232. “Hub and Spoke Operations” with Damon Flowers

Dawn talks with Damon Flowers,a seasoned entrepreneur, advisor and Fractional Growth Operator committed to helping business owners overcome obstacles and reach new heights of personal and business freedom. Damon serves $1–$30/50M small-to-mid-sized businesses, about operations streamlining as a modern hub-and-spoke model where operations becomes the core engine serving marketing, sales, fulfillment, finance, and support. Damon explains that decades of outsourcing business functions to disconnected tools (Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Stripe, DocuSign, Asana, etc.) left no central “core,” forcing founders and key staff to act as the human integration layer, which breaks down amid rapid innovation, volatility, and faster decision demands. He argues the operational hub should hold business context (vision, values, brand, customers, market signals), roles, SOPs, and a live knowledge base to create alignment, speed pivots, and offload decisions. They discuss deploying agentic AI in the operational core—trained like staff, introduced via sandboxing, and used to maintain SOPs—so humans can spend more time with customers and thinking strategically, not firefighting. 

In this episode....

Who is Damon Flowers and whom does he serve? (00:54)

Operations As Engine (01:06)

Why Old Model Breaks (03:33)

What Ops Covers Now (05:54)

Alignment Analogies (09:38)

AI In The Core (14:29)

Agentic AI Roles (19:30)

SOPs And Knowledge Base (24:33)

Why Pendulum Swings Back (28:16)

Where To Find Damon (34:17)

Final Takeaways And Close (35:50)

Damon Flowers'  Information:

Website: https://modernoperators.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/damonflowers/

Transcript

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INTRO/OUTRO: 0:03

Welcome to Business Mastery with Dawn Kennedy, your quick under forty five minute dose of expert insights and strategies to make a positive impact on your business and life. Let's get started.

DAWN KENNEDY: 0:17

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Business Mastery Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about operations streamlining, which is a topic that we should revisit once in a while, I think as business owners. But I don't know that while we're in it and in thick of it, we're really thinking much about the streamlining process until we run into a problem. And so some of this probably needs to be a little preventative. So I have Damon here who's going to talk to us all about how to think through operations streamlining. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Damon Flowers: 0:48

Hey, Dawn, great to be on your show for sure.

DAWN KENNEDY: 0:50

Thank you so much. Can you tell everyone who you are and who you serve?

Damon Flowers: 0:54

Yeah. So Damon Flowers, I serve small to medium sized business owners that are in that one to thirty to fifty million dollar space.

DAWN KENNEDY: 1:03

All right. Great. So Operation Streamline, before we started recording, you said that there's been a newer topic that you have been addressing. But before we get there, can you explain for the audience what you mean by operation streamlining?

Damon Flowers: 1:18

Yeah, yeah. So I'll throw out a bold statement and that is that operations modern operations is the new engine. It is the new engine for business just flat And the reason for that is that we are in a time when businesses are being asked to move a lot faster, owners are being asked to make decisions quicker, and we're simply not set up for this. And we can unpack this in just a moment. But the system of business, how most people run their business, is not set up to take advantage of the innovation that's happening and be able to be in flow with how fast the world is moving today. And so the way to fix that is not by a newer form of marketing or sales or anything else. It's really about transitioning to a new business model. This isn't a model just for e-commerce or brick and mortar or whatever. This is really a new model for business. And that new model is one that is more of a and spoke model, where operations lives at the core, at hub, and then it serves the various teams, staff if you will, as on the spoke, if you will. So serving marketing and sales and product and service, that kind of thing. And done well, then operations is the engine that enables business to move faster and be in line with how far, how fast and how quick our world is moving today.

DAWN KENNEDY: 2:48

And that's sort of backwards. Typically, we think that all of those outlying areas finance, marketing, sales, service operations. But to your point, operations is the engine that should be serving those other, I guess, factions of the business or the spokes themselves, right? Because we could probably point to seven or eight different areas that operations would need to serve to be able to do their jobs. So it's a little bit of a, I think, an inverted way of looking at your business, because most of the time we'll start with the external going in, right? So we'll start with sales and marketing, and then we'll tell operations sort of what's happening next. So let's talk a little bit about how you see this being inverted and how it's been working with companies.

Damon Flowers: 3:31

Yeah. So to do that, let's go back on a journey over the last thirty years. So we'll kind of go back and look at this from a historical perspective, right? So for the last thirty years or so, businesses have outsourced portions of themselves to other systems. We have outsourced sales as an example Salesforce. We have outsourced marketing to tools. Maybe like HubSpot, we've outsourced fulfillment to tools like Zendesk or Freshdesk or We've outsourced merchant processing to stripe and contract signing to DocuSign and project and task management to asana, all of which live at the edge. Right? So the problem with that is then there is at the center. And when there's nothing at the center, then the founder, the business owner and staff members, key staff members start to become the human integration layer, holding everything together. So many of your audience will kind of recognize maybe the founder or the business owner getting asked, what do we do about about this particular customer or this prospect? Or, hey, I've got a question about such and such, or can you take a look at this contract and make sure this is good before it goes out? What do we do in this particular case? How do we handle this support ticket? So what's happening right now is that we're seeing this older model being exposed for what it is. If we were not in rapid innovation right now, the old model would just continue working. But it's no longer working because we're in a rapid pace of innovation. So business owners and staff are being asked do far more than they were before. Owners are being asked to make decisions much faster, to be much more adaptable. So oftentimes we hear about news coming in, be it geopolitics or monetary policy changes, tariffs, changes to the workforce, etc. and all of that is causing businesses to have to react, and they are not able to react as quick as they would like to. So all of that is thrusting businesses to have to change to a different model. And that new model is this hub and spoke. So done, done correctly, this will allow businesses to get more into the stream of the flow of how fast world is moving again, to be able to make faster decisions, pivot quicker, etc..

DAWN KENNEDY: 5:52

Yeah. So if operations is the hub, what inside operations then that would serve those outlying areas that generally people in business can go, oh, okay. So so finance is a hub or a spoke or is it both? Let's talk about what does operations actually cover.

Damon Flowers: 6:11

Yeah. Great. Great question. So back in the old days right. Operations was really an afterthought. It was make sure that you have paperclips and office supplies in the office or something. Right. But and we really looked at marketing was sort of the leader. And then we looked at sales was sort of the leader, right? But the truth is that modern operations is really holds a lot more responsibilities today than it past. So let's unpack that for a moment. The operational core of your business should all of the context of your business. And what I mean by context is a definition of where are we going? Where do we want to be in three or four or five years? Who are we? For instance, what do we value? What do we want to be known for? What's our brand, right, etc. the question of who do we serve? Right. Who's our customer and what are they with? What problems are they having? How do we benefit them? And then also the question of what's the market telling us? And then therefore, what decisions are we to be making to respond to that? So all that context, when it lives in the and that operational hub, it now serves all those various groups. So it serves marketing and being able to make decisions about how we're promoting our brand and how we're getting prospect eyes, for instance, to take a look at our products and services. It helps to set the tone, then for the types of products and the types of services that we launch. It supports sales in their effort to talk with prospects and the operational core then also like the the traffic cop to enable, for instance, that's coming from product or service to be able to its way over to marketing or information that's coming from support to be able to make its way to sales. So everybody is on the same page. We start to see alignment. We start to see alignment from leadership down through staff, because everybody has a transparent view of what's happening. And again, where we're going. What that also does is it starts to offload decision responsibility from the founder or the business owner. It starts to offload decision responsibility from key staff members as well, because now we're in more of a shared system. So now marketing is enabled to make decisions that are good for marketing, but they're also good for the sales as well, product service fulfillment too. And what we start to see then is that the whole business works as a cohesive unit. So no longer are we, for instance, pouring a bunch of time or money or expertise into marketing. Maybe we're really blowing up marketing, but we're now seeing fulfillment can't handle the for instance, customers that are coming in. So we're sort of trading one problem for another. And so operations is also I want your listeners to think about modern operations is the connective tissue that brings the organization together. It's like your body, for instance, right? We think about, oh, well, it's all about marketing. It's all about sales. That would sort of be like, oh, well, it's all about the brain being disconnected from the rest of the body, or I've got muscles. No, no activity to help direct them, for instance. We need to think about it cohesively where all systems work together for the greater good.

DAWN KENNEDY: 9:36

What I heard when you said this, believe it or not, and you were talking about in the old days. I read something not that long ago about NASA in like the sixties, trying to get someone on the moon, that if you asked anybody on the team what their role was, they said, well, we're getting someone to the moon, whether it was the person mopping the floors or the head engineer or everybody sort of knew that at the end of the day, whatever their contribution was, it was to this greater good of getting someone the moon. So I'm curious if this is we evolved out of that or is that similar? And then now we're going back there because that's really how business at that speed needs to function. We put a guy on the moon in what, six years, years, whatever it was. When you think about it, are we just returning back to a well-oiled, functioning machine where everybody knew what they were doing and what the goal was?

Damon Flowers: 10:31

Yeah, I love that example, by the way. And I can think of others, too. For instance, Southwest Airlines, so for many years after Southwest Airlines came about or launched, really, there were many stories about maybe a plane getting delayed in terms of turning around so the pilot would get out of the plane and come down and help the baggage crew, for instance, load bags on the plane because as a company, they had very they were very clear and their values right and very transparent. And that created a company that was able to move very well and very rapidly. And I agree that over the last several years we've become very specialized. Right. So all across the board, if you think about medicine, there are specialists, specialists, you go talk to one specialist and they don't really know anything about another another area. And business has really become the same way. We become very specialized. So we're very specialized in buying a tool for a very specific thing. And many, many times today business owners are running twenty, thirty, fifty, seventy plus disconnected tools to act as specialists in all these areas. But those tools really don't connect together in a way. there's nothing really again, rotting at the core. And so because of that, we see a lot of fragmentation. And that fragmentation is not good in a world where we need to move cohesively, we need to move quickly. We need to be able to again, make decisions We need to be able to see, oh, well, there's a change happening in the marketplace, or there's a change economically. And we as a business need to be able to respond to that and move forward. Another example I like to use is example.

DAWN KENNEDY: 12:10

Just saying, I'm familiar with the case study, I love it.

Damon Flowers: 12:14

Another example I like to use is this one of imagine that you and your company and all of your staff are like getting into a boat and you're traveling across the Atlantic, you're leaving New York Harbor and traveling over to England, for instance. And, and some people are working down in the engine room and some people are working in hospitality, making have clean food and water to drink. Some people are working in navigation, some people in and communication. But the truth is, we're all reliant on one another, right? We all have individual responsibilities, but we're all reliant on one another to make it across. And I want you to think about your company in the same way that the idea of setting a vision for where we're going, where we're going to England, what do we value, for instance, what type of culture do we want to create? For instance, while we're on that journey, sure that we have ownership at various places within the business and making sure that we're all working together again in this kind of transparent way to be able to And that way, as storms come up, or we need to course correct or things of that nature, we can very quickly, right? We're not isolated in a way where we get of trouble, because one portion of the team is working on one area and another portion is working on something

DAWN KENNEDY: 13:27

Right? That's another great example, another great analogy. I was actually on I was in the Navy. I don't know if I've ever I don't know if I've ever said that on a podcast before. I'm not sure. But yeah, I was on a ship. So it's like when you brought that example, it's like, yes, everybody knows how to do general quarters, Everybody knows what to do if there's a problem. So what a great example. I don't know that examples out there much in the world of business because we have become. So I use the word siloed, right? So marketing does marketing. And they're like, just give us the ninety day plan. We've got it from here. Or production might be the same way. Well, we know that this is our part and this is what we're going to do over that. So what an interesting way to look at the hub and spoke because the hub and spoke doesn't necessarily mean like the, the classic graphic where you have the big circle in the middle and the little, the little circles on the outside, you're saying it's like, it's like you're all on a boat, you're all going in the same way. And each of you are all inside that circle at level.

Damon Flowers: 14:26

Yeah. And what we think about too, is we think about what's most important that we all need access to, and then we put that in the center. So context is one thing we mentioned. We call it context engineering in the world. But the idea of organizing that context so that it serves everybody in the company. Another thing that we want to think about is, instance, with AI, we don't want to deploy AI as another tool right on the periphery or the edge, because now when we do, it may start to really help sales, or it may really start to your service side, but it's not helping anybody else, right? So AI as well works best when it's deployed in the core, the operational core, and AI then also has it has the information that it needs in order to run. So it knows the context of your business. It knows, for instance, where we're going and what we're focused on this quarter and who we sell and what they have to say and what products we have, etc.. And that that AI now continues to get advanced and improved at the core. And that enables and serves, again, all of your teams, all of your staff to do what they do better and better and better.

DAWN KENNEDY: 15:38

All right. So before we started this episode, we were a little bit about some of the AI stuff that you've been talking about and seeing. So beyond leaving it at the core, what else do you see AI doing as far as operations streamlining and then supporting the hub and spoke model even more than we've been doing with the, as you said, human integrator?

Damon Flowers: 15:59

Yeah.

DAWN KENNEDY: 15:59

It's true. It's very true. We sometimes become tool managers, right?

Damon Flowers: 16:04

Yeah. And to pick on that a little bit more before we move into the AI portion completely, when you are operating sort of that old business model, and humans are then required to be the human integration layer to keep sort of moving. The problem with that is then that you're not free to spend one on one human time, because we're caught in the weeds, we're firefighting, we're overwhelmed with so much stuff to do, whether in marketing or in helping with service or helping customers. And the second problem is that we're not able think strategically because again, we're just down the weeds. So one of the, some of the benefits that we'll start to see by moving to this new model is the ability to have your operations, your systems, automation, AI, etc., work very, very effectively. And that freeing you up to now have conversations, for instance, with prospects, with customers, with potential partners, with affiliates, right. And being able to spend more human time. And then second, to be able to free up, to spend more time strategically, what? Not just the leader, but all throughout the business for us to have time and space to unpack, how can I do my role better? How can I reach and have better conversations? Where would I like to see my role advance, for instance, over the next six to twelve months? And those are really fun questions to ask. Now, I will say for me, I'm not one to say that we need to deploy AI and fire everybody, and AI is going take over. I'm a big believer that AI needs to be a be an enhancement to us as as people to do our job better. I'm we have a lot of job recs open and we'll be continuing to hire people even though we're heavy, heavy users of AI. So I would encourage other folks to think same, not. This is not about just deploying AI and firing people, for instance, to try to get your costs down. It's really about deploying AI so that your people can now be better at what they do and again, be more strategic.

DAWN KENNEDY: 18:08

Yeah, I think AI, it's maturing in a way. I've read some articles where it's an and not or. Right. So we use AI and humans. And again, at the speed of business nowadays it just makes a lot of sense. We've been reading the horror stories, if you will, about the sweeping layoffs. And now they're rehiring all the people. And it's nice to be on the outside watching someone else make those mistakes, for sure, but it can't be very comfortable if those mistakes are now being corrected. But it is definitely information. I think that we can look at and rely on as, this is how we're figuring it out. Like the internet originally. It's what is this for? And then e-commerce. I'm not putting my credit card on there. Now you have a Google wallet and you just tap phone. So the adoption and stuff over time. I do want you though, to also speak about AI at the operational hub, because I want to understand from your perspective, where AI can also be an assistant beyond writing your copy or doing your marketing plans or helping, I use it for, you know, inventory protection, right? Taking a look at things, what else should we or can we or what have we not thought of that should be in operations, maybe needs a little AI helper. But if we're bringing all the things into that core values and things, what else should we be considering?

Damon Flowers: 19:28

Yeah. Good question. So for us, again, we are my company deploys and builds operating systems for businesses that uses this hub and spoke model. And within that, we also deploy an Agentic AI system. Again thinking about that Agentic AI being in the operational hub. And so for us, again, operations is really to be thinking, okay, what's the context of the business building that in first and then understanding the processes for business? And once those processes are well understood they're working now we go to work systematizing those processes. So we want to think about AI, for instance, not just, well, in some instance, experimenting with AI, using it, for instance, to maybe write emails, come up with marketing plans, do financial projections. There's of course, a lot of that, right? And then AI in terms of automation, deploying that. Once we have a process that's understood, for instance, and we want to continue to expand it. Another thing I would suggest is thinking about AI very much like your training a staff member. So if we hired somebody brand new into our company, right. And they've got a role, that role, for instance, is responsible for a particular chunk of the business, right? So responsible for a copy or responsible for financial projections, whatever it is, that role also has some functions. It needs that individual needs to be trained. For instance, on here's where you find certain things in the business, here's where we operate projects and here's where we interact with customers and here's where our products live. I want you to think about training your AI in the same way. So first of all, let's flash forward, for instance, and define for ourselves what would our roadmap look like six months or twelve months from now and build an org chart, for instance. So that org chart would have different roles. For instance, in some of those roles are going to be individuals you're going to hire. And some of those roles may be agents, if you will, that are running that particular area of the business. So we do that, and now we start to define And then through those roles, we also then start to hand them skills or train them with skills. So imagine an agent now that is serving a purpose in the business. And they have a series of skills just like a human would. And they have resources that they have access And of course, then the context of the which is what everything rides on. So think about this as, let's say, for that you're a small business and you're wanting to, you're at maybe a million, you're wanting to grow to five million dollars. Well, typically most small businesses at that phase are not able to hire a CFO or a comptroller, right? As an example. So in that case, you know, you're growing to a place where you may want to have a human that is doing that work. But in the beginning, creating a role that maybe your CFO and that role is trained then on the skills that CFO has and then that that role and that agent now with the context of your business, is able to do things that a normal CFO would do. So maybe running financial projections, for instance, or doing some financial modeling as an example. So let's kind of go back and summarize. So we talked about first, looking ahead six twelve months, what what roles would I want to have in my company? Right. So I'm defining from marketing and sales, fulfillment, all of that. Next I'm looking at, okay, well, what's the roadmap that I want to hire to for staff? And then I'm going to fill in the gaps with agents. And then when I think about deploying those agents. First, I need to have the context of my business available for those agents to use. And then second, I'm going to think about training those agents just like I would a staff member. So an agent has a specific role. It has skills that are available to it. It has resources within the business that are available to it. And we start to roll it out, not giving it everything all at once. Like we don't want to open it up and for instance, give access to all of our bank accounts and contracts and all that. We're creating a sandbox to train that agent, just like we would train a staff member, hey, here's a project, or here's some things to kind of work on in a, small way to get to see how that staff member feels and how they do in that in the same way that an agent would work as well. And then as that agent performs, for instance, then you would expand the capabilities, if you will, further.

DAWN KENNEDY: 24:11

So yeah, and very importantly, you said that the resources would set again, like in the hub. So as you do expand and maybe you do need to bring that human CFO, they would also have access to all of the data and all of the things, and what they would have an historical archives and things. And here's sort of where I wanted to ask this next question is, I know that most people who are listening in today are like, we have SOPs for everybody, SOPs for roles, SOPs for jobs, SOPs for processes, SOPs for doing everything. But if all of those SOPs don't have some maybe broader connection back to the hub that is a gap is that we don't have maybe the, the collaborative SOPs where this is we might have. Well, before you do X, you check with Y, but this needs to be a layer deeper. If you have the hub where you have those touch points sort of spelled out where operations should be sitting.

Damon Flowers: 25:14

Oh, exactly. And you bring up a great point when we talk about, well, what all goes in the operational hub. We mentioned context in our earlier Certainly the roles of the business that lives the operational hub, the SOPs and the knowledge base that lives in the operational hub. And by the way, your SOPs shouldn't really just be managed by one person. They should be owned and managed by multiple people. So if you're in sales, for instance, one of your job functions, if you will, is to update the SOPs for sales, right? And if you're in fulfillment or support, one of your functions is to update and manage the knowledge base. And here's where we can use agents to do this. So we want to make sure that our knowledge is live, that it's it's not six months old and completely outdated, right? So most people don't like to manage and update SOPs, but we can deploy an agent, for instance, where we just talk to the agent and say, hey, we just made a new, new update. There's some checklists we've added blah, blah, and then have it go off. Reference the correct knowledge base item. Look at the template, look what's there, and incorporate that new feedback right into that knowledge base. So it happens very naturally. So instead of thinking, oh gosh, I've got to this Friday, my boss is on me about going over to these and updating and tapping up a bunch of stuff. Think of it as like, what if you could just talk into a microphone when you notice something and say, oh, hey, we need to update this checklist, blah, blah, blah, here's the information. Hand it off to an agent and now an agent, because it knows the context for your templates and your work and how you do things. It stitches all that in, and it does a better and a faster job than you would do, right?

DAWN KENNEDY: 26:59

Yes. So again, this buys back that human time because I don't know the last time that we've had a company come up and say something like, oh no, every so often all of our employees get that reflective time at their desk, and they get to sit and think about how they want things to look in six months, or what kind of leader they want to be, or the next that they want to take on. Or the really good idea fairy visited them, but they just haven't had a chance to do the research on it. So this sounds like a really great way where you're not necessarily adding complexity, you're adding precision.

Damon Flowers: 27:38

Yeah. Yeah. You're, you're giving your staff space to be better at what they do. You're empowering them to love what they do and to love the company and love where it's going. Right? We're that's the type of businesses that we really enjoy working with and helping. And by the way, that type of business, when staff feel really empowered, will go much further and much faster in getting there than the company where it's very disconnected. And the, the strategic information lives with leadership and staff are just sort of told what to do. Nobody shows up at work and nobody's really about it.

DAWN KENNEDY: 28:11

Right? Yeah. I love this concept. Now, let me ask you, we talked about thirty ago, we sort of got away from this concept. Why do you think that is that the hub and spoke became so specialized on the outer side. And operations was just kind of the catchall.

Damon Flowers: 28:28

Well, it's it's really been happening for like the last fifty years. We could touch on the fact that back in the early old, old, old days, if you had a phone or a fax machine and a Rolodex and you had a lot of passion, you could crush it in business. And it's obviously a software has come right. We've leveraged and used software to be better and faster, but we've taken it too far. And I always like to say that in society, we see this pendulum that's just moving from side to side, right? We get to one extreme and we're like, oh, too, too much. And the pendulum starts coming back down and we're like, oh, this is great. But then it just swings up to the other side because.

DAWN KENNEDY: 29:05

Somebody had a better idea this time.

Damon Flowers: 29:09

And I think what's happening is if we didn't have AI and the rapid amount of innovation and the world changing so quickly, we have a lot of disruption that's happening in the world today. If that weren't happening, we would certainly just keep doing things the way we were doing them. We would just keep plugging in tools and we be okay being the human integration layer. But the fact is that, again, market volatility and geopolitics and changes happening on a dime and disruption and AI now every week, every month can do something just radically different and better than the week or month before. All of that is pushing business to have to transform. And so we are going back from a disconnected, siloed type of business process environment to one that is unified. That's really what I want listeners to take is you need to start thinking about your business as unified core of truth, a unified source of truth, this operational hub, again, with the context and the vision and and who we are, where we're going, who we serve, your roles, your knowledge base, and how that sets up and then everybody in the company to be able to move much faster. So now as we start to hear that something's happened in the world, and that is affecting your ability to handle pricing or to handle hiring, or where you're going to allocate capital when you have this type of hub and spoke the single source of truth, you can now respond much faster. So your ability to make decisions and pivot becomes much greater.

DAWN KENNEDY: 30:41

And one last thing about the, the operations sitting in the middle hub and spoke model is everybody really has access to the hub in your design is that nobody has to make an independent decision. So in other words, marketing is not making an independent decision from the other areas of the business, even if they're going out and let's say they've been given an assignment, Here's a ninety day strategy or here's a six month strategy. And they have to go through and make those decisions. If something does come up, they can always refer back to all the information, the hub, or reach out to the right counterpart instead of having to make the decision and then try to defend it later. Because I think that's another thing that we see in the silo approach is people are making the very best decisions for what they think they need to do, and they feel maybe sometimes like going back and asking or going back is a sign they didn't understand the assignment or maybe the, the in the software is showing one thing. I like the idea that all of the values. And not only that, the resources and the things to check on are readily available in a hub model. And to your point, not with one person.

Damon Flowers: 32:02

Yes. Yeah. Something else to point out that we'll all laugh at is. The coup for years has always been the gray haired man or the gray haired woman in the room, the one that has worked in lots of different industries and lots of different teams, and has worked in sales and worked in marketing and worked in finance. Because living in operations takes a really a good or a great understanding of all aspects of business and how to bring things together so that as we move as a company, again, we're not succeeding in one area of the business and breaking or slowing down another area of business. And so think about now as we shift, we want to move away from finding the fifty sixty year old woman or man who's been around for thirty years, thirty, forty years working in all aspects of the business. We now have the capability of this cohesiveness, this transparency, the context, all of that living at this core. So that, again, I love your point of staff being able to now make decisions that they would not have been able to make before. That are now best for the business because they understand this is, again, where we're going and who's what and what our values are and how we best support customers, etc. so that then frees up, again the founder or the business owner or key staff members from having to be the the train director, if you will, all the time.

DAWN KENNEDY: 33:28

Yeah, definitely not just efficiency and workflow getting better when people are on the same mission that they really want to be together. It's incredible what speed and with what results that you can get out of that when everybody is on the mission because they want to be there and because they have a, a real, like you keep saying empowerment. And I can see how having operations at the hub on your role, but always being able to reach out and have what you need without having to take the time to track people down or to run another study or to do something really could be empowering. As to the employee going, yeah, I, I now feel more supported in my role than I did before we moved to this model.

Damon Flowers: 34:13

Yeah, absolutely.

DAWN KENNEDY: 34:14

Yeah, I love it. All right. So where can people find you? Where can they learn about the model? Where can they reach out to you and maybe even lurk you on social media?

Damon Flowers: 34:24

Yeah. So a lot of our, a lot of folks that find us, come to us because they want to make this transition, but they're stuck. They're juggling lots of plates. They're overwhelmed. They know they need to be making decisions, but they're having trouble making those decisions because there's a lack of confidence, I think, today about where things are headed, how that's going to affect my business. So we've recently launched an advisor that acts very much like I would or my partner would on a phone call. You can access that advisor at advisor dot dot com, and that advisor is trained on all of our how we think and how we operate. You don't have to get on a call with us, and you can have a conversation with them to help really identify what challenges you're having and experiencing in your business. And then we'll provide a plan for, for you to be able to move past that and be able to make those transitions.

DAWN KENNEDY: 35:14

Fantastic. All right. So we're going to put that down inside the show notes. Anywhere else. Should we follow you on LinkedIn? Do you have a Substack or do you just want us to go to your website?

Damon Flowers: 35:24

Yeah, the website is great. Modern operators dot com. You can always reach out to me on LinkedIn, Damon Flowers, and we have a growing subreddit as well, where we share a lot of modern operational thoughts and thought leadership. So yeah.

DAWN KENNEDY: 35:37

Fantastic. All right. So we're going to put all that down inside the show notes. So if you find us on the day we launch, you'll see it two years from now, five years from now, you'll still be able to find Damon and this model. I think this is such an incredibly great perspective. And it's so funny that we do keep repeating the past for whatever reason. We just keep, Like you said, the pendulum goes back and forth and we're going the other way. But at the speed that modern business runs, this is going to be a pendulum swing. That's going to be much more, I think, impactful than maybe it would have been in the sixties and the fifties. This is going to have a very big impact on business and the speed of business.

Damon Flowers: 36:18

It is. Yeah. And the last thing I'll say, Don, is I would really encourage folks, the worst thing you can do is to just kick the can down the road and hope that, oh, well, in six months it'll work itself out or I'll figure it out, etc.. Please do not do that. Please do not do that. We want to be proactive about embracing what's coming, and we're going to be going through a lot of change. That is just what's going to happen. So the quicker we can embrace that and start making that transition, the better off you're going to be.

DAWN KENNEDY: 36:46

Yeah. Perfect. Right. Thank you so much for being here. Such a great conversation. Really looking forward to hearing from all of you out there. Your thoughts about whether or not you're move to the system, or if you've been operating in this and spoke. And I always forget to tell people to like subscribe. So I'm going to do that now. So the engineers don't get mad at me. And thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate your time.

Damon Flowers: 37:13

This has been great, Dawn. I've loved talking with you.

DAWN KENNEDY: 37:15

Me too, me too. Thanks so much. All right, we'll talk to y'all next time on the next episode of the Business Mastery Podcast. Take care. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Business Mastery Podcast. If you want to learn more about me, you can go Don k Kennedy dot com and you can now check us out on YouTube well as, of course, any of your favorite platforms that podcasts. Take care.