I / We / They Framework: 3 Simple Steps to Grow Your Business

What's going on everybody? Welcome to the First Class Founders podcast. The goal of this show is to help you discover your passions and build a business doing what you love. My name is Yong-Soo Chung and I'm the Founder of Urban EDC, an e-commerce brand selling everyday carry gear, and GrowthJet, a Climate Neutral Certified third-party logistics company. For the past 7 years, I built an 8-figure business around my passions and now, I'm ready to share all the mistakes I made and lessons I learned with you.

Today, I'm going to share with you a framework that I developed to help me gain clarity on what I need to work depending on the stage of my business. As entrepreneurs, we're all juggling a hundred different things all at once. I felt the same way when I first started out.

I call this the 'I / We / They' framework and it has changed how I approach my own business. In fact, the moment I began to think about my business using this framework, my business growth accelerated. 

I wish that someone had taught me this framework 7 years ago when I first became an entrepreneur. Well, I'm here to share this framework with you today to cut down years worth of learning into one short episode.

Let's dive in!

Let's begin today's lesson with a story.

When a new baby elephant is born, its mother protects and cares for it as if her life depends on it.

She nurtures her babies and protects them from dangerous predators such as a pride of lions looking for their next meal.

As the calves grow older and begin to understand the world around them, the mother teaches their calves who their friends are, and who represent potential threats.

These young elephants acquire their knowledge by learning what the adult elephants around them are eating, and they practice their mothering skills by following the behavior of mothers of newborn calves.

Finally, when they are ready, the elephants go out on their own into the wild.

This metaphor describes the "I / We / They" framework that we'll be discussing today.

There are 3 parts to this framework: Experimental, Operational, and Scaleable, corresponding to I, We, and They respectively.

The Experimental phase of your business starts with yourself. This is where the "I" portion of this framework comes into play.

The Experimental phase is characterized by building your audience and validating your ideas.
 
So let's say that you’ve made the leap and started your own business.

You have a pretty good idea of the product or service you’ll be offering, but you’re still identifying your target audience.

During this phase, you're trying lots of new things. You're trying this, you're trying that. You're still exploring what might work and that's OK.

This phase tends to have the greatest fear of failure and self-doubt as you'll have more questions than answers.

During this phase, you might be spending too much time researching, looking for inspiration, buying online courses, or watching others who are already further ahead than you.

You might be thinking that this is what you need to do to grow your business but sometimes it can have the opposite effect. You might feel overwhelmed by all the information and don't know where to start. You may even lose motivation altogether.

Don't worry, this is all part of the experimental phase.

Now, here's how to level up to the next phase of your business.

Spark your curiosity. Get out there and talk to your target audience about their pain points. Test and validate your ideas to see if anybody would be willing to pay you for your product or service to solve their particular problem.

Build an email list of your potential customers so that you can reach out to them when your product is ready.

It's critical at this stage to get as much feedback as possible from potential customers and filter out the useful signals from all the noise.

Don’t let fear get in the way of this essential step. Get out of your comfort zone. 

Nothing beats talking to real potential customers.

The insights you get from these conversations will be invaluable and can either make or break your business.

Think about your offering, target audience, pricing, and perhaps even your business model.

Stay flexible and be open to whatever feedback might come up.

Ultimately, you want to find product / market fit of your offering for your intended audience.

In my opinion, it's important that you, as the business owner and creator, stay involved during this phase.

Think of it like giving birth to a new baby, except that your baby is a business venture.

Remember the mother elephant at the beginning of this story? This stage will require a lot of hustle from you, which is why this is the "I" phase of this framework.

Until you hone in and nail this stage, you'll want to stay lean and flexible.

Here's a pro tip: Your friends and family are great to lean on for support during this phase, but they're probably not your ideal customer avatar.  

So if you do get feedback from your friends and family about your product or service, take it with a grain of salt.

They want to see you succeed so they're not going to give you feedback like a real paying customer would.

For example, when I launched Urban EDC, I knew that my friends and family weren't my target audience.

I was selling fancy bottle openers and expensive pocket knives.

So I didn't get feedback from them because I knew they weren't my target audience.

Get out there and talk to real potential customers who will actually pay for your product or service.

Don't take any shortcuts here.

Okay, let’s move on to the 'We' part of this framework and that is the Operational phase.

But before we move on, please consider sharing this episode with a friend who might also be starting a new business or a side hustle. As you may already know, word-of-mouth referral is the best way to grow this show. Thank you in advance! I really do appreciate every share.

Okay, back to the show.

So after the Experimental phase, you should have a product or service that your potential customers are willing to buy.

You may even have some sales rolling in by now and you're starting to get excited.

This is typically one of the most exciting phases of starting your own business.

You've worked long hours to validate your idea and build your audience and now, you're starting to see the fruits of your labor pay off.

But, as your business starts taking off, you're going to be pulled in a thousand different directions.

Your customers are emailing you, your product might have bugs that need to be fixed, you may need to upgrade your servers, and you barely have time to eat, sleep, and shower.

You have no choice but to wear all sorts of different hats as you frantically try to keep up with everything that's being thrown at you.

This can be overwhelming but don't worry.

As crazy as this sounds, this is all part of the process. You're on the right track.

Now is the time to build systems and processes to keep yourself from running around and driving yourself crazy.

You need to create three primary systems:

The first is a lead-generating process.

So think about where your potential customers are hanging out, provide value to those customers, establish your authority within that niche, and finally, convert your audience into real paying customers.

You're building out your marketing funnel to move cold leads to warm leads, then warm leads to real customers.

Figure out how you will differentiate yourself from similar offerings on the market.

This is your revenue-generating system so take some time to optimize it.

I did a deep dive on how to find, nurture, and grow your audience in episode 12 if you're interested in learning more. I'll link it in the show notes.

The second system you need to build out is the value delivery for your product or service.

What does this mean?

Value delivery simply means once you have a paying customer, how are you fulfilling what you promised to your customer to make sure they are happy?

Let's do a simple example of what value delivery means.

So let's say you have an online shop selling t-shirts. You figured out your lead generation piece to this puzzle so you have some potential customers shopping on your site.

Now, when your potential customer buys your shirt, are you capable of delivering that t-shirt in a timely manner to your customer? And more importantly, did the t-shirt live up to the expectations of your customer?

This is value delivery.

As part of setting up this value delivery system, it's really important to set up feedback loops here with your customers to continuously assess your value delivery mechanism.

If your customers are happy, ask them for referrals or write a review.

If they're unhappy, find out why so you can improve your product.

The third is an operational process to monitor both the lead generation side and the value delivery side of your business.

Here, you're just making sure that the wheels don't fall off with either the lead generation or value delivery systems.

You're creating a process for managing those two processes.

This can be a bit confusing so let's do an example showcasing all three processes.

Let's say you just opened up a pizza shop. Because you're short on cash, you make friends with a couple of neighboring small businesses around you and bake them a fresh, delicious pizza with all their favorite toppings.

They love your pizza and tell all their customers who are looking for a great lunch spot about your pizza place down the street.

For you, this lead generation process is working so you decide to make friends with even more businesses around you. This time, you document the process into a Standard Operating Procedure so you can hire an intern to go around and become friends with all the businesses in your neighborhood.

This is your lead generation process.

Now, back at your pizza place, it's starting to get busy. Word has gotten out about your delicious pizza and you're running around making as many pizzas as you can.

After a couple weeks, you figure out an efficient process for producing a lot more pizzas without sacrificing quality.

So, what do you do?

You document this process into another Standard Operating Procedure.

This time, it's your value delivery SOP, which is separate from your lead generation SOP.

Then, you assign one of your employees to be in charge of following this SOP and making any adjustments when necessary.

Now, it's time to create your operational process to manage both lead generation and value delivery systems.

Here, I recommend using dashboards showing your important metrics.

This way, you can take a snapshot of your business at any moment and monitor for any bottlenecks.

You can also begin to think about new growth opportunities.

Perhaps you can come up with a seasonal pizza recipe to drive more foot traffic to your store.

Typically, as the business owner, you'll be working with your team on this last operational process for a while.

You need to build an all-star caliber team around you to help you with these 3 processes.

Work with them carefully and refine these systems over time.

Mentor your team and teach them everything you know about your business.

Just as the newborn calves worked with their mothers to learn the survival skills of being an elephant, it's your job to work together with your team to teach them everything you know.

Okay, let's move on to the final part of this framework and that's scaling your business beyond yourself.

But before we get into scaling, I want to tell you about the First Class Founders Membership.

All right, we're back. Let's quickly review the first two parts of the "I / We / They" framework.

The first phase of your business is experimental. This is when you're going to try a lot of different things, go out and talk to your potential customers, and find product / market fit for your offering. You should really be the one doing this step since it's so critical to the future success of your company.

The second phase of your business is operational. When things start clicking for you, you'll be dragged in many different directions. This is the time to put systems and processes into place. Systemize your business in three areas: lead generation, value delivery, and overall operations to make sure everything is running smoothly. This is when you should start building a team around you to help you manage these areas of your business using standard operating procedures. Work closely with your team to refine these processes.

Okay, now we're moving on to the scaling phase.

So your business is growing and you’re working with your team to build out processes and systematize your operations.

Now, it’s time to empower your team. 

Here's a quick question. Do you know what the single most important factor is in motivating employees?

Is it equity or salary?

There must be some sort of financial upside, right?

The dream to hit it big when the company IPOs or sells?

Nope.

It's neither equity nor salary that matters.

Sure, people will negotiate and fight for more equity and higher salary but in the end, this is not what motivates employees.

So what is it?

According to Matt Mochary, one of the world’s most sought-after CEO coaches, it’s having an impact on building things that get used in the world.

In other words, the autonomy to make big decisions for the company is what motivates employees.

Ownership over creation.

Ownership over decision-making.

Ownership over action.

The biggest growth levers in my own business happened when I let go of control and delegated the decision-making process to my team.

Sure, they will make mistakes but that's part of the learning process.

If your team isn't making any mistakes, it's a sign for you to challenge them and empower them with the authority to make even bigger decisions on behalf of your company.

This may sound counterintuitive. Why would you let your team make mistakes that could cost you money?

Think of it as an investment in their learning process.

They will learn ten times faster by doing it themselves than you teaching them how to do it.

So how do you delegate decision-making without the company breaking apart?

Here are some strategies.

Encourage your team to brainstorm solutions first. Then, give feedback on the decisions that your team makes.

If your team is off track, try this.

If you must come up with the plan yourself, get your team's buy-in so that they feel ownership over that decision.

And lastly, trust your team to make the right calls, but it doesn't hurt to verify first.

By doing this, you're eliminating your own decision-making bottleneck at the company and also empowering your employees.

Elevate the key operators in your business to take the reins from you.

As your company grows, it’s important to develop a culture of accountability and ownership. 

Each employee should own a certain part of your business and be 100% responsible for it. 

It’s almost like each employee has a smaller business within yours and they have ownership over that part of your business. 

Eliminate politics at all costs and elevate team members based on performance only. 

You could also implement profit sharing for your employees. For example, for Urban EDC, we have a 10% profit share bonus for all employees based on their salary and how long they’ve been with us. 

This incentivizes everyone to work as a team together. 

During this phase of your business, you are working to remove yourself from the business and empower your team to run it on their own. 

What’s surprising about this is that if you set this up properly, your business will grow even faster than when you were managing the business yourself.

I know this might sound crazy but this is exactly what I’ve experienced in my own business with both Urban EDC and GrowthJet. 

I’ve empowered my team to make important decisions.

And now, they are thriving, running the day-to-day operations without me.

OK, to sum it up, we have moved from I to We and now, They, completing our I / We / They framework.

Before we end, I'll leave you with one action item you can take with you today to help you grow your business.

The most important takeaway from this episode is to identify which phase your business is in right now.

Is it in the Experimental phase where you going out there, talking to potential customers, validating ideas for a new product offering?

Is it in the Operational phase where you are building out your 3 key systems and processes alongside your team who will eventually be managing these Standard Operating Procedures themselves?

Or, is it in the Scaleable phase where you are empowering your team to run the business for you and delegating decision-making down to each one of your employees?

Once you've identified where your business lies within this framework, you should have a better idea of what your next steps are to elevate your business to the next level.

Okay, that's it for today!

In the next episode of First Class Founders, we'll talk about branding. What is branding and how do you make sure your brand stands out from the crowd? It might not be what you think.

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All right, I’ll see you on the next episode of First Class Founders!