$200M In Revenue With "Mini Machines"

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Today you will learn how Christine used “tiny teams” to scale 3 businesses to $200M in revenue.

It is in an entrepreneur’s DNA to shoot for growth. But what if you could grow fast while working 4 days a week with just a few people?

Most businesses plateau because they fail to systematize operations and continue to run everything in start-up mode.

Let’s stop that.

Tiny Teams Create Big Leverage

In 3 minutes, you’re going to learn:

• How to create systems that will save you 40+ hours a week.

• Where to easily find (and hire) A+ level talent for your team.

• Why investing in your operations could be your biggest growth hack.

Christine Carrillo - The 20-Hour CEO:

Christine Carillo became the head of her household at 14. Unsurprisingly, she’s accomplished a lot as an entrepreneur:

• Built 3 businesses to $200M in revenue.

• Creator of the 20-Hour CEO Maven Course

• Prioritizes living (e.g., Family, surfing, travel, etc.) & works wherever she damn chooses.

Christine sets herself apart by achieving massive amounts of productivity in minimal time.

Her secret?

Relentless systemization and leverage save her about 60% of her time.

The 5-Step "Mini Machines" Playbook

Here’s the step-by-step to get started:

1. Create a map

2. Build Mini Machines

3. Layer in talent

4. Add leverage with technology

5. Continually iterate, automate, and simplify.

Let’s dig in!

Step 1: Create A Map

As James Clear says,

"winners and losers have the same goal. Goals are great for setting direction, but systems are best for making progress."

The first step is mapping out the exact steps you take to achieve an outcome. You’ll often see opportunities to improve efficiency by just mapping out the process.

The best places to start are:

1. Who you sell to - How do you get in front of customers today? Are there systems you can build to create efficiency in this process?

2. How do you fulfill it - What steps are required to fulfill the service? Is there a repeatable process?

For Example:

When Christine was building Butler Health, a therapist-matching service, she needed to get ahold of therapists.

• Level 1: She started by reaching out to therapists from popular sites like Psychology Today, putting them into a spreadsheet, and having her team pull contact information.

• Level 2: Over time, they built a screen scraper to automatically pull the name, practice, and contact information for therapists from popular listing sites.

This process automated the company's lead generation and allowed them to scale much faster. For context, the company was profitable within 1.5 months of launching (listen to our interview to get the full story 🔈).

Step 2: Build Mini Machines

A map will eventually become a mini-machine. In short, a system takes an input and drives to a consistent output in a highly efficient way.

Here’s an example of a communications mini machine.

(Steal the template for yourself here)

Each week, Christine sends a team memo outlining exactly what her companies need to do to move the company forward, with or without her.

By reading her memo, the team knows:

• What to work on

• Whats a priority & why

• How to make decisions without any input

The secret is that these memos only took Christine 15-minutes to make!

Learn more about this communication process here.

Step 3: Layer In Talent

You can only do so much before you burn out and your business begins to plateau.

One way to give yourself leverage is to outsource your processes to intelligent and capable people.

Christine has mastered sourcing low-cost, high-quality talent by looking offshore.

A site she often uses is Olinejobs.ph

This platform is purpose-built for virtual teams at significantly more affordable rates than you could find stateside.

Train your virtual assistants to run the playbooks and mini machines you developed in the first few steps.

Step 4: Leverage A Tech Stack

Tools are critical to building a tiny team with massive output. The heuristic here is that the easier someone’s job is to do, the faster they can do it.

Simplify the touch points for everyone to reduce stress on the stack and make it as seamless as possible.

Here are some of the tools Christine’s companies use:

• Notion - an all-in-one workspace for notetaking, knowledge and data management, and project and task management.

• Air Table - a low-code platform for building collaborative apps. Christine uses this to power their CRM.

• Zapier - automate workflows.

• Missive - Email collaboration across her companies.

• Loom - a quick and easy way to film, record videos, and share notes.

Step 5: Iterate, Automate, & Simplify

This is the secret sauce and is more art than science.

When a business grows, it will inevitably take on fat. Something sneaks into your tech stack because of shiny object syndrome. People get added to the team to deal with problems at scale. The list goes on and on.

Most companies keep the bloat and plateau - struggling to feed what is slowly becoming a bureaucracy.

To have a small team, you must take a breath and create automation machines around the fat and trim.

Over time, your mini-machines will compound to create a highly efficient execution machine.

When Butler health started to grow, 10 people were vetting the demand side of the marketplace.

Christine automated this as soon as possible with machine learning and cut the vetting team by ten people.

The result?

A hyper-efficient & small team.

Now, Christine works on projects she loves, takes vacations, gets paid, and has a life.

That is called winning.