[EO DC] Identifying and Removing Bottlenecks To Scale Your Business With Jordan Solender

Jordan Solender is the Founder of IT Select, where he serves as an IT Executive, helping organizations transform their technology procurement with faster, AI-driven models. Under his leadership, IT Select has expanded to serve clients in 38 states, streamlined procurement cycles from 120 days to as few as 30. For himself, Jordan achieved an eight-figure exit from a previous technology advisory firm. Beyond IT Select, Jordan’s entrepreneurial journey began at age 13 and spans multiple businesses in technology, events, hospitality, and business coaching, and he is widely recognized for his expertise in AI transformation and optimizing business processes.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[03:57] Jordan Solender explains how IT Select slashes procurement cycles with AI
[04:33] Why traditional IT procurement is broken and how to fix it
[07:33] How Decision Maker Dinners spark collaboration among CTOs
[12:09] Expert tips to prevent ransomware disasters in your business
[13:26] How founders can escape bottlenecks by automating tasks
[21:53] How one simple automation helped a founder gain 10 hours weekly
[24:18] Jordan’s bottleneck framework to scale by removing yourself from the equation
[34:01] Insider picks for the top tools to streamline SOPs and train your team
[39:44] Understanding sales math and the 80/20 rule behind business growth

In this episode…

Scaling a business can feel like a balancing act between growth and control. Many founders find themselves buried in day-to-day tasks, unsure of how to delegate without losing visibility or quality. But what if the biggest obstacle to scaling isn’t the market or the team but the founder?

According to Jordan Solender, a tech entrepreneur and systems strategist, most businesses hit a ceiling because the founder becomes the bottleneck. He explains that by identifying where time and decision-making pile up, leaders can begin to document, delegate, and automate. Jordan highlights that real growth starts when founders remove themselves from one process at a time, using AI, automation, and clear systems to replace their constant involvement. This shift not only restores time and focus but transforms businesses from founder-dependent to self-sustaining.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Jordan Solender, Founder and IT Executive of IT Select, to discuss how entrepreneurs can identify and remove bottlenecks to scale their businesses. They talk about automation and AI as growth tools, how to delegate effectively, and the importance of knowing your numbers. Jordan also shares his bottleneck audit framework and insights from building multiple successful companies.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related episodes:

Quotable Moments:

“It’s purely just helping founders remove themselves as the bottleneck by systemizing, and optimizing, and automating their businesses.”
“If you can document it, you can delegate it.”
“The goal isn’t more hustle. It’s more clarity, and control, and more time.”
“Elimination is the cleanest form of optimization. No system is better than a bad one.”
“Distance creates clarity. And when you zoom out, you realize most bottlenecks aren’t people problems.”

Action Steps:

Identify where you are the bottleneck: Mapping tasks that rely solely on you exposes growth constraints and inefficiencies.
Document and delegate repetitive processes: Creating clear SOPs empowers your team to act independently while maintaining consistency and quality.
Automate wherever possible: Leveraging AI and automation tools frees your time and ensures crucial tasks run smoothly without manual oversight.
Audit systems regularly for friction: Ongoing reviews help eliminate unnecessary steps and ensure your operations stay lean, scalable, and effective.
Focus on one improvement at a time: Incremental progress compounds over time, making lasting change more achievable and less overwhelming for you and your team.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:12

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. Jordan Solender. You can check him out his website JordanSolender.com. it’s Solender.

You can also check out itselect.io. He’s got nine other companies. I won’t mention all of them on here. But before I formally introduce you, Jordan, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. Since Jordan and I met through an EO connection Entrepreneurs’ Organization, people can check it out.

It’s all over the world. Actually. Some great EO members I’ve had on are Robert Hartline of EO Nashville. I had Michael, so he built up a chain of cell phone stores and then sold them. It was really interesting.

And he had a software. You know how it is. He’s got like six other companies as well. Michael Attias runs Caterson also an EO Nashville. Very interesting.

You know, interview on how he built up his SaaS company through the restaurant business. Actually Jordan has started a barbecue business, caters then helps a lot of barbecue businesses. Obviously he’s in Nashville, so maybe you guys should connect. But Mat Zalk, Key Renter Property Management in Tulsa, just sharing how he built up. You know, he was doing investment properties and he’s like this is a pain.

I need a team around this. And then he started doing that for other people. So he manages his property. So that and many, many more. Check him out.

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I’m super excited. Jordan Solender is a tech entrepreneur and he’s Founder of IT Select. They transform how IT leaders by technology by replacing slow, expensive procurement cycles with faster, smarter AI powered models. His journey actually began when he was 13, right as a snow his snowblower service. It evolved into launching a successful DJ company in high school.

He went on to build a technology advisory firm that grew rapidly, tripling its team and reaching an eight figure exit. And like I mentioned, he’s got several other companies barbecue, restaurant, capital company, and even a coaching business, which we’ll go into because all the stuff that he’s done to remove himself and optimize a sales funnel and all these things, people are asking him, how do I do this? Jordan. So, Jordan, thanks for having me. Yeah.

Thanks for coming on.

Jordan Solender: 03:26

Thanks. Thanks for having me. No, I appreciate it. What an honor to be on an EO, another EO members podcast as well as Inspired Insider. So this is awesome.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:36

Yeah I’m excited. And just start off and we’ll start with it select and we’ll go from there. But talk about it. Select a little bit and what you do. Because I know a lot of the learnings come from it.

Select and your other event company. So let’s it select. What do you guys do.

Jordan Solender: 03:57

Yeah, absolutely. So it select quick elevator pitch is we are it selection as a service. Think of us as an IT broker. We don’t get paid by you. We get paid by the vendor.

We are an agnostic advisory firm that brings the right providers to you by doing a short and fast needs assessment. And then from there you pick the provider, you save time, you save money. So what takes you by yourself? Normally 90, 120 days we’re doing in 30 to 60 days.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:24

How did you come across that model? Because when I hear it, I hear we’re going to run all your back end systems and things like that, and you kind of took a different route.

Jordan Solender: 04:33

Yeah. I mean, what we found was procurement was broken, right? Like procurement should be a growth lever. You know, it’s time we we change that. Procurement should be something that one the IT person shouldn’t be doing.

The headaches that we hear constantly are all right I need a new solution. And when a CTO goes out to the marketplace he does a little Google fu. Right. And he says, this is what I’m looking for. He types in the feature.

Then he deals with an SDR that we’ve all talked about, you know, and talked to, you know, a guy out of college qualifying you, you know, as a CTO and IT manager, IT director, VP, you don’t have this kind of time. You have a lot of people relying on you to run the organization’s back end operations, right? Email and cloud and whatnot. So you go through the SDR and then, you know, a couple days later, you talk to the sales guy. The sales guy says, okay, let’s do a demo.

It’s another week later. Then we’re talking to an engineer doing the demo. Finally, we go back to the sales guy. We get the pricing, and after the pricing, we, you know, we we go back and forth negotiating. Now I need executive buy in.

So now I need to come up with a deliverable for an executive buy in. At this point we’re at four to to eight weeks depending on how complicated this process is or what the solution is for scoping and how technical it is. Then we get to the end. In a lot of the times, you know, Jeremy, you know, the CTOs and the VP’s and the IT directors get to the end with the pricing and they realize this isn’t exactly what I needed, and it doesn’t check all the boxes. Now we’ve just wasted 4 to 6 weeks on one solution, and typically you need 3 or 4 bids.

You want to do some research. You want to make sure you’re getting the best price, the best fit right, all the features you want. You want to make sure you can grow into a solution, not out of one. This is where it comes in. We’re going to do a short needs assessment, something very familiar to say what the Deloitte’s PwC’s Bcg’s of the world do.

We’re going to gather all the quantitative details of the KPIs and operational considerations that your team might need. What matters most to everybody. Then we’re going to go out to the marketplace. We’re going to find the top three providers that do everything you need within budget, within deployment timeframes, within all those KPIs. And we’re going to say, here you go here.

Here are the three that we recommend. And we’re going to organizationally put them on your calendar in a way where you’re not dealing with the time constraints and disparaging meetings all over the place. With your team. We’re going to organize it. We’re going to make sure that the process is very efficient in how you evaluate them.

We’re going to have scorecards and data books around how each of them perform could perform for you both from a financial perspective as well as a features perspective. And from there, we’ll make sure that the process is really efficient. Right? It’s not going to be all over the place. You’re not going to be wasting your time.

We’re going to save time. We’re going to save money.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:20

I’m curious, there’s a couple of things that stick out on your website, which I want to go through. One is decision maker dinners, right? This is not a normal thing you see on a website. Can you talk about that?

Jordan Solender: 07:33

Yeah. Decision maker dinners are really cool. They’ve they’ve really taken form over time. It was just a idea I had to get, you know, customers that were like minded, not even with projects involved in the same place that I was, just like, hey, we should share some ideas. These people will get along with these people, etc..

So the first one was in Philadelphia back in early 2025. Like in January. We did it at like a Fogo de Chao. Rented rented a room. Right.

And we got unlimited meat.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:04

You can’t go wrong with that.

Jordan Solender: 08:05

Unlimited unlimited meat, unlimited ideas. You know, there’s a tagline right there. So that being said, we got like, I think it was, you know, 8 to 10 CTOs and decision makers. Some were customers of mine, some weren’t right. Some were just potentials.

And they brought a friend in a room and we gave them a scenario. Right. Like you get hit with ransomware, you know, what do you do next? And then we just kind of went around the table and we talked about like, oh, well, this is where I’m strong. This is where I’m not strong.

This is where, you know, we could have probably done better because this actually happened to us. Everybody signs an NDA before getting into the room, right? We want everybody to feel comfortable. Typically we’re not. We’re making sure that these 8 to 10 people aren’t competitors in any way, you know, so different industries, different markets, that kind of thing.

They were all around the Philadelphia area though. And then we had two vendors that specialized in the topic. Right. And I made it very clear to the vendors, this is not a sales conference. This is not a sales pitch.

We want you to come in. And after everybody has gone, you can say, here’s how you would have alleviated the problems that they would have had in how they addressed that, the ransomware issue. And that’s it. After we did the the question and the roundtable, we just kind of, you know, just had some chatting. We had dinner and then afterwards we we had cigars.

It was a lot of fun outside on the patio. It was it was a really good time. So we’ve we’ve done this in a few cities now. We did it in Philly. We did it in Minneapolis.

We did it in Dallas, San Jose. How do you.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:37

Choose the city?

Jordan Solender: 09:39

It’s really just where you have your customers.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:41

Jordan like for this, this company, they could be all over the US. I take it.

Jordan Solender: 09:46

All over the US. So we have customers in 38 states right now. Nothing. Nothing is helping us decide outside of, you know, where. We have a cluster of customers that want to want to do this.

Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:57

So you’ll look at like a concentration and you’re like, oh, Minnesota seems good. We have a bunch of people there. Let’s do a dinner.

Jordan Solender: 10:04

Exactly. We have a request to do it in New York, but we don’t have a ton of customers in New York. So we said, hey, if we can, you know, drum up enough interest, we’ll we’ll do one there, maybe at, like, Nobu or something like that. Right. We want to have a great dining experience.

We want to have a great situation for the vendor to to come in and alleviate any weak points in what a customer might see. So there’s there should be a lot of value on both sides.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:28

Yeah. I think again, we’ll talk a little bit about the sales process and sales funnel. But that’s just like just a unique way of getting people together and kind of a non salesy add value environment. One they’re getting food. Do you have people typically pay for like how do you structure that piece.

Are you paying for the thing. Or maybe there’s a sponsor that help offset the cost. I know these dinners could be expensive. I mean, I’ve run events in, you know, 20 or 30 people. It gets it gets pricey.

Jordan Solender: 11:01

Yeah, it gets pricey. So these are sponsored transparently right in the invites, the private invites. Because again, it’s invite only. You can’t like sign up. You know.

It is completely sponsored by the two vendors that we would bring in. Right. So they’re paying for the dinners, you know, the customers, you know and you know, can get some free swag, which is fine. You know, everybody loves swag stuff we all get. Right.

And we make sure you know it’s a good time. But for the most part we try to keep the spotlight on the collaborative networking in the topic. Right. You know, this CTO over here is doing something similar to you. You guys should be buddies, right?

I have I have a lot of that where I’ve just introduced a couple CTOs to each other and, you know, they’ve, you know, shared ideas and expertise.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:49

Yeah. I’m curious. I know you can’t share names or whatever the case is, but some of the advice you mentioned, you get hit with ransomware, right? And it’s what are what’s like some good advice people gave around the table that if a company is listening earlier to prevent it or if they are, you know, experiencing it.

Jordan Solender: 12:09

Stop, drop and roll. No, don’t do that in your data center. It’s probably super dirty. Unless you have very hygienic data center. But immutable backups is a great place to start, right?

Having backups that ransomware can’t get into testing those backups, right? So if if you don’t have a backup system that you are constantly testing, right, talk to us and we’ll make sure we have you with a service or a solution where you can constantly test the state of those backups. How many times? Oh my God, I would be a very, very rich man if I had a dollar even just for how many times I’ve heard an IT administrator say I tested my backups and they were corrupted. Right.

It’s like, well, you clearly weren’t testing enough because, you know, you would know that and you would do another backup, etc., and fix that. So if you aren’t testing your backups, talk to me. If you don’t have immutable backups from ransomware. Talk to me if you don’t have backups off site or in the cloud. Talk to me.

Right. We want to get you in a better place.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:09

I’m wondering, in this business, if you look back at the other businesses, what are some challenges or mistakes that you now do differently with it? Select because you learn from those things from, you know, the 17 other businesses in the past.

Jordan Solender: 13:26

Oof! Well, I mean, this kind of leads into what I’ve started with the coaching, right, is, is figuring out ways to work on the business and not in the business. Right. Removing myself from the business. Right.

So and that’s, you know, just to pivot a little bit here, if that’s all right. That’s that’s what I’m doing with the coaching. It’s it’s purely just helping founders remove themselves as the bottleneck. Right. By systemizing and optimizing and automating their businesses so they can scale without everything depending on them.

So all of my businesses, I really practice that, you know, I practice, you know, auditing, you know, what are the things that are completely repetitive every single time? What am I in on the day to day when I refer to the bottleneck? You know, what is the choke point? Where are things not being able to scale? Typically that’s you.

That’s the owner. That’s the founder. The amount of businesses that I see every day, including my own. At one point, right until I kind of came up with my framework to evaluate, it was bottlenecked by me. I had to pull myself out.

I needed to scale. I needed to scale faster. I needed to run, you know, faster, scale harder, and make sure that I was, you know, documenting and delegating, you know. So, I mean, I could go into why don’t we start with the.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:52

Yeah. Why don’t we start with the event company and maybe talk through some of the bottlenecks you discovered and how you removed yourself?

[Continue to Page 2]

Jordan Solender: 15:00

Yeah, yeah. You know, the most recent one, this this is super fresh, right? Was my team for the events company. So we do about 450 weddings alone a year at one I’ve, I’ve three events companies. One of them we’ll just talk about is a company called Maryland’s DJ.

We do about 450 weddings a year. Okay. We get about, you know, 30 to 50 inbound leads a month. Right? Just people on our website saying we want info, right?

Immediately they get hit with an email just in an automated fashion to book a call with somebody on our sales team. But I realized about 50 to 60% of those leads, you know, weren’t booking time, you know. And hey, you know, 4,050% is is is great still right. Booking time. But it’s an inbound lead.

They’re requesting info. It should be more than that. It should be higher. They’re requesting that info. So I said to my team.

All right, well let’s let’s go ahead and call every single one of these leads that comes in in addition to an email. So I have my team calling. Some of my team is located overseas for operational just efficiency sake. I have a good amount of team overseas like most people. So they’re calling every single lead.

Right. But that’s still a bottleneck. It’s it’s bound by the time of that person. So I thought to myself, okay, well how do we get, you know, the most optimal results in a call, you know, within 30s of somebody submitting that lead, I want it to be fast every time. So we deployed an AI voice agent that calls every single lead 30s after they submit that web form, which is pretty cool, you know, and they’re taking the data from the web form.

We’re passing it through to the AI agent, and the goal of the AI agent is to do three things. It’s to qualify the lead on budget. Okay. The second thing is, are you the right person to talk to about your corporate event, your wedding, your private event, whatever it may be? And the third is to make sure that we’re available on that date.

So it’s checking the CRM, it’s checking the form that they submitted info. And then the goal is to book a meeting with the sales team. So it’s connected into all of our systems to actually book time on the calendar. And if it doesn’t get on the phone, it leaves a voicemail in the callback number is an actual live person. So right there removes the, you know, the bottleneck of somebody on my team being able to call fast enough with enough information, which is nice.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:33

Do people know if they answer if it is a voice agent or is it that is a technology that good where they wouldn’t know?

Jordan Solender: 17:41

You know, it’s pretty good. I think you could still tell it’s AI. You know, I was talking to a bunch of viewers last night at dinner, actually, and I was showing them a couple of the recordings and they were like, I would know it’s AI. And I’m like, well, you’re not the normal person, though. You know, there’s a few recordings where, you know, you have somebody’s mom, you know, talking to the agent, you know, the agent’s name is Kelsey and says, hey, I’m Kelsey.

You know, and I’m here to talk to you about your daughter’s wedding, you know, on this date. And she’s like, oh, thanks for calling. You know, she you know, she has no idea. It’s it’s it’s it’s adorable to be honest. And then you have people in there like late 20s, early 30s, which is our normal ICP.

You know that immediately know it’s AI, but they don’t care because they’re getting the information immediately. Yeah. You know, so how do you train that?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:25

Like how how much of the conversation does it transfer over to someone if it asks a question that they’re not sure about, like transfer to a salesperson? How does how does the agent get trained? You train the agent. So like kind of can obviously it’s a conversational you know any questions or things can come up.

Jordan Solender: 18:45

So a lot of it is a brain dump, right? You want to give the AI agent as much as your brain as you can the whole. The best part about AI is that you can give it a golden image, and it’s going to regurgitate, you know, everything off that golden image. You can say, you know, if the client says this or has this sentiment, then I want you to respond with this. If it has that, then respond with this.

A lot of if then stuff. But it’s a lot of brain dump, right? You want to put as much information into your custom GPT or your custom PDF knowledge base as you can for this voice agent. That way it knows what to do and when to do it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:21

So that’s one you’ve noticed. You noticed a bottleneck kind of in the in the lead and sales process with the AI voice agent. What else I don’t know. Could be with that you’ve removed yourself or team through automation or AI.

Jordan Solender: 19:37

Sure, sure. So let me tell another recent one. So about my buddy. We’ll we’ll call him Tom. I just helped him out recently.

So I’m working with Tom. Yeah, he’s the founder. Another a seven figure marketing agency. Super smart guy, great team. He’s had his team for 15, 20 years.

Everything in the business ran through Tom, though, right? Everything ran through him. He was approving every invoice. He was answering every question, reviewing every client email before they went out. Basically, nothing moved unless Tom touched it.

He had great. He had a great team for back end operations and customer success. But you know, Tom was very involved, right? He was he was definitely working in the business, not on the business as a you know, as I say. So I asked him, you know what?

You know, he’s coming to me and he’s telling me he’s like, dude, I’m super burned out, right? Like, I am not sure I want to scale this thing to a point of exit. I’d like to exit within 3 to 5 years, like, I know, I, but I’m super burned out and I’m. I said, what’s one thing that drives you crazy but still depends on you? And he goes real fast.

He goes invoices. He goes, I’m spending like two hours a day just approving invoices and payments and I’m like, invoices and payments. And he goes, yeah. And I’m like, okay, so let’s let’s just remove yourself one thing. Just remove yourself from one thing.

Right. Let’s, let’s just focus on one thing to remove yourself from and take it from there. Right. Remove yourself from one thing. If you could take anything away, right.

What would that one thing be? So we worked together and we built a small automation using an automation platform. Right. In his accounting software. It was QuickBooks that auto approved anything under a certain amount and flagged any exceptions for review.

Right. So this single change alone in his busy season gave him ten hours back every week. Ten hours. Ten. I mean, what could you do with ten hours?

I mean, you’re an entrepreneur. I mean, what could you do with ten extra freaking hours, man? So I wouldn’t.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:48

Start a barbecue restaurant. But that’s what I wouldn’t do. But.

Jordan Solender: 21:53

Oh, investor in a barbecue restaurant didn’t start it. But. But the best part about this whole thing, though, is that once Tom saw that automation could replace like that one area, he comes back to me the next week. Literally the next week, we hadn’t even seen like the benefits of like a month. It was literally the next week.

It was like a Tuesday morning. He calls me and he goes, that saved me a ton of time, right? I’m not worried about it. Everything under a certain amount, if it matches a certain criteria, just auto approves. It’s nice.

My team’s not waiting on me anymore. My team’s happier. I’m happier. Ten hours easy, and I’m like, okay. And I’m like, let’s pick one more thing.

So then he starts looking into it and he’s like, all right, well, there’s client onboarding. I’m really involved with. There’s proposals, there’s they’re scheduling. So we’re like, I don’t know, a month, a month and a half now later. He’s not buried in approvals anymore.

He feels like he’s leading the business again. Right. He’s talking strategy with me. Right. Which he hasn’t talked to me about strategy like ever.

Right. Because he’s been so ingrained in everything. Entrenched. You know, in you know, the lesson I think the takeaway here is, you know, and I do this every day with, with my own businesses, right, to try to make them better because the I hate the phrase, I absolutely hate the phrase if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I hate that it can always be improved.

It can always be fixed. It can always be better. Don’t don’t even write the the guys that say that they want a job, you know, they’re they’re not looking to to scale. They’re they’re looking to have a job. And if you want to be an entrepreneur and build a job for yourself, like that’s totally fine.

I think my messaging and who I work best for and with width and provide the value to our entrepreneurs that want to scale and work on the business, not in the business. And just pick one thing and remove yourself. That’s that’s how real scale starts. Just picking one thing and removing yourself.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:52

Jordan, you said you have a special like audit process when you’re working with someone to evaluate. I love that question is what’s one thing that drives you crazy? That depends on you, because then you just kind of chip away at the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And you mentioned you have this process in the beginning to evaluate, I don’t know if it’s the company or the person or the tasks. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Jordan Solender: 24:18

Yeah. So my first step in I call it my bottleneck framework. Right. Is is the audit right. We figure out exactly where you, the founder, are, the bottleneck.

Right. Where are things being held up? What’s taking a lot of your time? We want to map out everything that touches you decisions, approvals, client communication. Operations.

I want to measure how much of it actually requires you. Once we see where the friction is, we can start. We can decide to start eliminating or delegating or automating any of it. Right. If you can document it, you can delegate it.

I like to say so the goal isn’t to overwhelm you with systems. It’s to find one area that’s blocking scale and start removing you from it. Right? Remember, remove yourself from one thing. That’s it.

So that’s the foundation for everything that comes next, right? It’s figuring out how to remove you from those things.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:16

You know, I love the eliminate automate delegate. One of my favorite books is The Goal. You know. Yeah. It’s and it talks a lot about obviously bottlenecks and friction points.

So I love you know what you’re saying here when you look at and sometimes I forget just to think of eliminating something like, you know, sometimes my mind goes to, well, I should delegate it, automate it or whatever. Like, maybe I should just get rid of it, right? And so what are some of those things that you found that business owners were doing that you’re like, let’s just get rid of it altogether. Do you remember any of those.

Jordan Solender: 25:55

About getting rid of a process altogether?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:57

Yeah. Like eliminating whatever something that someone’s doing. Right. In the case of, you know, not even automating or delegating, but just removing it, it’s unnecessary.

Jordan Solender: 26:09

So I don’t know. I mean, this all depends on the business, right? Like, you, you gotta you gotta look at the facts. You got to look at what you’re doing in the business on a, on a daily basis. But to remove a process I don’t think you’re ever actually removing.

You’re removing yourself from process. But to remove a complete process from your business, I don’t think that’s ever happening. You’re modifying your your scaling it. It. Maybe you’re maybe even automating it, right?

I don’t know if eliminating is the right word, right? Like, for instance, take a. Take a delivery service. Right. And order comes in.

You know, I’m sure somebody’s taking it over the phone. They’re putting it into a computer. The computer sends it out to a dispatcher. Dispatcher takes it to your house. Right?

I’m sure there’s even a better way to do it, where the dispatcher just gets it right from the computer and eliminates that, or removes right that that middleman. You know, I think things are just constantly should be changed and constantly flowing. I don’t know if eliminating a whole process is a way to look at it, though. Yeah, that makes sense.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:17

Yeah, totally. I’ll give you an example from like the podcast early on I’m like, oh, well, you know, after the after we record this, I’m going to just say, oh, you know, kind of record a special intro on every episode, right? And say, you got to check out Jordan because he’ll basically help eliminate you. You know, basically eliminate the bottlenecks in your business and blah, blah, blah. And I was finding I wasn’t doing it right after, right.

The interview was over. And so it would be a couple days and I’d be like, I don’t remember everything. Jordan says. I’m going to go back and listen to the interview and then record like a special intro. And I’m like, what would happen if I just didn’t record a special intro, right?

And so no one cared. So I was like, that saves me so much time. And that was that was a bottleneck in my process. And I just got rid of it. Right.

So.

Jordan Solender: 28:14

Well, I was going to say on that note, a lot of founders think they need to fix every process, right? But half the time what they need to do to your point is, is eliminate them, right? So over time, businesses collect steps that made sense once, but now they just kind of slow things down. So that was something right there that kind of just slowed you down. And then as soon as you realize, like, oh, you know, there there wasn’t nothing broke, right?

In fact, things got faster and you relieved some time for yourself. I mean, in some sense. Right? Elimination is the cleanest form of optimization. But before you automate or delegate or strip out the unnecessary because no system is better than a bad one, that’s already been automated, right?

So, you know, sometimes it’s the cleanest form of of optimizing. It’s just eliminating. So I think it all depends on the situation.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:01

To what you were saying with founders. And that’s why what you do is really important, because I find sometimes I’m too close to something. I don’t see that. I don’t see a fresh set of eyes on a business. Right.

To me, that’s normal. I need I’ve been doing it for this long. I almost feel like I need to do it, even though I probably don’t. So having someone like you who’s built these businesses is is very valuable to look through and see, because you may. I don’t know if this has happened, but someone thinks, oh, this is the thing I need to, you know, automate.

And you’re like, actually, when we did this evaluation, this is way seems like way more important to get rid of.

Jordan Solender: 29:42

Yeah. So interesting. You just said something that I say all the time. So about being too close to their own process. Right.

Like you build it, you build the process like in your podcast strategy, like in how you spin up a podcast and whatnot. Right. Like you built that process. So a lot of the times founders are too close to the process. So you built it.

You understand the logic behind every step. And it’s it’s hard to see where the waste is. So that’s why when people come to me, it’s easy for me to, to to look at it right and be like this, this, this. When you’re that close, everything feels necessary. Everything feels necessary because you’re doing it.

You built it even when half of it isn’t right. So you start almost defending inefficiencies because they worked once. That’s why an outside audit is so powerful. It’s it’s not emotional. It’s just data.

And as somebody once told me, you know, facts don’t have feelings. Right. It’s it’s not emotional. It’s just data. So sometimes you need someone who isn’t living inside the process every day to ask, why are we even doing this?

Like, what’s what’s the point of this? Right. Distance creates clarity. And when you zoom out and you realize most bottlenecks aren’t people problems. They’re they’re visibility problems.

You can’t see the problem.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:58

You know what is another thing? Jordan, when you look back at your companies or the people you’ve helped, what’s another thing people stated that drives them crazy, that depended on them? We talked about, obviously in one of your processes, the calls. Right. It depended on someone or people weren’t booking.

The other example with the agency was the kind of the invoices and that kind of thing. What else have you found when you’re talking to people? Is that one thing that’s driving them crazy.

Jordan Solender: 31:35

There’s a lot here. There’s a lot to. There’s a lot to unpack. Okay, how about this one? I was talking to somebody about at the same dinner last night.

About answering the same questions over and over and over again. Right. Chasing team members for updates, approvals that pile up, watching money come in. And time disappear. Right.

Because you’re not scaling effectively. Maybe you’re scaling, but not well. It’s it’s a lot of this goes back to time right. So scaling revenue but not themselves right. Again pulling the founder out.

So every new client now means more chaos not freedom. A lot of I’ve noticed that a lot of founders are subconsciously like scared of scaling because another client means more questions, or I need to hire more staff, or I need to look at the financials of, you know, this client, is this client profitable? Right. And that’s really where I come in, right? I help the founders identify exactly where they’ve become that bottleneck.

We install the systems, the automation, the structure, so the business runs without depending on them. So the goal isn’t more a hustle. It’s more clarity and control and more time. If you’re looking for more of like a specific example, I know that was like high level. We can take the answering the questions over and over again, right.

Let’s let’s talk about SOPs. Let’s talk about automation and using AI to your leverage. Like AI is a wild tool, like AI is a wild tool, you know? So we’re standardizing platforms right now across every one of my companies to standardize SOPs and have AI write the SOPs. I’ll record a short loom video and document something that I’m doing on a daily basis to win in a certain part of the business.

I’ll upload it to the SOP platform and and I’ll have everybody go watch it. And then I’ll have that SOP AI platform generate a quiz to make sure everybody fully understands, hey, this is how you win in this specific, specific facet of the business.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:46

Is I’m curious, I want to talk tech stack for a little bit. Right. Because people love talking about tech and software and tools. Is that specific one an internal tool, or do you use an external software for SOPs?

Jordan Solender: 34:01

For SOPs? We’ve tried so many tools. I’ve Trainual you’ll you know, actually another EO EO member Trainual.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:09

They’ve been on the podcast. Yeah.

Jordan Solender: 34:11

Oh really? Yeah. Yeah. Great platform. Ultimately though we we looked at Trainual, but we ended up going with a company called Whsle.

And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Weil, but wild for SOPs. Wild for SOPs. So we use whale for learning, onboarding and SOP creation.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:32

Okay. Yeah.

Jordan Solender: 34:34

This isn’t affiliated or sponsored.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:36

Or.

Jordan Solender: 34:36

Anything. I just, you know, we love them. We use.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:39

Them. Yeah, we use sweetprocess. I have not tested out whale, but we like sweetprocess as an SOP platform that centralizes everything. And yeah so it’s it’s definitely our team is like thank God we have this thing you know. What are some of the other important tools software that you and the team use.

Jordan Solender: 35:02

We’re big with Loom. We use a lot of Loom. Right. To not waste time. You know what could have been a meeting?

Could have easily been a Loom. I always say so we’ll record like a 1 to 5 minute loom. Here’s here’s what’s going on. We can see who read it. Tech stack.

We love slack because it integrates into everything. We use Salesforce as our CRM, standardized on all the companies. Ever since Salesforce rolled out their AI, right? Engaging with leads, you know, lost leads or, you know, people that aren’t talking to us. You know, it’s never been easier.

ChatGPT you know, everybody has a license to our ChatGPT environment. We have our own custom GPT that we’ve made to answer questions internally from everything about HR internally and culture in the company, all the way to customer facing documents and how to create certain documents and deliverables to make sure every customer is getting the you know, the right things across every company.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:01

Do you use anything from like a project management perspective, like assigning tasks?

Jordan Solender: 36:07

Yeah. So we use Monday.com. We tried asana, we tried Clickup ended up going with Monday again because of integrations. So the more things a platform integrates to, the better. I like things that are connected.

I don’t want to have redundancy. So you know, we can integrate. We use Google Workspace on our back end for every company so we can integrate Google Workspace. Google workspace with Monday, OpenAI, slack, you know, Salesforce. They all integrate to each other at every single company.

So there’s no redundancy in data. There’s always a source of truth.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:44

Anything from like you guys get a I mean it’s amazing the inbound leads and things you get from your companies. Are there any like phone systems that you use that connects everything, or is it Salesforce kind of allow you to do that?

Jordan Solender: 36:58

So Salesforce allows us to do it all as far as like a customer relationship management tool. But when it comes to inbound leads, I mean every company is different, right? It select is dominantly more of an outbound company. So I have a team making anywhere between 3000 to 4000 calls a day. Right.

So the sales math, right? I was talking about sales math last night and doing the sales funnel and the sales math. Right. Like, we need this many leads every single month to go in top of funnel. This many touches need to happen.

If we are over this amount of touches, kick that lead out of the funnel because they’re not going to answer the phone. I am a big subscriber to the Pareto method, right? 20% versus 80%. So I know 20% is going to pick up the phone. 20% of that is going to book a meeting.

20% of that is going to be qualified. 20% of that is going to get to the sales process. So, you know, it’s it’s very simple to work backwards on how many leads I need in the top of the funnel every month for it. Select for Maryland’s DJ. It’s almost the exact opposite because that’s an inbound company.

So it’s more based on Instagram Reels and hold rates on reels, right? How many people have followed us that month? So people find us by searching, you know, what is our SEO look like? Everything is is totally different. But the one thing that is true across all the companies is that there is sales math.

There is always sales math. There is always a funnel. And you have to understand your sales math, your numbers and your funnel if your business is going to scale successfully.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:36

Yeah. Jordan, you brought up a really good point. I think about Pareto’s principle, maybe every hour, you know, and I had Perry Marshall, who wrote 80/20 Sales & Marketing, who he, Richard Koch, has. Like, if you go on, anyone goes on audible. He’s got the 80 over 20 book.

So Perry actually went to I don’t know if it was Portugal or Spain to like spend time with Richard Koch, who wrote 80 over 20. So, so Perry came out with like the 80/20, like applied it to sales and marketing and came out with it. So of course I listened to all of the 80 over 20 books, like if I can get that little extra nugget from I mean, it’s a simple principle, right? But it’s, you know, 20% of whatever, you know, activity leads to 80% of results or however you want to apply it. But, you know, I definitely love going deep in that on that specific topic.

I’m curious, the call. That’s a crazy amount of calls per day. How do you manage that from like a technology perspective or certain? Again, like softwares or things that you’re using to at least do the outbound stuff?

Jordan Solender: 39:44

Yeah. So we there’s all different types of dialers out there. Right now in the US, AI dialing I’m pretty sure is illegal. You can’t do that at scale. I think you can do it for inbound calls, which we do because that’s, you know, people are requesting info.

So they’ve opted in. Essentially we actually have humans. You know, we have we have a whole team overseas that is doing outbound calls. We use something called a parallel dialer, which is basically a human component dialer. So there’s a bunch of people in a call center, you know, they’re making hundreds of dials a day for my team in as soon as they get somebody on the line, beep goes in the air.

year. And you know, my my team gets the pick up. So you know between that and the 1080 ten rule, you know, I would say those are the biggest nuggets for for scaling for founders right now.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:36

I’m curious, Jordan, from your standpoint, you’ve had mentors, colleagues throughout your career and who are some of those advisors and some of the great advice they’ve given you?

Jordan Solender: 40:52

A lot of people in EO, you know, EO has been so fruitful in that way, you know, in understanding not just your business and how it relates to your home life, but also how your home life relates to your business. You know, those are those are some big things. But first and foremost, my dad was an entrepreneur, right. So watching so my dad, you know, when I was a when I was a kid, you know, a toddler, my dad was big in the Domino’s Pizza Boom. So when I was a little kid, you know, I think like ages one to 6 or 7.

He had a bunch of Domino’s franchises in the Mid-Atlantic, you know, everything from North Carolina to Jersey. He he he had a Domino’s Pizza franchise. I remember being a kid and making pizzas in Domino’s pizzas. That’s where my birthday party was, you know? So that was that was really fun.

I got some cute pictures as a kid doing that. My dad took a page out of Mr. Wonderful’s book from Shark Tank, you know, and he always he always pressed me when I was starting my business this really early on. Know your numbers, right? I think I took that a step further because he was always referring to financials. Right.

You know, profit margins, you know, net income, you know, just basic, basic things on a PNL. I took it a step further, you know, in sales math. Right. So I know the amount of leads, like I mentioned, you know, the amount of touches, the amount of phone calls, how many proposals versions need to happen before we average, you know, a sale. So know your numbers if you don’t know your numbers in your ICP as a founder.

Big red flag, right? You might just be creating a job for yourself.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:27

Any other ego members and any advice they’ve given you that’s been helpful.

Jordan Solender: 42:35

I mean, so, so many. I’ll give a shout out to Kate in New York. So Kate, I don’t want to throw out a last name, but I’m sure you could figure it out with LinkedIn search. So she she’s a LinkedIn expert, right. And for for her, you know, she she was telling me I was on the phone with her a couple weeks ago.

You know, creating content creates trust. And as an entrepreneur with multiple businesses, right, you need to create trust in multiple verticals and industries. So something I’m leaning into more recently is creating content, like getting myself out there and, you know, if you got a bunch of entrepreneurs in the room, the one that is going to make himself uncomfortable more often than not is the one that’s going to win, right? You got you got to put yourself in uncomfortable situations. And most entrepreneurs, right.

Like we’re natural salespeople. We’re natural leaders, but we don’t like making ourselves uncomfortable, like putting ourselves on camera. A lot of the times. So she was telling me, you know, you know, you got to make yourself content and trustworthy through that content, and other people will want to work with you that way because they’ll be able to see you, you know, and and you’ll gain that authority in that space by making that content. Put yourself in an uncomfortable situation by creating that content.

So hope, hope that makes sense. But you know, I’m trying to do that myself.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:11

It’s amazing. Jordan, like some of the people I talk to and they’re so impressive and they’re. Are. Concerned about sharing? I don’t know whatever.

I don’t know what they’re concerned about. Honestly, like, just maybe they haven’t done it or. But just getting on video and even more chatting. It’s maybe just that muscle that needs to be flexed, but like you’re I’m thinking you’re you should like, you’re a rockstar. You should be sharing like all of the knowledge and things and people want to hear it.

So I don’t know what maybe some some things holding people back, I guess. I don’t know what it is.

Jordan Solender: 44:47

Yeah. And that’s, that’s the plan to do with, you know, my, my coaching piece. Right. And I talked about the bottleneck framework as I’m calling it. I talked about a little bit, you know, just people in EO reaching out to me.

How do I remove myself from this? How do I remove myself from that? How do I delegate this effectively? How do I scale the business and not be in it so much? So I’m hopefully I’m going to be doing a lot of that in the coming weeks.

I’m actually going to be rolling out JordanSolender.com where you can talk to me about it consulting, business coaching, Business consulting, automation and AI injection. All of these things. I’m going to kind of consolidate there to Jordan.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 45:24

Com last question Jordan. And before I ask it, I just want to thank you for sharing your knowledge and your journey with all of us. And people can check out, as you mentioned, JordanSolender.com and also itselect.io for more info, just some of your favorite books resources. Obviously your well studied guy and you’re talking about, you know, the sales process and bottlenecks and SOPs and Pareto principle.

What are some of your favorite books of all time that people should check out that has been valuable for you?

Jordan Solender: 46:04

Absolutely. So the one book I give to. Every salesperson or operator that I hire when I hire them. Over the past, I would say 5 to 7 years has been Chris Voss. Never Split the Difference.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 46:22

Chris was a guest. Yeah.

Jordan Solender: 46:24

Oh, really? Oh, yeah. So, man, I’d love to meet him. So fantastic speaker, great author, phenomenal book. Right.

The next is Dan Martell. Buy Back Your Time. So I would say those two have made the biggest impact on me as a, as a leader, a coach, you know, business owner. Those two.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 46:49

I love it. Jordan, one of the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing the journey. JordanSolender.com. itselect.io. We’ll see everyone next time.

Jordan. Thanks so much.

Jordan Solender: 46:59

Thank you Jeremy. Have a great day.

Outro: 47:01

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