With Jhana Li, a speaker, investor, and CEO of Spyglass Ops, with a mission to empower visionary founders by helping them scale their companies through operational excellence, systems thinking, and strong leadership. Jhana brings a unique blend of strategy and structure to fast-moving startups, helping founders stay in their zone of genius while building businesses that run smoothly without them. Through her work, she’s enabled dozens of entrepreneurs to unlock growth, avoid burnout, and step confidently into the CEO role.

Having built her expertise from the ground up as an early hire at a high-growth startup, Jhana eventually transitioned into COO roles and then founded Spyglass Ops, where she now leads a team of operational experts serving founders across industries. Beyond her company, she’s a sought-after speaker and advisor known for translating complex operational concepts into actionable strategies. Jhana’s mission is rooted in the belief that great businesses are not just built—they’re designed, one intentional system at a time.

Join us in our conversation as Jhana talks about the power of having uncomfortable conversations backed by strong processes, and how founders can shift from reactive chaos to proactive leadership. She shares her journey from van life to becoming a systems-driven CEOs. Tune in to learn how intentional operations can create both business growth and personal freedom.

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Takeaways & quotes you don’t want to miss from this episode:

• Why project managers ≠ operators (and what founders get wrong about that).
• When should founders bring in their first operator?
• How to scale with clarity, not chaos.
• The CEO-COO relationship explained: vision vs. execution.
• How Jhana’s Vision → Strategy → Systems → Delegation framework helps you scale smart.

“Operations is not something you’re born knowing, it’s something you learn.”

-Jhana Li

Check out these highlights:

• 02:12 Jhana shares how she fell into operations after being brought into a startup as an early employee and “figuring things out.”.
• 09:22 What are the common mistakes founders make with hiring?
• 24:00 What makes a great operator?
• 27:18 Jhana breaks down how to approach scaling with structure and intention.
• 36:48 Hear Jhana’s final takeaway for the listeners…

How to get in touch with Jhana on Social Media:

Imperfect Show Notes

We are happy to offer these imperfect show notes to make this podcast more accessible to those who are hearing impaired or those who prefer reading over listening. While we would love to offer more polished show notes, we are currently offering an automated transcription (which likely includes errors, but hopefully will still deliver great value), below:

GGGB Intro  00:00

Here’s what you get on today’s episode of Guts, Grit and Great Business®…

Jhana Li  00:04

Your success is directly proportionate to the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have. But the reframe that I offer people is that if you’re backed by the right process, those conversations get to become dramatically less uncomfortable. The uncomfortable conversation is you and me across each other at the table. A far more comfortable conversation is US versus the problem.

GGGB Intro  00:30

The adventure of entrepreneurship and building a life and business you love, preferably at the same time is not for the faint of heart. That’s why Heather Pearce Campbell is bringing you a dose of guts, grit and great business stories that will inspire and motivate you to create what you want in your business and life. Welcome to the Guts, Grit and Great Business® podcast where endurance is required. Now, here’s your host, The Legal Website Warrior®, Heather Pearce Campbell.

Heather Pearce Campbell  00:58

Alrighty, welcome. I am Heather Pearce Campbell, The Legal Website Warrior®. I’m an attorney and legal coach based here in Seattle, Washington, supporting online information entrepreneurs throughout the US and around the world. Welcome to another episode of Guts, Grit and Great Business®. I’m super excited to welcome my new friend, Jhana Li. Welcome Jhana!

Jhana Li  01:21

Thanks, Heather. I’m so excited to be here. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  01:23

Yes, super happy to have you. I always like to give a shoutout to whoever introduced me to my wonderful guest, and this time it was Maruxa Murphy, so big shoutout to Maruxa. I actually, I think still need to get her on the podcast.

Jhana Li  01:38

There you go. Note to self.

Heather Pearce Campbell  01:41

That’s right, but I’m super glad that our paths overlapped. I know we chatted a bit ago, and I think that there’s a lot that we can tackle today, particularly if you’re listening in the world of team building, right? Jhana Li lives in that world. She’s got a super fun journey to share. Let’s get her introduced. So Jhana Li first discovered operations while van lifeing her way through North and South America. She’s been a CEO at multiple successful startups and coached hundreds more. After seeing countless founders stall out and trap themselves without the proper operations, Jhana has started SpyglassOps through operations, consulting and recruitment. SpyglassOps empowers founders to simultaneously scale their businesses while regaining their personal freedom. So for I kind of feel like we have to start with the van life. I need a little background on how that happened, how it went. Do you miss it? Talk to us about van life.

Jhana Li  02:48

Yeah. So pretty much, you know, after college, I met a guy. He was like, Hey, I’m starting a business. I’m moving into a van. Do you want to come with me? And I said, Yes, but only if we take the van to South America done so that kind of set me off on what was like two and a half years of traveling and living nomadically. And in order to support that lifestyle, again, he was starting and scaling his own business, and that was kind of my introduction to entrepreneurship. Was watching him try and tackle these challenges. And as you do? You know you like weigh in, you try and solve problems together. And through a series of odd events, I ended up stepping into his business for what was supposed to be like 30 days, fill in for someone, and kind of whoopsied my way into the COO role at his company. I stepped into the company and just really not having any idea what I was doing, it was very intuitive to me where the gaps in the company were, where the wasted opportunities and the wasted resources were, and so I just started cleaning things up. And then I got lucky with some mentors who told me that there’s a word for that, and that’s operations. And that really sent me down the rabbit hole of what is operations? How do we build operations? That, in my mind, Ops is there to do two things, it’s help. It’s to maximize the efficiency within our business, right? Get us the most bang for buck within our business as measured by profit, and to make sure that the founder and CEO has the relationship that they want with their business. So in our case, I had to learn a style of operations that supported me and my boyfriend in like, traveling around in this van and going to paragliding competitions and wanting to live and travel and see the world, because we committed to that lifestyle that wasn’t going to work if we were running the business with 80 hour a week work weeks. So it was this gorgeous, like forcing agent that made me have to figure out, what’s the systems, what’s the team? How do I build that team? How do I manage that team in such a way where the work can get done without me? And that is really what defines the style of operations that I teach to our clients. Because I think we all start our business wanting freedom, but then we find ourselves years later, never feeling less free and how. We get there when it’s the exact opposite of the goal that we set out to achieve for ourselves, right?

Heather Pearce Campbell  05:04

Well, we didn’t put ourselves on the van life path,

Jhana Li  05:07

And my recommendation is that you don’t have to from the comfort of your own home.

Heather Pearce Campbell  05:20

How am I gonna learn this? I don’t think I came down. No, that is great. And you know, you mentioned the phrase forcing mechanism, right? And I think so often in life in general, we end up with a forcing mechanism that causes us, whether it’s health, whether it’s children with special needs, whether it’s suddenly having to, you know, care for a parent like whatever the circumstance where suddenly we’re forced to make a shift and evaluate things in new ways, and hopefully we do that sooner than later, so that we are actually creating the type of business we like to be in. What did you find were some of those early gems on your own journey that you were like, and maybe you didn’t have these, but like, sometimes there are some big ahas of like, Oh my gosh. Why did I not see this sooner? Why did I not do this earlier? But it sounds like, you know, you started right out of the gate, learning this stuff and applying it right away. What were some of those things as you began working with other people that you found really made a difference? 

Jhana Li  06:27

Yeah, so many come to mind, but a big AHA moment for me was in that first COO role, I had the opportunity to work with my very first Ops mentor, a woman named Layla Hermosi, and I was working directly with her team and her product. And I just remember being so struck by how high performing her team is literally every single person I worked with. I was like, you are incredible. And I couldn’t understand how her team was just so much better than mine. And that is really what sent me down the leadership and team building rabbit hole, because when I asked her about it, essentially her very gentle but necessary slap in the face was Jhana, it’s not my team, right? It’s not that my team is better, it’s not that I pay them more, it’s not that they’re somehow a players while your team is not it’s how I lead them, right? Our PR team is only as good as the coach, so if you want to level up your team, what that actually looks like is looking in the mirror, leveling up yourself, leveling up your leadership, and then your team will rise. And I totally did not believe her for like, the longest time. And then as I really started digging into this leadership thing. It’s really what I realized to be true is that if our businesses are just reflections of ourselves, our team is just reflections of ourselves, we can look at our team and be disappointed and frustrated by their performance, and we can point the finger and blame them, or we can say, how have I unintentionally accepted and tolerated this level of behavior. How have I maybe enabled this behavior and how I lead and how I hire and how I manage? How can I use my team’s performance as a data set that reflects back to me where I have room for growth as a leader? And when that unlock happened, it changed the game for me, because instead of now having to go out, fire everyone and then hire “players”, the solution is actually much simpler. It’s harder, but it’s simpler, which is, I change. I change. All of a sudden my team will change.

Heather Pearce Campbell  08:33

What? When you were in that conversation, and I don’t know if you were able to observe her long enough, what was she doing differently that you saw like, Oh, this is different than the average person out there leading a small business. Yes.

Jhana Li  08:48

So the first thing that she did is that she had very clear systems and processes for each key stage of the employee journey, right? She had a process for hiring that guaranteed she got the right a player into the right seat every time. She had a process for onboarding that guaranteed that if the right person was hired, they would be set up for success, and they would be ramped up in their role quickly, and if somehow the wrong person got through, they would quit in the first 30 days. She had a process for managing that she called Manage up or manage out. If there’s an underperformer on the team, there is a process to follow that will either lift them up and close the performance gaps or manage them out, meaning they will literally quit and self select off the bus. She had a process for firing, right? So I think the big thing is, like we all, none of us know how to lead. None of us are born with this knowledge. The critical difference is that she did the work to establish, how do we do these things, so that she was able to create a processed outcome, which is, I have the highest performing team all the time. I’m not leaving that up to chance. I’m not leaving that up to my gut. Tech. I’m not leaving that up to like, intuitively, how do I handle the situation in front of me? There is a process to fall back on it, every single stage of the journey.

Heather Pearce Campbell  10:09

Well, and I think, you know, it’s so interesting, because when I think about even the processes and systems in my business, often, if there’s, like, a mistake that happens, or a gap, you know, my first question is, like, Okay, how do we fix the system? What is broken in the system? It’s very often not a people problem. It’s a system problem. Like, how did we set up the system so that it failed in this way? Right? Yeah, is she somebody that is natural with processes? Like, as you dig into it and you’ve worked now long enough that you’ve seen a lot of business owners doing their thing. I think systems come naturally for some people and not so naturally for others. They have a system, even if they don’t know they have a system, right? And it’s about getting that down and then asking, is it working? What do you find for those that do it really well? How are they doing it? 

Jhana Li  10:58

Well, yeah. So the short answer is, yes, absolutely, being able to observe Layla, and if you know her husband, Alex, they are the quintessential, like EOS would call like the visionary integrator pair, right? Or the founder and the operator. And what I have found to be very true in now the hundreds of visionary operator pairs that I’ve had the opportunity to work with and coach, is that these are two completely different avatars. It’s different skill sets, it’s different psychographics, it’s different decision making trees, it’s different priorities, it’s different values, and it’s different ways of interpreting data. So where a visionary will look at the data within the business and they will see, here’s the next product we could launch. Here’s the next revenue generating opportunity we could take advantage of. Here’s the next way to grow the business. An operator will look at the same exact business and say, here’s the holes. Here’s where things aren’t working. Here’s where they could be working better. Here’s where we’re wasting time. So they’re two fundamentally different lenses, and the power of like Alex and Layla, or anyone who finds this partnership, is that you’re able to get a true genius in each seat, so that one person is looking at growth and one person is looking at profit, and we get to look at both, and we don’t put pressure on ourselves to be both and to somehow have mastered both. So I work with visionary entrepreneurs, and pretty much I tell them, hey, I’m giving you the permission slip to not be the systems person, to not care about SOPs, because we both know you don’t right. Your highest value to your business is to stay in the visionary sea. But that doesn’t mean these things aren’t important. It just means you’re not the right person to be looking at them. Let’s go find you that person. Let’s train that person if you already have them, so that you’ve got your counterpart and your company’s not losing profitability and efficiency just because you’re not your lens isn’t naturally geared that way.

Heather Pearce Campbell  12:58

So it sounds like in that role, and the sweet spot that you found yourself landing in your work is you can train somebody up, like some of your clients, bring you their person and say, help or you can also help them go find and train that person. Is that correct?

Jhana Li  13:16

Correct. Yeah. So we do an audit of our clients businesses, and we tell them, because again, the hard part is that I’m a visionary trying to identify an operator when I’m not an operator. So I don’t know what they look like. I don’t know how to find them. I don’t know if I have the right person in the role, or just a person that I like a lot and trust a lot. So we’ll actually do that vetting process and we’ll give them our recommendation. Yes, you’ve got the right person, they just need skill and knowledge or know that person is either no longer a fit or they were never a fit. We have had to help clients, fire their spouses, fire their siblings out of this role, because the person you trust the most is not necessarily the same person who’s going to be the best. COO.

Heather Pearce Campbell  13:58

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, you raise a really interesting point, even about hiring and how people end up doing roles in businesses that you know sometimes work out to be a great fit, other times not so much. And so often I think people hire out of convenience, out of like, well, I don’t know any better, and I like this person, and they seem capable, so I’m sure they can figure it out, right? Yes, and yet I know we talked about this before going live like there has been a season for so many of my clients right now where we’ve had to unwind some major problems with team and some contractors that came in, you know, and they could have been in a business a while, long enough to to take control of enough systems that they can do a lot of damage on exiting, right? And there’s like, the systems for all of that, and how you capture that information, and how you maintain control of your business accounts, and all of that, right? But it can really be a nightmare to the nth degree, especially for a small business, when operations essentially have to come to a halt because something like this has happened. Can you speak to your experience not only seeing that in some of the businesses that you’ve worked with, but also helping folks avoid that outcome?

Jhana Li  15:24

Yeah, so it’s so funny, because the call I was literally on just before this is to help a client with this exact situation. Right hired the best friend into the COO role, not the right fit, is absolutely ruining their relationship. They can barely speak to each other anymore, but she’s become such a critical component of his business that if she were to throw up her hands and storm out tomorrow, the company could grind to a halt. She could cause a lot of damage on her way out. Right? So how do we manage the situation? And again, guys, there’s a process, right? The answer is not, I’m going to have a hard conversation and then thoughts and prayers. There is a process that will help somebody. And namely, I always see it as, how do we go and take this situation from it being a me versus you, you’re on the other side of the table from me. We’re negotiating, we’re fighting, and I have to get my way, and you have to get out. How do we turn that from an me versus you to an us versus the problem. It’s you and me on the same side of the table. The problem is that we have you in a role that you’re not a fit for. How do we work together? How do we collaborate to solve the problem? Because maybe the problem, or maybe the solution is, actually you’re a great fit for the company. You’re just in the wrong role. Maybe the solution is, you could be a great fit for this role if you wanted to close certain skill and knowledge gaps. Maybe the solution maybe, is that actually this isn’t the right business vehicle for you, with where you want to grow, with the role you want to fill, with how much you want to get paid. We can actually look at this together and objectively realize and both come to the understanding that we can’t serve you in the way you want to be served, and if that’s where we land, that sucks, and there’s a lot of grief and heartache in that, but it’s actually okay, and we can work together and be collaborative in building a transition game plan that honors your needs, right? We’ll keep paying you for the next 60 to 90 days. We’ll bring in a replacement. Maybe you can train that person. I can give you a letter of recommendation and post about you on my social media and help align you with future opportunities, if it’s us on the same team and the same side of the table, we now get to work together to find a solution that serves you and serves the business, but if it’s you versus me, that’s where we run into a lot of the emotionality that ends up destroying relationships and causing a ton of liability to the business, which I’m sure you know even better than I do, how dangerous that can be.

Heather Pearce Campbell  18:02

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Heather Pearce Campbell  19:45

I have a couple thoughts. Where I want to start is in your because it sounds like you can do an analysis of people in their roles. Are you using, like, known tools out there, like, I know there’s personality assessments? There’s the Codal assessment, which is it measures like your motivation, like what actually motivates your personality. That one is called the Colby, right? So there’s different assessments. Are you using tools like that to help understand somebody? Or do you have your own process? What does that look like?

Jhana Li  20:18

Yeah, the short answer is no. We’ve essentially developed our own process only because you’re not looking, especially in the COO role, you’re not looking for just the best personality type of a COO in this client example, this woman who’s in the role is actually a phenomenal coo. Technically, she is very proficient. Motivation wise, she is spot on. The challenge is culture and trust, right? She’s not the right COO for this visionary, and that’s so okay. That’s totally okay. She deserves to go be the COO for a visionary somewhere else, where they’re exactly the right fit and they can do great work together. But the challenge is, is that we’ve got this whole big relationship, and all of this trust broken and all of this inability to communicate, and that’s what’s preventing us from just having the honest conversation that you and I just aren’t the right fit for each other anymore, and how can I support and serve you in going to find the thing that is the right fit. So the short answer is the process at a high level looks like identifying what is the hat that needs to be worn in the business. The big mistake that we make as entrepreneurs, you asked, how do we prevent this? The big mistake that leads us here, is that we find people that we know, like and trust, and then we build roles around people, right? So I like my brother, I’m going to hire him as my coo. I don’t know what that means, so I’m just going to give him a bunch of stuff that he’s good at, and we’re going to call that being my COO, right? So we get these Frankenstein roles built around individuals. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  21:51

Oh, it’s yes. And to your point that you made before, these individuals, once you get far enough down the road, actually have the ability to hold a business hostage if they walk out, if they stop running the systems and processes that they’re responsible for, if they don’t hand over account credentials, if they do any number of things that people do in the heat of the moment, I have a client who you know probably, I mean, I’m guessing It was like eight months ago. We’ve had multiple conversations over the course of time, and I just said, Look, this is not a good trend. This guy is going to end up holding your business hostage. You’re going to probably have to hack back all of your account like and unfortunately, that is where he ended up in December and January, we have spent 1000s and 1000s of dollars trying to regain his business, trying to to literally hack his accounts. I mean, it’s been atrocious. And the unfortunate part is it could have been avoided, right? And and it’s really hard that the challenge that I see many small businesses face is they bring somebody on. This person becomes somewhat critical to the functioning of the business, even if they’re not the best person for the job. And people in order to avoid the discomfort of having those challenging conversations and learning how to do that, well they avoid and they say to me, Well, I thought it was going to get better. I hoped that one situation was just going to resolve, you know? And it’s like it never does, folks, it never does. It does not resolve on its own. If there’s a red flag that you are seeing early in the process. And the other thing, from a legal perspective, you give up a lot of your rights if you are allowing a continued behavior or system or process that isn’t really working for you to go on because you have not put that person on constructive notice that this is not working right, right? So it’s you know. How are they supposed to know? How are they supposed to mind read, and it’s your responsibility as the business owner to lead people, not only through those conversations, but also to lead your business in the right direction. And you know, the unfortunate part is, you’re also doing your clients or your customers a tremendous disservice if you continue down that path, because at some point there’s going to be so much disruption that impacts them as well. Amen.

Jhana Li  24:26

Anybody watching the video, I’m like nodding and gesturing like you’re so spot on with this Heather, right? And I think so. A quote from that mentor, Layla, something I love that she says “Your success is directly proportionate to the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have. But the reframe that I offer people is that if you’re backed by the right process, those conversations get to become dramatically less uncomfortable. The uncomfortable conversation is you and me across each other at the table. A far more comfortable conversation is US versus the problem”. So if how we have that conversation, and the process we used to walk someone through that conversation aligns incentives, puts us back on the same side of the table the conversation like I still get coffee every month with people that I’ve fired. Right? I love those people dearly. They invite me to their baby shower because I didn’t have to have a conversation that said, I’m forcing you out. The conversation was, here’s the role that’s as it needs to be filled, right? You ask what our our process is. Instead of finding people and then adjusting roles to them, we take the people off the table, and we define the role. Here is what the COO at this company needs to be capable of delivering. Here’s the tasks associated with the role, here’s the scope of work, here’s the people they manage, here’s the outcomes, here’s the metrics they’re responsible for. We define that. Then we ask that person to come back onto the table and we say, Hey, here’s the role. Do you actually want this role? 

Heather Pearce Campbell  26:06

Is this a fit? Yeah, you actually want this?

Jhana Li  26:08

And they’re like, oh, no, that role sucks. Which is why I haven’t been doing any of that stuff totally. Here’s the other roles that are available in the company. Are any of these hats a fit for the skills that you want to develop, the work you want to do, and how much you’re willing to get paid? Willing to get paid. Oh, no. Okay, so then there’s actually only one opportunity left, and that’s for us to go help you find another place. But I’m doing that as an act of service to you, because what no one deserves is to be unsuccessful in their work.

Heather Pearce Campbell  26:40

No and and to be unappreciated, despite the fact that they’re, you know, showing up, putting and it’s that conversation around even skilled labor versus unskilled labor, where I’m like, I was talking to my husband and just like, why is it that we cannot value a living wage, even for “unskilled labor”. It’s essential to the business. It’s essential to our economy. It’s essential. And not only that, but somebody is giving time from their life to show up and do this role, right? Like, how awful to not be appreciated for that. So I completely agree. And I think one of the other things that comes to mind when I’m thinking about, you know, how many clients I’ve seen in this position of turmoil, where on the back end, things are really yucky, and they could have been so much better, is it matters how you hire. It matters the language that you use when you’re saying, okay, you know, yes, we want to bring you into this role and understand that if there’s ever a point where this role doesn’t seem to be a fit, or things are getting, you know, crunchy, or balls dropped because it’s not a fit, we’re going to be very proactive in addressing that, because we want you to win, and we want us to win, right? And I think just committing to a level of transparency around here’s what we want. We want everybody winning. And if there’s a point where we’re not all winning, we’re going to immediately address it, and not in a not in an aggressive way, but in an open way, right? Of like, is this working? I’ve noticed this, how’s this going? And you know what I have found in my own work? Because I’ve got a small team, you know, I work with three or four assistants, or, you know, various team members at any given point, and they have very specific roles. But one of the for my main assistant, one of the things that I’m asking at every meeting, every quarterly meeting, where we’re reviewing her work, is what needs to be taken off your plate, what is not a fit for you, whether it’s because you’ve grown or you just don’t like it, right? And so even though it’s not necessarily like pegging her into a specific role, it is modifying the role and saying, Who else do I need to bring on to do this other function that is no longer a fit, right? And because I want to know, are there things you’re unhappy doing, right? And probably businesses who are doing it better have clearly defined all of those roles in advance. But businesses change over time. You know, they some functions drop off. You’re like, oh, we tried that and didn’t like it. We’re not doing that thing anymore, right? 

Jhana Li  29:25

So what you’re talking about is what I would introduce into the onboarding process, right? So exactly what you just said, I have a whole slide in my onboarding deck, my culture deck, that I walk everybody through of what happens if there’s a performance gap. I say that on day one, and the reason for it is exactly what you just said. It takes the taboo, it takes the discomfort out of the conversation. It says, I don’t expect you to be perfect. In fact, I expect that at some point there’s going to be discrepancy. So when that happens, I’m already getting in front of the emotional discomfort that isn’t inevitable when that moment happens. I’m pre framing that I expect this to happen, and here’s how we’re going to handle it. We’re going to handle it by showing up to the same side of the table and being teammates to each other, and being collaborative in how we identify the gap and then decide whether that gap can be closed, or how it can be closed, but I expect gaps to exist, because the hard part with startups is that our teams are changing so rapidly, our company is changing so rapidly. So to your point, the roles that we needed six months ago may not be the roles that we need six months from now. So we need to have a process that will allow us to stay flexible and dynamic, because our companies intrinsically are if we are locking people into specific roles, or if we’re not setting in place the right cultural foundations that will allow us to evolve and change with them over time, you are literally setting yourself up for the most uncomfortable conversations, and then you’ll put those conversations off, and then the problem will grow, and then we have an explosion. So to your point, Heather, the root cause solution to this goes all the way back to hiring and onboarding, not how do we handle it now that the trash can is already on fire?

Heather Pearce Campbell  31:16

Yeah, that’s right, and I think so often people just don’t know. I mean, we’re all doing our best. We’re not here to beat you up, even if it feels like we’re beating you up, but you know better, and so you do better, right? So moving forward, anybody heard this conversation? Yes, go back and look at how are you beginning? How does everything look? At the beginning, run yourself through the process as the person that you’re getting ready to hire, right? How does it feel? What does that conversation look like? I think that that level of proactive planning the amount of heartache it can save. So, yes, what? In addition to things like this, where you’re like saving people time saving them heartache. What do you love most about your work? What have you found are the pieces that you really love to dig into?

Jhana Li  32:09

Oh, I always say that the best thing I get to do is help founders fall back in love with their business. Because we start this business because we love it. We love something about it, and then through the slow aggregation of all of the stuff that we’re talking about, the problematic team members that we don’t know how to handle, and the systems that we don’t want to build, and the client fires that keep piling up, we fall out of love with our business. And the reality is that all of that is entirely solvable. And so through bringing in the right systems, the right team, getting these things off the plates of the founders, and getting them back into the role that not only is the role that they enjoy the most, but is also the role that’s going to generate the most amount of growth and revenue for their business. They get to fall back in love with this company that they built, and that, to me, is such a satisfying transformation to support someone through because, again, all the things we’re suffering from in our business are solvable problems. We just don’t know how to solve them, and that’s okay, because we’ve never done this before. So how could you possibly be expected to know that’s not a reasonable expectation. What is a reasonable expectation is that when you hear a conversation like this and you recognize I have this problem, they’re telling me there’s a solution, it is your responsibility to then go find that solution and implement it in your business. What I don’t accept is people who back themselves into a corner and then say, I guess I just have to work 80 hour weeks and hate my life because grind and hustle tells me that’s what it means to be an entrepreneur that I don’t accept for anyone, right?

Heather Pearce Campbell  33:50

And I think so many people get stuck in that spot where they do not see the way out, and they almost lose the motivation to go find it right, until they hit a pinch point, a forcing mechanism that forces them to go find it. So who are your favorite? Describe the kinds of clients and businesses that you like to work with? 

Jhana Li  34:10

Yeah, so it’s so funny, because psychographically, you just hit the nail on the head, which is, most clients find us when they’re at the bottom of the well, right? They literally have tried everything else they’re ready to burn their businesses to the ground or exit them at a fraction of what they wanted tomorrow, because they just can’t stand it anymore. It can work with those clients. They’re not my favorite because I have to tell those clients, unfortunately, you’re so far down the well that it’s going to take three to six months for you to even start climbing your way out of it, and now you have to hold on and persist for another six months in a situation that you hate. What I love are the clients that say, Hey, I think I might be starting to fall down a well, and I don’t want to hit the bottom before I start to look at solutions. Can we be proactive? Active. So like demographically, we work with generally online based startups. They’re doing between seven to eight figures a year. They’re trying to scale their systems and their team and the founders trying to get themselves out of the day to day weeds. My favorite people are people who look into the future of their business and say, I don’t like where my relationship with my company is going, I don’t see how to work myself out of some of these hats. I don’t see how to grow without me just putting more hours in. And I don’t choose that for myself. I know there must be a better way, and I’m willing to go out and invest in finding it. So I never hit the bottom of the, well…

Heather Pearce Campbell  35:37

Yeah, it’s, you know, I look at my own clientele, and the number that show up proactively versus the ones that are like end up in turn. And you know, there’s a mix of both.

Jhana Li  35:50

And we have a lawsuit. Can you help me? That’s true. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  35:54

There’s a mix of both, and sometimes you get forced into one side or the other, but you know because I want to talk about those folks who find themselves in distress, right? And I know what that looks like, and I’ve had folks, in fact, I had a consultation with somebody yesterday who’s clearly in a state of distress. And I think the challenge in supporting some of those folks is that they’re so desperate for a solution, it’s like they are, you can almost just see the tears popping out of their eyes, because if we can’t solve this problem in this one hour, you know what I mean, this pain is going to continue, and it’s really hard to help people get back to the long term vision and the mindset of like, yeah, you’re going to have to have some endurance to build your way out of this, right? And that is the journey of business. How much do you find yourself in the the mindset coaching side of things versus logistics?

Jhana Li  36:52

Such a good question. So we find ourselves in the mindset coaching side. So much that I actually went out and partnered with an executive coach to help our clients on exactly that, because the mindset is the difference between our clients that get good results and our clients that get great results, the their ability to change how they lead. Right? What I said, our businesses are just reflections of ourselves, so my team’s whole job when we do that audit is to pretty much just hold up the mirror and say, here is how, with the best of intentions, you are bottlenecking your business, and here is how you must grow and change if you want your business to grow and change. For the clients that are willing to sign up and do that work, we now have an executive coach who will work with you on everything from strategy to leadership style to delegation and control to trust, the things that will make the long term difference in building the version of your company that you want, and then tactically we place a fractional coo like effective immediately to start help clearing I think of it as the difference between like headaches and cancer, right? If a patient comes into the doctor’s room and they have cancer, but the cancer is causing headaches, well, we need to fix the cancer. There’s cancer in the body. We have to fix the cancer, but fixing the cancer is going to take six months, nine months, and they still have splitting headaches. So how can we craft a Tylenol pill that helps abate the symptoms that are causing the immediate pain, so we have enough time to actually fix the cancer. Because if the headaches are so painful that you just like, this is where the metaphor falls apart, but like, you give up and you walk away from the whole thing, you sell the business, you burn it down, you do whatever, then we haven’t actually done right by you. We have to figure out how to fix the headache long enough to solve the cancer. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  38:47

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, if you’re listening, we just strongly encourage you to be on the proactive side of this, right? It’s well, it is interesting. That analogy, you know, brings me back to early days of business training, when you learn like people are either responding to like, motivating towards a positive outcome or avoiding a negative one, right? And so often in business leadership, we’re in that pain point already trying to avoid that pain. What talk to us about the resources I know you’ve got a like, a variety of resources that you have available for folks who are in your world. Talk to us about ones or a one that feels like a fit for this audience?

Jhana Li  39:35

Yeah. So the one that comes to mind, if any of what we talked about around team building resonated with you today, like I mentioned, I’ve taken those early processes that I learned from my very first mentor, I’ve stress tested and iterated and optimized them through hundreds of businesses, and now have my own set of team building SOPs, and they all exist. I call it like the a player SOP Bible, and I am more than happy to give that. Anyone in your your audience, Heather, who wants the process required to solve these things and build the version of their team that they want. So if that’s interesting to anybody you guys can, I think probably the best way would be just DM me on Instagram. Let me know that you came from this podcast. You can DM me the code word like a player SOP Bible. I will shoot that over to you. Totally free, and I’m more than happy to do so.

Heather Pearce Campbell  40:21

Oh, I love that sounds. I feel like I need to go read that too. I love SOPs but I’m sure I’ve got room for improvement. What I’m sure there’s so much that we could dig into in this world, right? Team Building is one of the biggest challenges that businesses face. I mean, from a logistical standpoint, from a leadership standpoint, even from a legal standpoint, right team building comes with all sorts of unknowns, a variety of risks. Is it worth doing? Absolutely, and get some support to do it right, right touch on some of the other things that you find are some of those big potholes that people step in. What else do you help people address?

Jhana Li  41:04

Yeah, so we have a six pillar operational framework. Team is only one, so one of six, right? The other five are strategy and strategic alignment leadership. So that’s what we’re talking about in terms of leadership style, but also the leaders that you have in place within your business team is a major one. And then we have communication, like meetings, how information flows through the business systems, and then data you cannot scale, like these pillars, I think of like the foundation of a house. Taller the building, the taller the house becomes, the deeper the foundation needs to sit in order for that house to be stable and scalable, you cannot scale your house with only one or two or even three of these pillars. If you truly want a company that can scale and then sustain without you, it requires all six. So when we do that audit, those are the six categories we’re looking at our clients, businesses through and we’re identifying specific gaps in areas for improvement, and we give them a health score broken down across subcategories for each of those six pillars, so they know where they stand.

Heather Pearce Campbell  42:12

I love that. Yes, people love systems, right? We love frameworks. We love pillars. I do a lot of talk about foundations as well, because that’s that’s where legal fits, right is building out that strong business foundation. So I get it, and that was a great example. So folks, you know, we talked a lot about team, we talked some about leadership. There’s a lot more that gets tackled in the scope of operations and getting support with your operations so that those are done, right? Jonna, so good to connect with you today. What final, well, first of all, a couple things we know you show up on Instagram because you just said, DM me. Where else can people find you? Where do you like for people to come connect with you, follow you, you know, find your resources. Where are you at online? 

Jhana Li  43:02

Yeah, so Instagram is the best. The handle is @thejhanali. And then I will also be launching my YouTube channel here very quickly, or I should say, ramping it up, so you can also on YouTube @thejhanali, and both of those places is where I’m able to just give as much free educational content, free resources as much as I’m able to share. That’s where I do it.

Heather Pearce Campbell  43:23

Awesome. So folks, pop over to our show notes page. You can find those always at legalwebsitewarrior.com/podcast, look for Jhana Li’s episode. And Jhana is spelled J-H-A-N-A and then L-I for Li. So check out Jhana’s episode. We will share links to your website, to any resources, to your to your socials. What final thoughts would you like to leave our listeners with?

Jhana Li  43:51

The final thought would be, I’ll just bring it back to like a common theme that we’ve tied through, which is, our businesses are reflections of ourselves, and that’s a challenge, because it means everything that you’re unhappy with in your business is somehow, some way, a reflection of you. That’s a bitter pill to swallow, but what you earn, what you unlock when you take ownership for your company in that way, is the opportunity to do something about it, because you can’t control anyone else. Fundamentally, you can’t force your team to become better, but what you can change is how you show up and lead so hand in hand with that radical ownership comes instantaneous opportunity to change what you don’t like about your business. And with the right tools, with the right guidance, you can make changes tomorrow that will change your situation with your business tomorrow. It’s not as hard as it sounds, and it doesn’t take as long as it sounds. We’ve had clients come back to us after two weeks and say, I feel like I’m running a different team like these people are just. Fundamentally different. I don’t understand what happened, and all I’ll reflect back to them is what happened is you changed. So when we take ownership for that, we offer ourselves the ability for immediate and instantaneous unlocks. And I hope that that is a saving grace for everyone who is maybe feeling a little disheartened at the end of this episode. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  45:20

Well, yeah, and I hope not too many people are but it’s real talk. Building a team is not a small thing. It’s not an easy thing. It’s an essential thing. That what I love about what you just said, though, is, I think also the level of honesty that you invite from a team, when you say and you show up to each meeting. What did I do to to cause this to happen? Right? Did I miscommunicate? Did I, you know, where was there a lack of clarity, where, where, you know and if you’re genuinely interested in the real response, you’ll get it right? People want to be part of the solution. They don’t want to be in the problem, right? And as soon as you shift that, I think getting and just opening the floor for that honesty, where there’s not any shame in that game, it just makes it so much easier. Like you said that that potential for speed to fix things faster, because you’re going to get to the root of it.

Jhana Li  46:20

Yes. And again, you’re inviting your team to join you on the same side of the table. They are not the problem. They’re actually a collaborator with you to identify and solve what the real problem is.

Heather Pearce Campbell  46:32

That’s right, yeah, no, I love that so much. Jhana. Thank you. It’s been such a joy. I wish we had more time to dig into all the other pillars. But for now, we’re going to send folks your way to go DM, you start to look into some of your resources. I really hope we are able to bring some folks over into your world, especially those that are super aware they’re heading down a road where they need more support they do not want to end up at that pinch point.

Jhana Li  46:58

Thank you so much, Heather, this was so fun. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  47:00

Absolutely. 

GGGB Outro  47:02

Thank you for joining us today on the Guts, Grit and Great Business® podcast. We hope that we’ve added a little fuel to your tank, some coffee to your cup and pep in your step to keep you moving forward in your own great adventures. For key takeaways, links to any resources mentioned in today’s show and more, see the show notes which can be found at www.legalwebsitewarrior.com/podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and if you enjoyed today’s conversation, please give us some stars and a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast so others will find us too. Keep up the great work you are doing in the world and we’ll see you next week.