Jen Hamilton (00:01.034)
All right, today my guest is Jodi and Jodi, I'm so grateful to have you here. You are our fractional COO, you are in my world and I love having you in my world. You're part of my community. You're someone I learn from and learn with and I know you help many, many others in our community learn too. You're so generous with sharing and now you get to share on our podcast. I can't wait for people to learn from you. So welcome, Jodi.
Jodi Graham (00:27.209)
Thanks, Jen. I'm so excited to be here and always enjoy working with you. So thanks for inviting me.
Jen Hamilton (00:33.59)
Yeah, well let's get to know you a little bit better first. So we have some fun questions to kick us off. Let's think about this. Every superhero sidekick has an origin story. We want to hear yours. How did you go from an operator in the trenches to a COO on a mission?
Jodi Graham (00:52.027)
question. So my passion has really always been building teams and growing revenue. And I have always enjoyed being that right hand of the entrepreneur. And I've have really developed a track record of driving growth as well as opportunities and exits for the owners that I work with. And the bulk of my career has really been doing that within organizations.
So much so that that growth and working within those organizations led to nine mergers and acquisitions. Yes, a lot.
Jen Hamilton (01:28.846)
Woo, that's quite a record.
Jodi Graham (01:32.935)
And honestly, I didn't want to go through a tenth. So in 2024, I really made the conscious decision to reignite my business strategic growth advisors. And really my goal is to work with three to five clients and with them as they grow, evolve and maybe exit or don't need me anymore, then that gives me the opportunity to do the same.
bring in another client without having to find myself in a job search looking for or going through acquisition number 10. So that's really how I decided to leave being in the trenches as an employee and really come out as a fractional COO.
Jen Hamilton (02:19.704)
Well, and it's having so many clients be able to learn from you who've done what they've never done by having acquisitions and mergers and all those kinds of, you've been just growing to the point where they can be acquired. It's really such a benefit that you're now bringing that to organizations who would love to do that. You're welcome. Exciting and probably at times terrifying for them.
Jodi Graham (02:34.076)
Sir.
Jodi Graham (02:39.699)
Thank you. It's exciting.
Jodi Graham (02:47.035)
Right!
Jen Hamilton (02:48.436)
thank goodness they have you. Well, let's talk a little bit more. What types of business do you love to work with? And you're excited when they put out that call for help.
Jodi Graham (02:57.967)
Awesome. Well, you know, for me, it's the privately held businesses. They typically are between five and fifty million dollars in revenue and they've really probably already built a successful business, but they've really hit that inflection point where they've decided that in order to grow more, they are going to need to change and therefore they are willing to embrace
the challenge, the change, and the leadership necessary to make that happen. some of the, when I say inflection point to me, one, there might be industry changes that have happened in their industry. There could be a loss of a largest client. Or another is just frankly knowing that what got us to this point isn't going to get us to that next level. It's those organizations that I enjoy working with.
Jen Hamilton (03:53.902)
adhere to what you're sharing is they've hit some sort of wall. Don't even know oftentimes what it is. They just, I love how you said what got them here isn't going to get them to that next place. And that is the perfect time to bring in the expert like you who's got them to that place. It's hard to know where you're going if you haven't been there before. It's a perfect time to bring you in.
Jodi Graham (04:17.555)
Well, and I just find that when that's their desire, it's so much easier to then help them get to that next step because sometimes you can find clients that just the way we've always done is the way we're gonna always move forward. And for me, when you ask who do I really enjoy working with, it is the five to $50 million business, but it's somebody who's already built a successful business. They just wanna get to that next level and they want the help to get there.
Jen Hamilton (04:44.62)
Yeah, that's critical. The want to help, the help to get there and the realization. It is not easy. And it's also not easy to have to admit to yourself that I've done this all the way to this point. And for some reason, I cannot figure out how to get to that next level. First of all, I'll tell you if that is you and you're listening, it is very, very normal. It's okay that that completely happens. And that's part of why it's
Jodi Graham (04:47.293)
Yeah, right. Because it's not easy.
Jodi Graham (05:02.238)
Right.
Jodi Graham (05:08.124)
Absolutely.
Jen Hamilton (05:13.336)
People are very strategic around their growth as it's time to lean into people who know how to take you to that next level like you can. Okay, so let's talk about some of the business challenges that you like to solve. What's one thing that business owners do all the time that makes you wanna put on your cape and shout, please stop doing this. It's killing your business.
Jodi Graham (05:33.568)
I love that question. And I think you may identify with it. It's these, when you're working with founders, owners, visionaries, it's shiny object syndrome, right? I mean, let's go over here, let's go over here. They're awesome at creating new ideas. And I think one of the things that I do as I...
Jen Hamilton (05:48.43)
Yes.
Jen Hamilton (05:55.168)
you
Jodi Graham (06:00.403)
find that is how do I listen, do a good job of asking questions, and then really helping them answer the question, is it worth?
changing the priority of what the team is executing right now. And so from my perspective, you don't want to stifle the ideas because that's what's gotten them to that point. I think the other thing that you try and do at the same time is keep the organization focused on executing the plan around the current vision. And I think the other thing that I've realized, the more organizations I've worked in, in the small to mid-size, that founder doesn't really even understand
the impact that just sharing an idea or saying certain phrases or words openly in the organization, the impact that can have.
right, on what was moving forward now stalls a little bit or causes some water cooler talk. And so those are the things that I enjoy about working with the visionary and also try and manage to allow them to have those ideas. But at the same time, let's make sure we're deciding, we change priorities or put it on the list for the future.
Jen Hamilton (07:15.842)
There's a time and place for everything is what I hear and what you're talking about. And part of what I think being visionary ourselves as we all have this vision of what we want to do with our clients and what we want to do with our own businesses. It's about having that partnership with someone like yourself who can, as you said, want them to keep having those ideas, but it's where and when is that shared? Knowing that you're a place to take those ideas like
They birthed this little baby and they want it to be well taken care of and know that you will take good care of them and if it's the right idea to bring out, you'll bring them to the team and if it's not the right idea, you'll put it in a nice, warm, cozy place so we can revisit if it's ever the right time.
Jodi Graham (08:03.101)
Right, 100%. Very smart.
Jen Hamilton (08:06.184)
well, let's get into this topic. We are hearing already how you are a true expert in growth of a company. Yet we're talking about being CEO. So here's what I want to dive into with you. And I'm really excited about this is operationalizing growth. So I want to start with why is operationalizing growth so important for small businesses? Why does it matter to them?
Jodi Graham (08:22.708)
Sure.
Jodi Graham (08:36.595)
Well, the good news is it's, I think 99.9 % of the time, growth is an objective for a business, right? So it's so important because growth is more than just having a goal. It's how are we gonna get there? And so I find that there's not, it would be rare to find a small to mid-sized business that wasn't interested in tackling growth. So that's why I think it's an important topic.
Jen Hamilton (09:03.254)
Yeah. It's so powerful what you say. I also think they don't understand what really what growth means. It's so often talked about if you're going to a CEO community like Vistage or EO or those kinds of things they talk about, what's your revenue number? What are you growing to? And yet there's a whole large difference between not hitting a number and how do you hit that number? You said it so well.
Jodi Graham (09:19.229)
Mm-hmm.
Jodi Graham (09:30.599)
Exactly.
Jen Hamilton (09:31.574)
It's about the how and that's where the operationalization of this idea of what to get to is so critical. So let's talk about when they don't actually operate, operationalize growth, what does it really look like when that's missing and not in place?
Jodi Graham (09:49.675)
That's a great question. And I almost would say there's some activities or symptoms that I would look for in the organization. One that I see often is owners or teams jumping from opportunity to opportunity, activity to activity. It could also be that we are throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks, right? It may also be that we say yes
to doing everything. And when we do that...
it puts a strain on our organization. And it's supposed to be an exception to have a one-off, but if you see that your one-off solutions are becoming the norm, then that likely is another example that we haven't operationalized a growth plan. And last but not least is the organization and probably feels like our priorities are shifting every minute, every day, because we don't necessarily have
that strategy behind how we're going to hit that growth. So to me, those are some of the activities or symptoms that I could look at within my business and say, maybe while we have a growth plan, maybe we haven't operationalized it or communicated it enough throughout the organization to understand it. Because otherwise, those things shouldn't be happening at the frequency they probably are.
Jen Hamilton (11:19.596)
You bring up such a good point too. I want to dig into a little piece. didn't directly say it, but you, you sure were alluding to it. What has the impact been on the team when you see there's a growth idea, but not really a well thought out plan, not prioritize. How does that impact the team members and the teams working together?
Jodi Graham (11:23.774)
Yes, sir.
Jodi Graham (11:45.055)
I think often it can be a matter of...
impacting morale because just when I think I get it, oh, this is what we do and this is how I'm going to do my job better to contribute to the success of this customer. All of a sudden it changes and then I need to adjust and change without necessarily getting that direction and so that can be exhausting. If it happens too frequently, it can really impact morale and not knowing what the left hand,
and the right hand are doing. People want to be successful, but they need to know what success looks like. And so that can be challenging if I don't know and understand the plan and it's constantly changing.
Jen Hamilton (12:35.974)
I love that you talk about the morale and it can be a very challenging culture for high performing A player team members. A lot of them don't want to come into an environment that is constantly changing. They want the freedom to be expressing their unique talents. So it's not complete.
other side of it where it's so structured that they don't have the ability to bring their unique talents to it. But if it's so unstructured, they cannot bring their unique talents. And like you said, it's exhausting. It's not clear. What I also feel and see underneath is they don't feel important. They don't feel valued. Because if you're working on something and then you putting your heart and soul into it and you're really doing what you think is great,
Jodi Graham (13:19.552)
Mm-hmm, right.
Jen Hamilton (13:27.682)
And all of sudden it's like, no, no, we're not doing that anymore. It undervalues your feeling of importance and that what I do matters. If that over time, if it's constantly happening, I think you're gonna leave and you lose some of your best talent. It also makes it very hard to recruit top talent. You end up actually causing people to not give their best work or some of the things that...
Jodi Graham (13:32.768)
That's a great point.
Jen Hamilton (13:55.232)
owners will also complain about and I think this can be some of the symptoms too is my people aren't giving my best or they're not coming up with ideas. Well, how many ideas are you drowning them in? that part of it?
Jodi Graham (14:08.382)
Right? I often one of my favorite, may, I don't know, mantras, if you will, is, you know, people don't come to work to fail. I mean, most of us need to work. but we don't come to work to fail. But if I don't know what success is, or in this case, I don't know what the growth objective is and how to get there. And the part I play in it in my role, then I might not be succeeding, but not because I don't want to
succeed it's because I don't understand how you want me to impact that. So for me I try and keep that in mind and always think are we doing a good job of articulating what success looks like in operationalizing growth and hitting this target and whatever it is that we're communicating to the team.
Jen Hamilton (14:59.79)
for a second, because I love that we're seeing these symptoms. But now if you see these symptoms, the answer we're implying is, okay, well, operationalize it. So let's step back. I'd love to hear how you can explain to our listeners, what does operationalizing growth really mean? What does that look like?
Jodi Graham (15:20.702)
Well, I think it includes a couple of things. know, from my perspective, one of the first things would be is do we, what is our growth plan and have we articulated it, right? And oftentimes with that growth plan, it involves a strategy and that strategy involves who are we targeting? Who is our ideal client? It also involves what is our value proposition?
that we're speaking to that client about and then how are we communicating that value proposition across our organization so that everyone within the organization understands it and buys into it.
and knows the role they play in it and then can execute on it. And then if I have the growth plan, I know who my target client is, I know the value we bring to them, and I've communicated it across the organization, there should be alignment because I think that's the other thing you don't see when you're not operationalizing growth is you don't see alignment with sales and marketing. You don't see alignment with sales, marketing and operations.
and you also often don't see alignment with leadership. So I could look at my leadership goals and maybe they're completely different than or none of them contribute to our growth objective or plan. Then we're not operationalizing growth, right? Does that help or does that answer the question?
Jen Hamilton (16:57.966)
does. It's really powerful because there are different elements to it. It's not just a plan. It's who's doing the plan. How are they working together? One thing I want to dig into more is around this alignment and I do see often times, this is one of the biggest challenges is yes, absolutely with the leadership, but what is marketing telling people? What are they?
actually saying we do. What is sales promising that we will execute on and what is operations actually executing on? If those things don't align and we're not all rowing in the same direction, you are going to have internal conflict and external conflict. You're going to have people that are like, why did you promise that? We don't do that. Why aren't you execute on it? I promise this. There's a lot of finger pointing.
Jodi Graham (17:50.897)
Exactly.
Jen Hamilton (17:53.262)
The other side though is that the client is or the customer is experiencing something that's very disjointed. It's hard to want to keep trusting the company to grow. You're going to need your clients to retain and have some loyalty. You're also going to need them to speak well of you. So I'd love, I love that you go into this alignment. I think it's so important for us to make sure and be intentional about it because alignment doesn't happen by accident.
What have you seen that works to help get everybody on the same page?
Jodi Graham (18:28.395)
That's a great question. If you're open to me sharing an example with a client, I think that might be helpful. If I think about a client that was experiencing an inflection point, that's what we were talking about at the beginning. In this case for them, it was the loss of their largest customer.
Jen Hamilton (18:33.09)
Yeah, I would love to hear.
Jodi Graham (18:49.377)
And just to give a little bit of background, a third party administrator, so somebody that administers benefits, medical benefits for self-funded employers. And essentially, they've been in business, so again, been in business about 20 years. Their revenue was about 32 million, so a good, strong business. But...
Also, the reason the customer left, it was a Dear John letter. It was, we love you, we don't want to leave you, but we can achieve 50 % more savings by going with a national insurance carrier. So it was also the pressures in the market that were happening, right? So that's a challenge when you're going to lose that customer. And it looks like it's not just the loss of that one customer, but without change,
the rest of our revenue and our clients are at risk, right? So.
Jen Hamilton (19:45.559)
Cute.
Jodi Graham (19:46.858)
The other challenge though, and that's what made me think about sharing this example based on your question of the conflict that existed. The other challenge that this organization had is sales and operations were in conflict. And there was a rift because operations view was sales sold whatever they had to.
to win the business. And then they threw it over the wall and said, good luck with implementing that. Right. And that's to your point. Now the customer is in a difficult spot. That's not what I bought. And now operations is in a challenging spot because the way I'm supposed to implement a group needs to change. I likely need to change to keep this customer happy. And so how do we move forward? So we really had in this client two challenges.
Jen Hamilton (20:19.96)
Thanks.
Jen Hamilton (20:39.246)
Mm.
Jodi Graham (20:42.551)
So one of the things that we did was first of all, we had to address the pricing pressures. And one of the things, the first thing we did as a leadership team was get together, not just the sales leader, the leadership team, the owner. And we talked about the challenges we were experiencing. And we really put together a growth strategy that involved targeting a specific type of client. In this case, it was hospitals.
Jen Hamilton (21:03.502)
you
Jodi Graham (21:12.993)
And there were lots of reasons why that made sense that I won't go into here. But we did, we decided to target on hospitals. The other thing that we did then is we communicated that across the organization. So let's understand as an organization, we just lost our largest customer. Why did we lose our largest customer? What is it that we can do to grow? Let's talk about why targeting hospitals makes sense. And then let's also work on this rift that exists between sales and marketing. And one of the things
Jen Hamilton (21:13.421)
Mm-hmm.
Jodi Graham (21:42.9)
things that we did was we put in a bi-weekly sales and operations meeting, which was a matter of opening up communication and teamwork, but also focusing in on, you know, let's have some of those.
you know, gosh, the word's escaping me at the moment, but you know, the war room, okay, what word am I looking for when it goes bad and now we need to understand? Okay, debrief, let's debrief it. But those situations then helped sales, because sales wasn't trying to do the wrong thing.
Jen Hamilton (22:04.544)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (22:09.837)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jodi Graham (22:20.053)
they didn't understand what it was. So by having that sharing of information, now sales could better understand why I need to articulate it this way and how that helped operations be more successful. And so now they could clearly articulate without over committing and under delivering. had, also, so you helped with the pricing by targeting hospitals, you helped mend the sales and operations. The other piece was then clearly,
articulating the value proposition that we would bring to the hospital customer and communicating that across the organization so they understood the role they played in making those hospital clients happy. And ultimately, what we ended up finding is we went from, I should say the other thing that was key, otherwise you couldn't have done it, is deprioritizing the work that didn't impact
those areas. So if it wasn't a hospital business or it was activities that we've not seen as being successful, then let's deprioritize those and instead let's prioritize the objectives that we know will help contribute to success around hospital business and growing it. And that
really contributed to the organization doubling in four years. So from 32 million to over 60 million. And the hospital business went from 12 % to 43 % in four years. And I think my greatest excitement, and this was one where I was an employee within an organization, but the thing that was exciting to me is because everyone who is a non-salesperson said,
Jen Hamilton (23:57.55)
Wow.
Jodi Graham (24:11.684)
because I'm a non-salesperson. But in the elevator, I would have these non-salespeople telling me about opportunities that they thought we should call on, which was an exciting sign that we were operationalizing growth and people were getting engaged. And then the other thing we did on the sales floor when we had a new client is we'd bring the operations team up that helped us and we would ring the bell and we would talk about, here's the new client that's coming on board.
So funny, one of the times on the elevator down, one of the people on the third floor, which was operations, she's like, why don't we have a bell on our floor?
Jen Hamilton (24:42.731)
Hmm.
Jodi Graham (24:52.042)
And I was like, I can fix that. So we added a bell on every floor. And whenever we had a new customer, we went, we rang the bell. We talked about who the customer was, why they bought from us, and who was going to be supporting. And that helped that articulation of the growth strategy, the execution of the growth strategy, and the buy-in of the growth strategy. So probably way more than you wanted, but I hope that helps you see how you really help with that friction.
as well as an inflection point that can happen.
Jen Hamilton (25:25.678)
It's a beautiful example of so many things we're talking about that go awry when you're not having a growth, operationalizing a growth strategy and a plan and alignment. I loved how you walked us through. Thank you for all of that detail because you can really hear in your own, if you're a listener in your own story and where you are struggling, you can really hear it's very intentional and it's the small pieces that make a big impact. love, for example, as
Jodi Graham (25:52.386)
Mm-hmm.
Jen Hamilton (25:55.008)
As simple as it is, you saying that getting sales and marketing into the same meeting and having them on the other side of it. Now that they've created, what does this look like together? What are we selling together? What are we executing on together? And then on the other side, I love the celebration. Let's ring the bells together. It's incredible, full circle moment of what operationalizing growth is.
Jodi Graham (26:13.676)
Right.
Jen Hamilton (26:20.8)
And I'm glad you said that it did increase that excitement, that morale, that teamwork, the collaboration. No wonder there was such incredible growth and no wonder there was such retention, I'm sure, and more increased excitement from the client as well, because they knew you guys are gonna all work together as one team. You get me, you're gonna take care of me. That's incredible. Thank you for sharing.
Jodi Graham (26:36.022)
Mm-hmm, right.
Jodi Graham (26:47.65)
Absolutely. Well, and I think that's the thing that I enjoyed moving from a non-private business to a privately held business is so many of the employees within those organizations, they know their, I'm employee number two, I'm employee number three, I've been here for 20 years. And they have so much knowledge that sometimes we don't find the ways to engage and empower them. And when we do,
You know, the hospital idea wasn't just the leadership team's idea. It was by looking at our existing customers and who are we successful with. And that leads to so much more buy-in with the growth strategy or whatever process you're trying to change, whether it was operations and sales, because you know what? It's not leadership coming up with the idea. It's the team members and they have so much knowledge because they're the ones making it happen. So I just love to see that because there's that
skin in the game and then they're so excited that you're listening and that you're actually taking action on their idea which then only fuels the fire for them to want to support it more. So I think that's super exciting as well.
Jen Hamilton (28:01.71)
In this day and age of very much transformation around technology and changing of the likes and dislikes of our clients and likes and dislikes of our team, the only way we can really move forward through that is through innovation. And it's a perfect example of if we can listen and take action and they're bought into it, you're going to solve it by the whole team.
coming up with ideas, not those who are the leaders or the strategists in the organization. It's truly collaborative. I want to talk about this is, you could hear how great it is to actually operationalize and be clear on your plan and alignment. So why do so many businesses skip the operationalizing and just get to work on their growth?
Jodi Graham (28:31.874)
Right.
Jodi Graham (28:54.695)
That's a great question. if I think it.
comes down to a couple of things. It's not the fact that the owner isn't intelligent enough or ambitious enough to go tackle that, right? It's frankly that it's more exciting to work on sales than it is to put together an operational plan for growth, right? I mean, which would you rather do if you're the owner visionary? You like to be engaged in the hunt. And when revenues, they trigger that.
There are that opportunity, there's the urgency around, and if you don't work on it, there's the feeling of maybe getting left out, right? And at the same time, if we really are gonna operationalize growth, and we think of that example I gave, we're gonna have to answer some tough questions. Which customers or prospects do we wanna say no to?
Right? Which ones are our ideal clients? And then which revenue streams do we want and which don't we want? And those can be difficult questions for the owner and for the leadership team. And then when opportunities come across, the more challenging thing, even if I've done those steps, is now to hold myself accountable to it.
Am I willing to say, this isn't in the target market. This isn't that revenue stream we said yes to. So are we going to say no or are we going to go back to throwing it against the wall and see if it sticks? And that leads to those challenges we talked about.
Jen Hamilton (30:19.318)
yeah.
Jen Hamilton (30:34.274)
Follow through on the plan.
yeah.
Jodi Graham (30:38.947)
So, you know, and I think the other part of it is, it's kind of like all of us, right? We all have our favorite thing that we like to do and we do it more often. It's easier for us to do it. So I, as the visionary, might find it more enjoyable to go work on opportunities than I do to sit down and actually develop a growth plan.
articulate it and then execute on it. Developing that strategy may not be as exciting as getting in the thrill of the hunt. And so therefore we often do the thing that we enjoy more versus the thing that probably would help us get more success more quickly. So I think that's what it comes down to, especially for many of the owners of these small to mid-sized businesses that are already wearing so many hats.
Jen Hamilton (31:30.633)
Such great points. I also see people will avoid you're talking about the difficult questions. There's also the difficult conversations. I can't imagine that first sales and ops meeting was, oh, hey, this is so great. I'm so glad to see you. The tension and having to work through what it's going to take to get different people with different ideas.
Jodi Graham (31:48.547)
Right.
Jodi Graham (31:53.335)
Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (31:57.4)
thinking we need to do it differently on the same page. So sometimes that's what gets people to avoid putting a plan in place is because you can already think about, I know what this person is gonna say and how they're gonna act and where they're gonna push back and where we're gonna get resistance. And a lot of times that causes people to stop as well. You put together such a clear plan of how to take what's...
Jodi Graham (32:11.597)
Yeah.
Jen Hamilton (32:24.558)
initial resistance and put in a way to have people actually work well together. So now that you've seen some of these lessons, as you are in the seat as a fractional CO, what are some things you now know to do differently when you're coming into a business? Because we got to get up to speed quickly. We got to help them get back and get aligned quickly and operationalize quickly.
Jodi Graham (32:45.335)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jodi Graham (32:50.999)
You know, Jen, this might be too simplistic, so feel free to...
push me further, but I think there's two things that I look for and it's almost when I'm talking to prospects. Number one, it goes back to that ideal client. Am I at a point where I know I need to change and therefore I'm going to be willing to embrace it? Because it's not gonna be easy. like you said, they're difficult questions and if I'm not willing to get more granular about which
prospects I should be talking to, then I don't know that it's, you know, you're going to have the success that you want. So number one is, is my appetite there for taking that feedback? And then number two is, and I believe strongly in this one as well, is, is the owner or the CEO founder
Are do they believe or understand they might not believe it yet, but are they open enough to know that this is an organizational challenge, not just a sales and marketing challenge? Because if you think of that example that I gave, if we were just losing our largest customer and we had the rift between sales and operations, if
the owner, CEO, isn't willing to support the collaboration between the groups and the need to explore that we might have to target differently and then get the rest of the organization behind it, you're not gonna have success. And that's when it creates an environment that for me, it's a lot of finger pointing, it's the culture of not knowing what the left hand and the right hand is doing, and it becomes exhausting, right? So for me, those are
Jen Hamilton (34:47.213)
Yeah.
Jodi Graham (34:48.741)
some of the first things that I look at to understand is this an organization that is willing to operationalize growth in the way that they need to and then I think from there it's a matter of doing some of those simple steps we talked about. What is the growth plan? Who have you articulated it to? Do we have a value proposition? Who is our target client? And just going down to definitely understand all of those things and then really kind
of work within the organization to execute on them or implement them if they don't yet exist.
Jen Hamilton (35:28.438)
This is the value you can hear from listening to Jodi. If you're looking at how to grow, knowing that she knows exactly the process to go through, the little bumps are going to be, where the big bumps are going to be, and being able to have your expertise and getting there. That's why it's so powerful. When we look at, if you're listening to this and you're like, I can see the need to operationalize, but it sounds like a big deal. So what's something that our listeners could do as just the first step?
towards operationalizing growth.
Jodi Graham (36:00.121)
Great question.
You know, first, I think let's do something simple and might not be as simple as I make it sound, but let's look at some of those symptoms and reflect on our organization. Are we experiencing them? So first, you know, are we saying yes to too many things? Do we do a lot of one off solutions? Are we jumping from opportunity to opportunity? Are our priorities always shifting? OK, that's the first thing I do. And if that's the case, then say, OK,
I'm willing to dig in a little bit further. And then I would start going down that list that we just talked about, which number one.
Have we clearly defined what our growth goal is and how we plan to execute and operationalize it? And then some of the other things I'd look at is my value proposition, my ideal client. our departments aligned on this and are our leadership priorities supporting it? So pick one of those many and that's a good place to start.
Jen Hamilton (37:07.244)
Yeah, it's really powerful to start with that self diagnostics and assess what is the case of reality. Because if you stop right now and you're hearing this, you have big growth ideas and you haven't done any of these pieces. Now hearing Jodi have an opportunity to be able to say, hold on, let's pull back on moving forward with the full force and make sure we are moving forward on a
operationalized plan that's gonna get us there. So thank you so much for sharing. Now it's time for me to flip the mic and you get to ask me anything.
Jodi Graham (37:40.996)
Absolutely.
Jodi Graham (37:46.085)
So, Jen, I've been able to see you in action across different round tables and speaking, and you always refer to Disney and your love of it, and I don't know why. What is it? Tell me about Disney.
Jen Hamilton (38:02.724)
gosh, okay, so one of the things I think it helps is that I grew up, I still live in Southern California, and it didn't take very long to get there, but when I was young, this is still the case, it takes a lot of money to get there. So it was this big, very amazing treat that when we would be able to gather, and then I met my husband as a high school sweetheart, so.
Jodi Graham (38:17.582)
Yes.
Jodi Graham (38:22.819)
Okay.
Jen Hamilton (38:30.624)
We, in a way, grew up together and one of the things that we decided as we were building what is going to look like our life, we also went to college together, we started collecting the big giant, not even DVDs, but the VHSs of all of the Disney. So we wanted to have a collection together as like a first step. And that was the one thing we could agree on is that we loved Disney.
movies and it gave us something to do. It was a relatively cheap date because when you're in college you also need that. But then we also did something very special too is every once while we'd save up our money our college was still Southern California but we could get to Disneyland from there as well and it evolved and that is actually where we got engaged was at the Wishing Well and so it's always been a part of our relationship.
Jodi Graham (39:03.747)
Yes.
Jen Hamilton (39:26.158)
And even now with being an empty nested family, we still love to go on dates there. And the fun thing is this is our way to reconnect our family because our kids grew up going to Disneyland with us, Disney vacations and everything. So it's always been a place where we could have joy and love and that connection. It's also a place to escape. It's hard not to.
Jodi Graham (39:39.414)
loving it.
Jen Hamilton (39:53.122)
be in any Disney experience and not feel joy and happiness. we could use a little bit more of joy and happiness and connection in our life. So it's always been a part of it. I invite, when I invite people over to our house, our Disney love goes beyond going to the experiences. Our entire house is decorated in it. So it also feels like even though we're grownups, we get to have that child like,
Jodi Graham (40:01.986)
Of course.
Jodi Graham (40:21.614)
love it.
Jen Hamilton (40:22.188)
healing of joy and play in our house. it makes it a very warm and loving environment.
Jodi Graham (40:25.048)
I love that.
I love that. Thank you for sharing.
Jen Hamilton (40:30.927)
Thank you for asking.
Jodi Graham (40:32.608)
Of course, of course. It's funny because for me, have, I'm in the Midwest and I had never been to Disney. My husband won a trip and it was to Disney, Florida. So, and he was golfing one day and you can do these excursions and I was like, I'm going to Magic Kingdom. I'd never been. And I sat, I was over 30 years old and I was sitting watching the parade calling my sister like, this is awesome.
Jen Hamilton (40:48.771)
Yes.
Jodi Graham (41:02.502)
So I can only imagine what that was like growing up with it and then having the relationship from your family to now your husband and with your kids. It is magic. It is magic. So thank you.
Jen Hamilton (41:15.086)
There's also an entrepreneurial side and it goes back to this growth idea and having these crazy ideas and then getting extreme focus and getting alignment. There is incredible lessons learned in Walt Disney's willingness to break the mold, be innovative and work strategically with his brother Roy who was that CEO. He was the one operationalizing all these amazing ideas and growth.
and still honoring that willingness to have an imagination, but taking the alignment and the team and the commitment to culture to make it happen. I find a lot of exciting entrepreneurial inspiration from the way that they have grown that company as well.
Jodi Graham (42:01.158)
That's amazing. I didn't know that about that story. That's, I mean, you love that, especially when you can take your excitement and your joy, but then also tie it back to really what you're trying to do across all businesses in terms of that visionary and executor, if you will, or COO.
Jen Hamilton (42:21.858)
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's for us to cause what they want those outcomes to happen. That's really our role and it's so much fun. It's all about that. We love having that growth idea and making it happen. That's very cool. So Jodi, how can our listeners find you? I know that we connect folks with COOs of all kinds and types, but
Jodi Graham (42:35.993)
Yeah, execute the vision. Love it.
Jen Hamilton (42:47.214)
Someone really aligns with you. They've heard this, like, gosh, I could really use some help operationalizing my growth. What's the best way to connect with you? Well, make sure you put it in the notes too, but I wanna know from you. How can we find you?
Jodi Graham (42:57.753)
Great. Okay.
Wonderful. Well, first of all, I like to meet people the way they like to meet. So if it's talking, my phone will be listed and give me a call. If it's email, I know my email will be there as well. And if you'd just like to learn a little bit more about me, you can do that on my LinkedIn profile, which I believe Jen will have in the notes as well. So those would be the top three ways to connect with me in whatever way is most comfortable for you. And I'd welcome the phone call.
Jen Hamilton (43:28.832)
Awesome, Jodi, thank you so much for not only sharing that information, sharing everything. I know I learned, I'm sure anyone who listened to this, whether you're a fractional CO and you're like, man, I gotta look at the way I'm working. I know I've been inspired, how can I be better in causing growth? But also if you're that small business and growing and wanting to grow more, I hope you learned something today that helps you see what's possible when you really put some clear.
aligned, focused time and effort around your plan to get there. Thanks for being here, Jodi. I can't wait to have you back.
Jodi Graham (44:06.735)
Thanks, Jen. Look forward to it.
