thing that they need from you. You know exactly what they need. You know exactly when they need it because of how intentional they were in their communication, and very, very few businesses are aware of that, and they don't have any idea how much that can impact their ability to scale.

[00:09:46] Hector: Yeah, especially in 2025 when I think about, you know, my business, which is, perhaps on one end of the spectrum, but our, Team is so distributed across the planet that like you could spin a globe and like stop it and you might, you know, like equally we're all so spread out and in an office or like, you know, if this business were even 20 years ago, we would be forced to have to interact or we would, look up and peek over someone's cubicle or, you know, walk into someone's office and have those conversations.

[00:10:19] Hector: And now those are. Like you said, being done in email threads or they're being done in sort of these ad hoc places that, , I, my mind can't help but lead to a lack of productivity or effectiveness unless you're sort of intentional like you're saying.

[00:10:35] Madi: Exactly, and I've worked with teams and that design company I was talking about, we had students and mentors all over the globe. Our team was all over the globe. And so in order to be as effective as possible. Would move as quickly and scale the way we did. We increased our revenue six times over eight quarters, and I essentially had a new job every quarter.

[00:10:51] Madi: I was working there full-time. And, , we had to be so intentional because say I do some work and then I leave it, I'm done for the day. And someone who's in a the next time zone comes in as like, oh no, I need these things in order to complete this work that has to be done today. And I wasn't intentional with my communication around what was done, where I put information, where the links are, et cetera.

[00:11:10] Madi: Then either they're gonna be having to ping me and interrupt time with my family, or maybe they can't reach me and then the work gets delayed or they're just confused, or I send them in the wrong direction because I wasn't clear, and then they do the work and we have to redo it because it was done incorrectly.

[00:11:24] Madi: Like so many people don't consider how intentional you have to be for the person who is. Receiving the information, and this is one of the core things I do when I work with teams where not only do I work with the founder, but I work with their team as well to help improve their communication all around because it's this whole feedback loop around how exactly do we share communication, how is it received, and then what can we do better next time?

[00:11:47] Hector: It seems like you must have been, watching our operations over the last. Two weeks, we're going through it and especially as you scale and as the team gets bigger and larger, , I've realized that.

[00:11:59] Hector: As the founder. Not that I have less, I mean, I guess I do have less power, right? Less control. There's just, I can't do everything. I can't effect everything. And so, at least for me, my brain goes into creating systems and culture and trying to find the people that can put those in place.

[00:12:16] Hector: But in your mind, for the founder to be able to. knowing that they can't do everything, what, needs to be in place for them to scale the business in a way that, you know, doesn't drain their soul and, take decades off of their life.

[00:12:32] Madi: Yeah. So I cover this by looking at my LIFT framework, and it covers four main areas, leader infrastructure, fuel, which is more like marketing, sales related, and delivery for whatever your product is. And then team. So across all of those different areas, you have to address all of them. Otherwise, the entire business will have more friction.

[00:12:52] Madi: So for the leader, for example, leaders have to have. Good leadership skills. They have to know how to delegate well. They have to know how to give their team autonomy. And part of that is only possible because if they don't trust their team, they're not going to give them autonomy. So if you don't have the right team members in place, then we have to evaluate, okay, what is the issue there?

[00:13:11] Madi: Are they not a right fit for the role, which is oftentimes the case. , So how do we bring in these A players so that the founder can then trust those people? And then once we have good people in place, how do we , help train the founder so that they learn how to trust these new people? And so then we go into infrastructure of what are the systems in place to create the trust between the two of them, there's one tool I really like to recommend that I would highly suggest anyone listening.

[00:13:35] Madi: Uses called weekly reporting. Essentially all it needs to be is a form that asks , four to five main questions. What were your wins for this week? And this is something your team fills out every week. What were your wins? What were your challenges or blockers? What are decisions that were made? What are some things that are coming up on your like roadmap in the next few weeks?

[00:13:54] Madi: And then what are some things that you're seeing that maybe I should be aware of? What that does, when your team proactively shares that information is it helps give them ownership of their communication. So I mentioned some communication issues earlier. This helps alleviate a lot of that because it keeps the founder in the loop and helps the team understand that they have to be proactive in covering all of these areas.

[00:14:15] Madi: Also it's a benefit for the team members because if they want to be promoted or put on new projects or make more money or get more hours, whatever it is, that helps show the founder that they are doing all the things that they should be doing and in some cases, more than they expected. And then the founder, because they get in this cadence, they start to trust what this person is doing.

[00:14:32] Madi: 'cause they're seeing in all of the time. And this is in addition to communication, like in project management tools. And so that helps to, , create that trust so that the founder then can continue to back up and to trust the team and to delegate better. And that's the type of thing that we need to do in order to make sure that the founder doesn't get overly stressed.

[00:14:51] Madi: And if we don't do those things, you're just gonna stay in the middle of everything and be unable to disconnect, unable to take time off. If you have kids or you're expecting kids, you're gonna be unable to take time off there. And that's. Going to, you know, add more friction to you as a person, your personal life and the business overall.

[00:15:08] Hector: When we get back from break, Maddie, I want to get more into this framework because I love frameworks and, , I think that you've been, you know, working on and developing it and I think it's so important for business owners. And so, , we're gonna get more into that four part framework, right after this break. Hey, today's episode is brought to you by Amplify Media, and we are a podcast and content production company. Well, we like to think of ourselves as like the media arm for your company because chances are, if you're listening to this, you probably have a, product, a passion, a mission, some sort of message that you're trying to get out to the world, but you might not have the time, the team or the tech skills to be able to do it well.

[00:15:40] Hector: If that's the case, we can help Go to amplify media.com. That's A-M-P-L-A-F-Y media com. You can also check the show notes for the link. And with that, let's get back to Maddie. So Maddie, I love frameworks because I think it sort of simplifies things in a way that people can sort of remember and take with them and, really implement and, integrate, , in a much quicker way.

[00:16:04] Hector: So remind us of the four parts of the framework and then let's, if it's okay, kind of go through each one of them.

[00:16:10] Madi: Yeah, so it's called the lift framework. And one way to remember it is a rising tide lifts all boats similarly, that if you have like four legs of a , table, if you have one of 'em that's not working, it's wonky or it's completely missing, your table's gonna fall over. So it's leader infrastructure, fuel, which is like sales, marketing, those kinds of things around, , customer delivery as well.

[00:16:31] Madi: And then team and, , fuel. The reason why those are grouped together is because they're all related and if you don't have certain things in place like a marketing engine, which I know you guys are very familiar with, since that's part of what you do, , then it's gonna impact the rest of the business.

[00:16:46] Madi: You don't need to hire a team if you don't have all of the strong leads coming in, if you don't have a strong sales process of how you're gonna handle those leads, if you don't have strong client delivery. , And all of these pieces really feed into one another, and that's one of the ways that I focus on it, because in operations it can feel very broad to people.

[00:17:02] Madi: But these pieces are all connected, but we then also have to address them individually.

[00:17:08] Hector: and do you think of them, , you know, like an order of operations, like, please excuse my dear Aunt Sally, and you said it's like a table, but is there a, first place to look or, you know, if someone's going well, is leadership always the first place to start? Or might we start, at the fuel part, if that makes more sense.

[00:17:25] Madi: It depends on what's going on with the business, which is why I do an audit every time I work with someone because I need to understand, I will run them through all of my different frameworks in order to get them the right results, but we have to address them in a certain way. So if I'm working with a founder where it's their mentality that is creating a lot of other issues, if they are completely unable to trust.

[00:17:45] Madi: Their team. I have to understand, is that an issue on the founder side or is that a team issue? And there have definitely been founders I've worked with where we have to understand what is it mentally that's going on there. And I dive into a little bit of that. But I also have people I can recommend if it needs to go deeper.

[00:18:01] Madi: I have had clients tell me before that sessions with me are kind of like therapy, which I always tell 'em I'm not a therapist, but I do ask really in-depth questions. So in some cases it does start with the founder and it's around the mentality. But oftentimes when they're coming to me, it's. Like, my team is not doing the things that I want, , as quickly as possible, or, , they're making too many mistakes or we're just not able to move as quickly as possible.

[00:18:23] Madi: So we have to look at the team and then, , with infrastructure, if I'm doing their audit and I say, okay, so what do you use to keep track of tasks and projects? And they say, oh, we just use email. That is absolutely going to be an infrastructure first. , Solve because we have to get project management tools in place, and I have to get the entire team on board to adjust to that new way of operating, new way of communicating.

[00:18:46] Madi: And part of that also means that I have to develop relationships with the team. So this is why they kind of all go together and why I have to be very aware of how the business currently runs because if I can't get people on board, team members in particular, then things are not gonna move as quickly as it could.

[00:19:03] Madi: So there's. Human like side of this as well that I have to dive into.

[00:19:08] Hector: Yes, when we've gone through. I don't know how many project management tools. I feel like we've done 'em all. Mostly, , at least, you know, we did Trello, we've done Asana, we've done Airtable, now we're in Notion, , you know, we've had to hop into Clickup, are you of the mind that there is a best one?

[00:19:25] Madi: Yeah, so I used to say that I'm tools agnostic, but now I am very clearly pro certain tools and others. Just work better for other people. So my favorite project management tool is Asana. I've used it for years in all the tech startups I've worked in. But I also use Notion more specifically because it's more of a documentation and writing tool.

[00:19:45] Madi: Asana is not built for that. And a lot of these tools, like I know Notion has a task manager, but one of the challenges I had with them is. That when you tried to create templates, the information within the template, if you had like another file within it wouldn't get duplicated. It was always the original and I actually reached out to a friend of mine who's on their engineering team and said, yeah, we can't fix this 'cause of how it was built apparently.

[00:20:09] Madi: So. I use certain tools for the purpose that they were originally built for because when these tools start getting larger and larger, the companies do, they start adding futures. They wanna be all things to all people. And I don't think that actually works very well. And maybe there's some other tools out there that work better.

[00:20:24] Madi: , And I'm just not familiar with them. But I use Asana for project management notion, for like writing content, for documentation on how we do things. , And then, . I mentioned earlier we use Slack, and that's more for like culture building and like quick communication. But if we are having discussions in Slack, we wanna make sure that if it needs to be saved, whatever decision or however we're doing the process, whatever we've decided on that needs to go into Asana related to that task or into notion to capture it as documentation.

[00:20:51] Hector: mentioned there's the tool, which I think is its own sort of challenge, and I'm a tool nerd, so I have to like with my operations guy, like I. Delay our transition for like almost six months because we had just switched to another one. And then I was like, we got found, I found notion we're gonna switch to another one.

[00:21:12] Hector: And so like you said, there's this human part of it, right, of actually, okay, there's the task and then there's knowing how to test, but then they're actually getting the people to use the tools. And for me, I found that that's a. challenge for us, perhaps because I'm such an early adopter that I'm, so willing to try and do new things.

[00:21:30] Hector: But are there things that you have found that have helped? , I would imagine even like, particularly like older generations use things like Slack and Notion in as.

[00:21:43] Madi: Yeah, so one of the things that I do for helping change behavior is trying to make it harder for them to find the information simply by asking. Someone. So for example, if you had team members coming to you and they were saying, Hey, how do I solve this problem? Or, Hey, where do I find this information? You say, instead of giving them the answer, you say, have you checked here first?

[00:22:04] Madi: you kind of force them to go and look. And if they come back and they're like, I still couldn't find it, could you help me out? Then it's like you might take a minute to show them in Loom or something, or you get on a call with them. Again, depending on your time availability, someone else on the team could potentially do this.

[00:22:17] Madi: Have them pull up the tool and have them walk through it because we have to get them used to looking in these places and used to using the tools. So that's one way when. Questions or problems come up, I would walk them through. It takes a little more time, but if you want to have people adopt, you have to get them used to using it.

[00:22:36] Madi: And one big thing I always tell founders too is that you do not have to be the one teaching everyone how to do this. You can utilize other team members. And there's actually a, graphic that I have that I, I could share with you, we could put in the show notes that. , Is called the founder dot diagram, is what I call it.

[00:22:50] Madi: So essentially imagine a founder is a central dot, and when you're starting out as a solopreneur, it's just you. Then when you add someone else, there's another.off to the side and there's this a line between the two. And then that works okay? 'cause you're just communicating. But the more dots you add on the outside, if you just have lines going straight into the founder.

[00:23:07] Madi: You're gonna get overwhelmed, and I see this happen all the time. What we have to do actually, when we bring on new team members is create connections between the dots on the outside, all of the different people. Because when we do that, the founder is not the bottleneck. The founder is not the one who's fielding all these questions, and especially in a remote environment, no one can see that.

[00:23:25] Madi: If you are in an office, you could see if a bunch of people were going by the founder's office every two minutes to ask questions. Can't see that. In a remote environment. So if we create relationships, we other between other team members, we use them as onboarding buddies, we use them as training buddies, whatever it is, that will also free up the founder and that will make it easier for these people to adopt to these new tools too.

[00:23:44] Hector: I am sad that we only have a few more minutes left, but one of the things that we haven't touched on as much is the fuel part of it, and I think that perhaps it's kind of interesting that, at least in my head, operations and marketing occupy different pillars or they are, At least apparently in my head, distinct or different.

[00:24:05] Hector: You've grouped them together. how do you see those two working together? Or in which ways do you think that the operations really can drive the marketing and sales side of.

[00:24:16] Madi: Well, for one example, when I. Is working at another company. I helped with the, , customer support side of the business and customer success. And so I was inside a lot of the communication with existing customers. And if we can take that information and share it back to our marketing team or to our sales team based on what, like if our customers are really delighted with what we're delivering to them, that's something that we should share to marketing and sales and the internal team who's dealing with everything.

[00:24:44] Madi: After a sale is made, needs to be partnering with those other departments, those other team members, because we all have different insights. If marketing and sales can also communicate what they're seeing, whether it's data or in conversations back to other people who are helping to deliver the service.

[00:25:00] Madi: That can create a more cohesive experience for our customers, for our clients, but we have to treat each other like, , we're all pieces of the same team and we have different strengths and we have different, , perspectives. You know, like there's that idea of if you're looking at an elephant, one person sees the trunk, once person sees the leg, we have to.

[00:25:20] Madi: Give ourselves the opportunity to communicate and create this whole picture together, because that's how we deliver fantastic experiences. And as far as your question around, , the fuel overall, part of the reason it's together is because I can dive really deep on these other pillars and these other ones.

[00:25:35] Madi: In most cases, I'm going to refer to someone like you guys, for example, , because that's your specialty. But I still wanna call it out when I do these audits because I will see it. And they need to know that this is something that they need to address.

[00:25:48] Hector: Yeah, I think operationalizing that side of it is so important just because whether businesses you know, they run on word of mouth or referrals or like, I know there's been times in the business where. business just happens and I'm like, it's sort of like magic marketing and I don't really know what's happening.

[00:26:06] Hector: Like, you know, things, I'm doing stuff, but nothing's being tracked there's less of a system, , behind it that can be replicatable or that eventually the founder can be removed from, which I think is, is ultimately goal for most.

[00:26:18] Madi: Exactly. Yeah. And you need someone who can create those systems for you and continue to make them better and iterate on them so that you can be less and less involved.

[00:26:27] Hector: Right, because I think so many founders, and I, myself included, put myself in that bucket, we're the rainmakers. And so we go out there and close deals and get clients and, and that's cool. And it makes us feel good and, you know, gives us, you know, it boosts our ego. , But it also leads to burnout.

[00:26:41] Hector: well, I got two more questions for you. , But is there anything else that we missed today that you wanted to make sure that we touched on or that you think is relevant to today's conversation?

[00:26:52] Madi: I would say that if you are trying to grow your business and things feel very chaotic, you need to bring some type of operations person in. I'd be happy to work with anyone who has that challenge. But don't try and do it on your own because if you try and just. White knuckle it through. You're gonna have more friction, more burnout, and more frustration.

[00:27:10] Hector: Sure. And if people wanted to find out more about you or go deeper in your world, I think you have, , what's the best place for people to go?

[00:27:17] Madi: Yeah, so my website is building remote.co, no m at the end, so building remote.co. And then I also have an assessment called the Founder's Focus Assessment that , we can. Link in the show notes, if that's cool for listeners to go through. And essentially what it does is it helps to create clarity on what you are spending your time on and what you should be spending your time on.

[00:27:36] Madi: Part of this process helps to pull out what are the things that I either procrastinate on or really avoid or I'm not good at. And it helps to bring some clarity to, should I be doing this work? Should I hire this out? Or is there a smarter way to do this? And most of the time, founders don't take that time to do it.

[00:27:50] Madi: So it's one of the very first activities. , I encourage when I start talking with someone.

[00:27:55] Hector: Cool, and we'll definitely link that up in the show notes as well. , My last question for you, Maddie, is in your. Opinion. What is the secret to scaling a business?

[00:28:04] Madi: A growth mindset because not only do you have to have a growth mindset, if you want to, you know, try different things on the marketing side, but you have to have a growth mindset in order to improve who you are as a leader, how to grow your team and bring on people who may even be smarter than you in certain areas.

[00:28:19] Madi: Because when you're able to do that, you can bring on these rock stars, which will help to elevate your business and be able to scale faster.