Where Brands Get Their Edge

Most founders don't actually own a business. They own a job that pays them better.

In this episode, Borzou and Amanda sit down with **Jordan Solender** — operator across IT services, event and concert production, video, telemarketing, and a Maryland DJ company — who's known for one thing in particular: getting himself out of every business he touches in **6 to 9 months**.

Jordan walks through the exact playbook: the **week-off stress test** that exposes what's broken, why intake and handoffs are the first place to automate, how his DJ company's post-sale flow uses AI-generated welcome videos and 48-hour DJ intros, and why **founders don't micromanage because they love control — they do it because it makes them feel useful**.

If you're stuck being the help desk for your own team, this one's the kick in the ass.

### Topics Covered

- What "getting out of the business" actually means
- Why every business hits the same walls (and yours isn't a snowflake)
- How AI killed the excuse for not automating
- The post-sale automation flow at Maryland's DJ Family
- The week-off stress test — when to do it, when to do it again
- Building an SOP library (and why Use Whale won out)
- How granular an SOP should actually be
- Process problem vs. people problem — using personality data in hiring
- Founder ego and why micromanaging feels useful
- Cutting Slack out of your life and training your team to bring solutions, not problems

This episode is brought to you by **NickelBronx**.

Connect with us
Borzou – 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bronxzou/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/borzou/

Amanda –⁠ LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/akfischer/

Jordan – 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordansolender/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jordan.solender/

And give some love to our sponsor: https://nickelbronx.com/

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Creators and Guests

Host
Amanda Fischer
Host
Borzou Azabdaftari
Alabama-born, Virginia-raised, and Iranian-made, Borzou isn't just another CEO; he's a college dropout turned serial entrepreneur, speaker, and the brains behind the award-winning digital agency NickelBronx. Known for his prowess in branding and digital marketing, Borzou's work has garnered Hermes Creative, Clutch, and Marcom Awards. Beyond the boardroom, he's a connoisseur of design and anything aesthetically driven, embodying style with substance. Borzou's philosophy? Embrace what makes you unique; that's how you find your tribe.  When priorities with his family, health, business, and community are satisfied - you can find Borzou chasing once-in-a-lifetime experiences. His favorite things are amazing people and making memories, and he’s always adding to his collection of both.

What is Where Brands Get Their Edge?

Cutting-edge marketing news and advice for (and from) brands, founders, and marketing executives.

Jordan Solender (00:00)
If you want, I'll send you both a test to take after this and it'll do a readout. I can actually say like, how does Amanda and Boris you work together? And it'll talk about your communication based on your personality.

Borzou (00:09)
Do you want to say that?

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Where Brands Get Their Edge. If you are a founder, we've got the truth. If you're a marketer, we've got the tools. Today we have with us, as always, my co-host Amanda and Jordan Solander. I met Jordan through EO. Just, was it just last year?

Jordan Solender (00:37)
about two, no, two years ago now, cause this is my third year now. Yeah.

Borzou (00:39)
Two years ago,

third year, and he's blown me away in a couple of ways. And most, the most significant one, and he's a multiple, not just business, but like industry successful entrepreneur. But mostly because he gets himself out of all his businesses, whether he starts them or buys them, in what, six to nine months?

Jordan Solender (00:57)
That's the goal, six to nine months is the goal, yeah.

Borzou (01:02)
Yeah, and that's like something that sounds cool until you see him do it and then it gets a lot more impressive. Jordan, give us rundown of industries first.

Jordan Solender (01:11)
All right, so industries that I'm in right now, so IT procurement, MSP and IT services, event and concert production, ⁓ everything down to big festivals that you would see like on ⁓ Preakness and whatnot and contributing to those, but all the way down to the weddings that would happen around you, like on a weekly basis at the local country clubs and venues and wedding on the water in the DC metro area here.

I also have businesses in video production out in Colorado, and I've had businesses in telemarketing with huge call centers, both in the Philippines and Bogota, but also in Chico, California. So a little bit of everything all in between.

Amanda (01:50)
first of all, can we get some invites to those festivals and concerts? That sounds cool. you say you get out of a business, what does that mean specifically?

Jordan Solender (01:54)
Absolutely, let's

Getting, yeah, so out of the business, it can mean a lot of different things. Being out of the business doesn't mean disappearing. It means you're no longer the default solution. I'm a big believer in that you can only ask your team to do what you've already mastered in that business, right? So you're not approving every decision. You're not fixing every problem. You're not the first call when something breaks. Your job really shifts to three things at that nine or 10 month mark, right? When you're really getting out of it.

Directions, standards, and people. If a task requires your hands, you're still in the business. And if it requires your judgment, even once, you're building the business. It runs without you when you're out of it. So we want to figure out how you empower your team to build systems so it can continue to stay without you.

Borzou (02:48)
Yeah, well, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs, all entrepreneurs, they have this idea that their business is this like beautifully unique snowflake and like, ⁓ they could systemize their business because it was they're tchotchkes or this or that. And aside from like the breadth of your industries kind of proving this on its own, but we've also both seen people in every do The reality is the problems are kind of all the same and so are the solutions, right?

Jordan Solender (03:13)
Yeah, not every business is super unique, right? We're not all talking about like say Uber and Lyft here, right? like founders love to believe that their business is special. It's a, nobody wants to call the baby ugly, right? Like that's the big thing. Nobody wants to call their baby ugly, but the product changes ⁓ between each business, but the problems don't kind of like you said, there are some commonalities here. Every business hits the same walls. There is typically too much founder dependency at some point. There's messy handoffs between say sales and on.

boarding or there's no clear ownership with account management and marketing and decisions typically get stuck at the top, which is where you and I sit, right? So systems aren't for boring businesses. They're for interesting businesses that survive growth and then they keep growing.

Amanda (03:59)
And they're also for boring businesses. Systems are good for businesses, I

Jordan Solender (04:00)
Yeah, they're also for boring businesses.

Borzou (04:00)
you

Jordan Solender (04:05)
Yes.

Borzou (04:05)
Well, and I think There

used to be more of a cost barrier to automating a lot of this kind of stuff, but with AI technology, the way things are going, and this is another area Jordan's proven to be a super reliable and valuable asset for me, it's become a lot easier, right? You don't need a super or mind or a platform. can kind of like, know, jerry-ring and duct tape a lot of stuff together.

Jordan Solender (04:27)
You you absolutely can there's so many great solutions that can give you just like the first toe in the water of it I mean automation used to be so expensive and intimidating, but now it's a set one going through duct taping thing It's accessible and scrappy. I would say right you don't need a massive tech team You just need to know what you want to do and then the intent to do it and AI didn't make this complicated It actually removed the excuse for you having to not do it

Most systems today are just smart duct tape and that's fine, but the goal here isn't perfection. It's a way to help your team automate things so you can get out of the way.

Amanda (05:03)
Is there a go-to first thing that you automate or put in place? Yeah. I mean, just don't, know, if, there like one standard area that you look at most of the time first to try to automate with whatever business you're helping?

Jordan Solender (05:07)
a go-to first thing that I would automate in any business.

Yeah. So the first

thing I always look at, um, I was going for my water bottle, but it was the matter of water. Uh, the first thing I always look at is intake and handoffs always. It's the first place I start. So how does work come in? Who owns it next? And what does done when we start that work actually mean? Right. So if you're working on a marketing project and somebody signs, where does it go from there? Where is it slowing down? Who picks it up next? What is the perfect.

you know, next handoff look like, how should it be before it goes to the next person, whether it's account management, project management, before the Slack channel is created, what does everything need to be done before we go ahead and move it? Those are always the things I'm looking at first. It's definitely around intake and handoffs.

Borzou (06:01)
So, but post sale then or pre-sale as well?

Jordan Solender (06:04)
Both, I mean both, both. mean, the sales funnel is obviously really important, but typically I'm looking at right before the customer signs and then I would say the 48 hours post close to see what happens.

Borzou (06:17)
Well, and that's an important thing because like it getting done is one thing and how quickly and efficiently it gets done is another. And I know you pride yourself on how quickly these things happen. After signs, will you walk us through any one of the flows for your companies and how that looks?

Jordan Solender (06:31)
Sure, so let's talk about, I'll do one for each. I'll do pre-sales and then I'll do a post-sale. How about that? Because they're good for different reasons, right? Pre-sale creates automation leverage, right? Post-sale creates freedom that way you don't have to, as the founder, you don't actually have to worry about things getting done correctly. So let's talk about client onboarding. Let's do post first actually, right? So the second somebody signs,

three things happen automatically in every single one of my businesses. And I'll use the wedding DJ company as the example here. First, a welcome email goes out to the couple. Thanks for being here. Here's a custom GIF that we have AI generate. Like we're excited. It includes, we actually have, we just started this recently, actually. We tied it into Sora AI and we have to make an AI video of them, a picture of the couple at their wedding venue.

Super unique, super unique. It's really cool. So we have that automatically happen. So a welcome email goes out, welcome to the family, the DJ, Maryland's DJ family. That's name of the company with a clear timeline, a clear next step. Who is going to contact them next? There's no confusion. Happens immediately. Almost the minute they sign. The second is intake fires, right? And it's not just a giant form, just to move fast.

Borzou (07:21)
Very good. Yeah.

Jordan Solender (07:44)
It's who they are, what they got from us and what success looks like. So as soon as they sign the customer actually gets the welcome email, but our operations team gets an email that says like approve this and they'll hit approve in Slack. And then another form goes out to the client that says, thanks for booking these five things with us. You got drums, a saxophone and a DJ. Can you tell us what your interest was in these? So we can start taking notes on what songs we should start prepping our musicians for. Right. So just interaction.

And then finally, ownership. So it's not the team that's hanging out. It's actually a name, a face, a DJ. So we'll engage the DJ and the DJ will automatically send an email out 48 hours later. And the welcome email said, hey, in 48 hours, your DJ is going to reach out just to say hi. And it's a picture of him, his bio and all of his contact information. So now there's a plan, right? There's no more back and forth. There's no ambiguity about what happens after somebody signs up.

Borzou (08:38)
So when you're saying 48 hours, it automatically goes out. He doesn't send it in 48 hours. It automatically gets sent. Yeah.

Jordan Solender (08:44)
Correct, yeah, we have

automations in place that automatically send it out from his email and they'll reply to his email.

Borzou (08:51)
I want to talk a little bit about, and this is something Jordan talks about a lot, that Founders should take a week off. And if you haven't, it's great. You should try think for the first, I don't think I took a full year off for the first 15 years, I was an entrepreneur.

Amanda (09:05)
full year you don't you mean a full week for

Borzou (09:07)
a full week off for the first 15 years I

was an And method is take a week off and go dark. No no replies, no Slack, no texts. Like literally give it a week and come back and see what happens. And coincidentally, I was out of town all week last week and I was available and I probably had two or three things they needed help with.

And it definitely felt like things they shouldn't need help with. You know what I mean? I'm not 100 % I wrote it down, but I think a lot of people are scared to try A, because the business is so dependent on them, but also because of what could go wrong when they're out. So talk us through that process and why people need to do it.

Jordan Solender (09:42)
This is a fun test, but you can only really do it if you feel that you have like a competent team, right? And a gold image has been set. But this is the fastest way to find the truth, right? Of your team, who's capable, who's not, what's not written down enough. To your point of, you know, 15 years without a week off, right? Like most founders don't avoid time off because they're lazy. They avoid it because it exposes that there's some shit that's not working.

Borzou (10:08)
Do you know what my wedding anniversary is?

Jordan Solender (10:08)
Thank

Do you know when wedding anniversary is?

Borzou (10:12)
I do

because it's Thanksgiving weekend. So I have a nice global reminder every year as it's rolling around because my wife was like, listen, I need to know that you're going to be focused and not have to worry about work. When do you want to get married? said Thanksgiving or Christmas. It was like that.

Jordan Solender (10:18)
Mm-hmm.

Amanda (10:26)
Yeah, but Thanksgiving does change every year, just so you know.

Borzou (10:29)
I know, but it's enough. It's enough. It's enough of a reminder that I know it's coming. Yeah. It's

Jordan Solender (10:34)
Yeah. but

the, well, but just like your wedding, right? The week off isn't about, rest. It's a stress test, right? You, you, you go dark on purpose. That's what this is, right? No Slack, no texts, no teams, no checking in. And what breaks should tell you everything. What escalates shouldn't, right? Who steps up where decisions actually stall, right?

Borzou (10:36)
enough a reminder for me to check the calendar before the day before.

Amanda (10:40)
Thank you.

Borzou (10:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jordan Solender (10:59)
those two or three questions that you came back to, right? That's the work, right? Not answering them, eliminating the need for them. So in that situation, know, writing those questions down and then figuring out, all right, well, where do we keep our SOPs? And somebody could easily search like, what is Borders you do in this situation? That fixes that problem. It'll never happen again. So in fact, ⁓ I actually have my operations person at one of my companies, the production company.

Her name is Aja. She's fantastic. I love you, Aja, if you're listening. Aja's fantastic. One of her main job purposes is to manage the SOP library. So once a month, every month for an hour, she books me. And anything that she could not find in the SOP library, she has a Word document with. And she forces me to sit there for an hour and update the SOP library. And when I first hired her to do this, it was a lot.

Right? But every month it gets less and less to the point where we get these meetings done in like five to 15 minutes now, because it's like edge cases, like weird stuff.

Borzou (11:58)
So two adjacent questions. One, because I think this is, again, a place we'll get hung up on the complexity and how needs to look. What is your SOP library built in?

Jordan Solender (12:06)
We've tried it in a lot. This is trial and error.

you got to build it where they work, not some fancy system nobody opens. So my hunt for an SOP library was two things. Doesn't have an app that they can put on their phones, Android and iOS. Right? That's where they live. They all live on their freaking phones. So I wanted people on the road. If it's a DJ at a wedding, he could look something up. Or if it's somebody in the office, they could have the app on their computer.

A lot of the times we started in Google, when I start a brand new company, if I'm not buying something, we'll start it in just Google Drive and we'll just throw documents in there and we'll just search things, right? This is the SOP library. As things have gotten bigger, we tried things like trainual. We tried a service now implementation that was really complicated. I would not recommend you do that unless you're a multi-billion dollar company. But now we actually settled on a group called a whale. So it's called the whale app.

So I think the website is like getwhale.io or .com maybe, but it's yeah. So it, it's pretty awesome. They have an AI overlay on top of it. So people can ask the AI things like, Hey, how do I do this? And then it'll immediately pull up the right SOP. You can turn videos of yourself narrating things and it'll automatically generate an SOP. That's typically what I do now. I'll spend five minutes recording a video of myself and then it'll write it out. It's pretty awesome.

Borzou (13:01)
That's cute, get it, get well.

Just for everyone listening, it's usewhale.com, which frankly I think is much less cute. So something as simple as Google Docs, place to start,

Jordan Solender (13:25)
There you go. Use well. Yes. Yeah.

I really like use whale. If you want to start in Google docs, start in Google docs. need a, you need something though. If you don't have anything for your employees to go to in with your process on everything that you do in your business, that's the first thing you got to focus on. And you don't have to spend a ton of money to do it. You can do it in Google drive. can do it in SharePoint, right? Just do it in one drive wherever just you need a document.

Amanda (13:55)
how granular do you get with that?

Jordan Solender (13:58)
Super granular.

Amanda (13:59)
I was figuring that. So I was like hoping for ⁓ examples just because I think people really need to understand everything that they need to document.

Jordan Solender (14:06)
So granular enough that somebody brand new on your team can now run a process. Not so granular that it turns into a novel, right? This isn't like a Bridgerton trendy call out because I'm in the middle of it. But I don't document keystrokes. I document decisions, what should be happening. So where people usually get stuck and what matters if it's going wrong, what to do if it's not obvious.

Amanda (14:15)
doing it so...

Yeah.

Jordan Solender (14:29)
If a smart hire still has to ask me questions, it's not granular enough. If no one wants to read it, it's too granular. So you gotta find your medium depending on your business, right? Like if you're calling out Photoshop layers that, you know, probably too granular. If you're saying this is the program you click into, you know, and then you go from there, it's probably not granular enough. So what I always recommend, record yourself. Just make a video.

Borzou (14:52)
are you doing it? Yeah, yeah, not just talking about it.

Jordan Solender (14:53)
Yeah, so you doing it.

Yeah, record yourself of a video of you doing it and then upload it into an AI that'll write it out for

Borzou (15:00)
And whale.defa has that feature. Obviously people could try to, you know, use something like chat GPT or Gemini or whatever, but then everything's not gonna be in the same place. That's the only downside. Unless, unless you make a custom GPT. Are we not doing that yet?

Jordan Solender (15:09)
Yep. Yeah.

So you can absolutely do a custom GPT. I have a custom GPT for every single one of my businesses. It's fantastic. The problem is with custom GPTs, this is where I don't a hundred percent rely on AI. You got to check its work. And when it tells an employee the wrong process or makes an assumption on a process, right? Well, that's where things can get kind of hairy. So I almost rather have the SOP library and let my team use that.

Borzou (15:39)
gonna have to check this out.

Amanda (15:40)
Very helpful.

Jordan Solender (15:41)
I have a discount link if you need a discount link.

Amanda (15:41)
Yeah, that's really cool. It sounds really good. this sounds like something that might be great for us.

Borzou (15:43)
Give it to me and I will put it in for everyone when we post this

Jordan Solender (15:46)
Cool. Yeah.

Borzou (15:50)
Yeah.

I think a lot of founders have couple issues stepping back, right? I think part of it is organization. I think part of it is you said the team's really important. I think you and I are you know, culture and attitude being more important than skill set, right? But I think a lot of time people don't work out because of processes, not the people. And founders don't know that.

Do you have a kind of litmus test to see where the issue is if it's processor or the person?

Jordan Solender (16:19)
So I actually break this into two different problems, but.

Borzou (16:22)
Mm.

Jordan Solender (16:23)
So I try to vet the person in a unique way prior to hiring them. So recently, I actually, another EO, his name is Jason, I could pull his name if I need to. we just, so I'm sure you both have done like these culture index and these, ENTJ. Like we already know are typically the same, but.

Borzou (16:39)
Yeah, all that shit.

Amanda (16:44)
Yeah.

Jordan Solender (16:45)
I reached out to like the EO world, like community. was just like, how are you handling just like avoiding churn in this world of AI and personalities in the right role for the seat? And I know this is taking a weird turn on this question, but how are people doing this? Because I know you can legally do these personality tests, but at the same time, how do you take that data, interpret it for the right role? Right? Came across this guy in Texas named Jason who started a company called Active Index. This thing is

Lack of a better term, fucking wild. So it's a mobile first personality test. It competes directly with all your major players. It shows comparisons and the science behind why it's better. Then just like anything else I use, it has a layer of AI and you can ask it like, hey, Borsu just took this test. It's for a client on boarding role. It's typically very customer facing. This is where they would be successful. And then it'll run through your personality markers and say, this is why he's a good fit. This is why he's not.

I would definitely, you know, nine out of 10 hire this person or hire somebody like him that does it has these personality markers. Since we've implemented this, like our churn has been like cut in half, like probably a third of what it was, which is pretty wild. And we've actually implemented this across every company. We probably have had close to 200 people take tests and, you know, hiring and whatnot. So to answer your question about the right person in litmus test person for the role.

That's how I'm doing that on the front end now.

Borzou (18:07)
Well, and I think it's important for everyone to know that like you got a little bit of in-person, a little bit of virtual, a little bit of offshore. Like he's covering a lot of different bases one test.

Jordan Solender (18:18)
Yeah, well, it's pretty interesting.

If you want, I'll send you both a test to take after this and it'll do a readout. I can actually say like, how does Amanda and Boris you work together? And it'll talk about your communication based on your personality.

Amanda (18:29)
Thank

Borzou (18:29)
Do you want to say that?

Jordan Solender (18:33)
So it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I would say if you're not using something like this in your business, if you had, if you, you know, people looked at this like 20 years as like revolutionary, but then it started fading off and you never almost see this in hiring practice anymore. I think it's going to come back in a big way now that we have AI to interpret and tell us what to do with it. Because before we had this data, but we didn't know what to do with that data.

Borzou (18:34)
Tell us something we don't know, Jordan. ⁓

Amanda (18:37)
Yeah.

Borzou (18:56)
Yeah.

Jordan Solender (18:57)
And now we have

something interpreting it for us in layman's terms saying like this person will be a good fit for the role because don't put them in this role because.

Borzou (19:06)
Amanda's gonna be like, seaboard? I told you you had to And then my third thing around it was gonna be around, and I don't know if I want to call it like founder ego or like need to feel important or like micromanaging, right? But there's an element of like,

Amanda (19:09)
I'm sorry.

Borzou (19:25)
just letting go or like being willing to let go yeah. Do you feel that was really directed at me Jordan? think is like the third bottleneck to removing the bottleneck if you will. How do you deal with that with people you work with?

Amanda (19:28)
Yes. Yes.

Jordan Solender (19:39)
Founder ego ooh. So this is the hardest one and not because it's tactical, but because it's so emotional. Right, it's going back to the calling your baby ugly thing, everybody gets offended, right? You're not a snowflake. Founders don't micromanage because they love control. They micromanage because it makes them feel useful a lot of the time. I have found this to be true in 99.9 % of cases, right? Like you wanna jump in, you wanna

You want to insert yourself, but letting go feels like losing relevance, right? With your team, especially because if the business grew because of you, right? And now it's growing because of their team members and processes that you built, right? It's going to feel like losing relevance. The shift is this. You stop measuring your value by what you do. You measure it by what happens without you on that one week vacation.

You got to force distance on purpose. So fewer decisions, fewer check-ins, fewer rescues, right? And I remind myself that if I'm still needed for everything, I didn't actually build leverage. I built dependence on me. So putting some space between you and your business, you know, that's what you should feel proud of, right? That it grew without you as opposed to, no, I need to get in there.

Amanda (20:51)
that's awesome. I think that I just like how you stated that. But I was wanting to go back to the leaving the business for a week and say like, it didn't go that well, right? When do you try it again? Like, when do know that you can try this exercise again? Because you're gonna have to try it again because the whole idea is that it's the business can run without you.

Jordan Solender (21:11)
Once you start looking at the break points of the things that fell apart, then I mean, you could try it again, right? But you definitely don't wait like six months, right? You fix what broke and then you rerun the test. And in my mind, the rule is you try it again as soon as the same problems won't hit you twice. So every issue from the first week becomes a decision rule or an SOP, right? And then you try it. When you do try it again,

Maybe it's three days, maybe it's five days, then it's a week and you can kind of slowly increase. You know, it depends on what shape your business is in. So if you left for two days and everything just started going haywire, right? You should step back in, address those problems and make those SOPs, make those rules, make those escalation paths. The next time do it for three days. And you know, you gradually increase. I don't, I don't think there's like a set time that I would wait to just do it again. I wouldn't wait, like I said, six months. I would probably wait like a month.

Amanda (22:01)
Good news,

Borsie, you can go on another vacation.

Borzou (22:02)
Not gonna lie,

that was my takeaway. be out this week as well. I also, and I'm not proud of this, but I got more work done on that flight than I think there's something to locking me in a little box and not giving me access to anything. Jordan's not gonna like this at all. But I think I wanna just cut slack out of my life.

Like if, well, no, no, no. I'm gonna let you guys keep it. I'm just not gonna be on it. And if you guys need me, you can find me a different way. Yeah.

Amanda (22:26)
You've been saying that for like years at this. ⁓

I'm fine with that.

Jordan Solender (22:33)
Just smoke signals

in the abyss.

Borzou (22:35)
Yeah, well, I mean, dude, everyone's got access to me at least once a week somewhere. You know what I mean? And if it can't wait that long, it deserves a text or some shit.

Jordan Solender (22:44)
I do say sometimes, right. And I've said it to my team that Slack has turned me into a help desk for my team. So yeah. Yeah. So cutting your, now it doesn't hurt the business. It actually kind of forces the business to grow up.

Borzou (22:50)
Yeah, I mean, that's how I feel. Yeah.

And by the way, extrapolate that over like 50 open projects and five questions for each one. your point, a lot of them I probably don't need to weigh in on.

So if someone's listening to this and I'm gonna kind of cover this, but for the first time, right? Is there, everyone's gonna have their own reasons why they can't do this. They're not big enough, they don't have enough revenue, they don't have enough people, right?

What is either road mark they should look for that it's time to start or if they should be starting regardless, what's your motivating advice for them?

Jordan Solender (23:26)
I don't think any business is too big or too small to start this, but most founders are gonna wait for permission they'll never get, right? You don't need more revenue, you don't need more people, you need fewer excuses. So the trigger I use is if you have five or more active projects, it's already time.

So if people ask you the same questions every week, it's overdue. If your calendar is full, but progress feels really slow, you probably should have done this a long time ago. So start smaller than a week, right? Start with one rule, no answering questions that already exist somewhere, no decisions without an owner. The goal isn't gonna disappear. It's time to stop being the help desk for the rest of your team.

And if you're thinking like, can't do this yet, that's usually a sign you need to do it the most probably, right? Just, just take a step back. you know, something I have been one of, ⁓ the coaching clients that I've been working with lately, he's telling me that his team is constantly bringing him problems. And I said, well, why do you think that they can do that? And he goes, well, I'm the only one that could solve them. And I'm like, well, have you asked them for the solutions? And he goes, what do you mean? And I said,

Next time they come to you with a problem, I want you to just say very simply, can you bring me three solutions and see what they come back to you with? Because right now, every single time they come to you with a problem and you're fixing it, you're training them that they're not to be empowered, right? You need to empower your team so the business can grow. And by empowering the team and the business growing allows you to step back. So come to me with a solution if you also have a problem. You know, there's so much AI out there that if you're not asking AI,

before coming to me, that's an even bigger problem. Right? Go get three solutions and then come back to me.

Borzou (25:01)
That has been, for me, a surprisingly hard thing to drill into people, ask AI first. Yeah. And we have, you know, pay Jack's GPT for everyone, have paid Gemini for it. It's not the lack of available resources. You know?

Jordan Solender (25:07)
Ask AI first. Yeah.

Try that next time.

Just say, come back to me with solutions and then we'll talk about it.

Amanda (25:20)
think that maybe I'm trying to think about why that might be the case. It's like a lot of these things have to do with specific clients and softer skills and how to approach that specific client based on their history and based on maybe a number of other things that have happened. So I don't think that we have the data into AI enough to understand the scenario that they need a solution for a lot of the times. mean, you know, it's obviously like software

Borzou (25:45)
All right. This is for Jordan. Let's not get too much into our business. I'm just

Amanda (25:45)
skills in general, I, yeah.

You know.

Jordan Solender (25:51)
would you like an idea of how I'd handle that though?

Borzou (25:53)
Yeah, actually, yeah.

Amanda (25:53)
I would love

an idea! Yeah, see look!

Jordan Solender (25:55)
Okay. So,

okay. So here, more technical, like on how I'd get into this, but this is something I've actually done before. however you're recording your meetings, right? Whether it's click up zoom, whatever you're doing, take the transcript automatically have an automation platform, download the transcript, upload it to a file on Google drive and have projects in either in chat GPT or whatever AI model that you're using.

read all the transcripts for that client. So it always has relevance. The transcripts will automatically and say, Camilla, who is fantastic on your team, by the way, comes in and says, Jordan's social media is having this problem. What's going on? Well, she's going to have every single transcript from the past, however many meetings. So it'll give a recommendation based on Jordan's sentiment. It'll give a recommendation based on my account and what we've talked about before. It'll have the proposal in there for relevance and scope.

That might be a cool way to do it for you guys. I'm just thinking like, how do you do that with more bedside manner and relevant? The only thing that would be missing. Yeah.

Borzou (26:48)
Yeah.

Amanda (26:50)
Yeah, so that's what I

was getting at. I understand that there is an ability here to prime the AI to better solve these problems. And we haven't gone that far yet. So I know you guys, know you're working on some stuff, B. but.

Borzou (27:03)
We're gonna a lot of Otherwise,

I this was great for everyone watching. There are a lot of people who do systems, AI, bullshit stuff. But Jordan's the only one who's done it, right? Like did it for each of his businesses make his life better and easier, has gotten out of all of his businesses and...

really, and I saw it, I saw people harassing him, like how do do this, how do you do this, how do you this, kind of like we're doing with him here. that led into him kind of starting his coaching thing. And if you're gonna do something like this, I absolutely think it should be from someone who's like done the work and done it for a variety of businesses. So if you're looking for someone to give you the kick in the ass you need and help set the stuff up for you, Jordan is the best that I know. Any closing guys?

Jordan Solender (27:46)
Thank you.

Borzou (27:48)
No? We'll have links for Whale anything else here, here, here. Follow Jordan, follow us and we will see you when you see her.

Amanda (27:49)
I mean, this was.

Jordan Solender (27:54)
Thanks for having me guys. See ya.

Amanda (27:56)
Yeah.