Unlocking Momentum: Eden Lovejoy on Working With Your Team

Freddy D: 00:01:52

Hey, Superfans superstar Freddie D. Here in this episode 105, we're joined by Eden Lovejoy, a trailblazer in reimagining business management.

Eden is the creator of the Virtual GM Matrix, a groundbreaking system that empowers teams to take on general management responsibilities, freeing leaders to focus on strategy and vision. With her approach, she helps business owners move beyond the traditional. Work on your business mindset and embrace a new model.

Working with your business.

Get ready for a conversation about cultivating ownership, fostering engagement, and building a workplace culture that's both impactful and energizing.

Freddy D: 00:02:37

Welcome, Eden, to the Business Superfans podcast. We're super excited to have you here this afternoon.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:02:43

Thank you, Freddie. Really glad to be here with you today.

Freddy D: 00:02:46

Tell us a little about your backstory. I know you operate as a virtual general manager, but how you go about creating that business.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:02:56

From when I was very young, before I went into college, I knew that I wanted to work with small to mid sized businesses. It's always been this drive to help as many people as I can. There's only so much that you can do when you're a general manager with one company.

Right? You get to help one company, one team. But I've always had this internal map of got to be able to help more people. I love the work that I do.

I tell people I'm a general manager by craft and inclination. I love the work of facilitating the performance of teams and I love to bring that to as many clients and companies as possible.

So just internal drive would be the answer.

Freddy D: 00:03:35

Well, is that how you started off, just jumping into a general manager role or did you work your way up?

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:03:40

Well, I was in leadership right away in college.

I was in an entrepreneurship class and had an assignment to write a business plan and I saw on the notice board that someone was hiring a person to do a business plan. I thought, let's get paid to do this work. For my class. That turned into grant writing and management of a venture capital funded startup.

It was a small manufacturing startup funded by a technology innovation grant. From there moved into executive director of Inventors and Entrepreneurs Association.

So I went from school into leadership roles in smaller organizations and then kind of grew from there. So I've done for profit, nonprofit, range of things.

Freddy D: 00:04:27

Okay. So that gives you the background to do what you do from that aspect, which is a great opportunity, especially starting off the way you did.

Most people don't have those kind of opportunities and I worked myself up to that level over years. But you started off from a different path. And that's really cool.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:04:47

I think it's partly the market that I was in, partly the size of entities that I was working in to begin with. But yeah, it definitely has been a great adventure and I'm still doing it today.

I have four companies of my own teams that I'm leading and continuing to run as I'm working with other clients as well. I love what I do, so I just keep doing it well.

Freddy D: 00:05:08

It's empowering because you really can be transformative to the team, to the customers you're dealing with, to the suppliers you're working with. The distribution business, the complementary business.

Nobody ever really talks about ancillary businesses, but they all come into the equation and you're in a position to really kind of elevate everybody into it as everybody's growing.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:05:34

Exactly.

And it is my philosophy and what my book, Activate youe Virtual GM talks about building the skills and talents of the team to actually replace the work that I do. So in a small to mid sized company, you don't necessarily hire a full time general manager.

That's more of an investment and more of a need than a small business has. But you need the skill set ingrained in the company. So we need to build that skill set in the team.

Freddy D: 00:06:03

Yeah, absolutely. Correct. Because good management empowers their team and then actually gets out of the way and lets the team do what they need to do.

When I learned management and I went through numerous trainings, the things I learned was that my job was not to manage people. My job was to help the team accomplish their goals. And I became a facilitator. What do you need? How can I help?

What resources do you need to be successful? If I took care of them to be successful, I didn't have to worry about myself. Took care of itself.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:06:41

Exactly. My definition of supervision is to allocate resources and establish priorities with a team that is engaged and focused on accomplishing their goals.

We want to lead people with the supports they need to be successful. I don't want to have anybody on my team that I don't trust. Absolutely is out for my best interest and is doing their work.

My job is to to make sure they have the tools they need to be successful.

Freddy D: 00:07:07

Oh yeah. In my book I call creating business superfans and it starts with leadership.

The core of it is transforming your team into superfans of you as a leader and as a company. There's no better advocates than having your own team promoting the company they work at. That energy transcends to prospective customers.

Existing customers, the whole ecosystem gets affected by it. And if you've got a great culture and a great team, you can move mountains and accelerate business growth.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:07:45

You and I are really reaching the same message from a slightly different perspective. Absolutely.

Freddy D: 00:07:50

Yeah. That's my flare is when I wrote my book, it was like, okay, how do I write something different and cool? Because everybody else has done it.

Think of a sports team. Sports team's got the fans, faces, painted jerseys, banners, they're throwing tailgate parties. Who are they promoting? The team.

They're wearing all the gear and talking to friends about, hey, did you watch that game? Is the team paying them for that? No, they're making money off the merchandise.

So my idea was, why can't businesses transform their ecosystem into brand advocates, business superfans, and have them start promoting that company? It just explodes. I mean, there's no other option, really.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:08:30

Exactly. Right. When you have the team fully engaged and on board, you've got that energy. And the studies are consistent over the years, study after study.

When your team is engaged and excited to be in the business, you've got better safety record, more profitability, higher performance, less turnover. It is the key to success across the board.

Freddy D: 00:08:51

Think of it like a rowing team and you've got one oh each, and you have eight people on a racing rowboat. So you've got to get them all going in synchronization. They've got to be operating as a team.

Otherwise, you know, if nobody's in sync and knows the vision of the company and everybody's doing their own thing, that boat's going no place.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:09:14

Well.

And I think one of the things that happens often is that people in a company see the value of their contribution, but not everybody always sees the value of everybody's contribution. So really important in order to get those oars rowing together is to build that relational integrity, right?

For everyone to know the value of everybody else on the team and how it flows together.

I was talking with someone yesterday on a construction company team, and, you know, carpenters and plumbers tend to think that they're driving the whole bus, right? They're the big picture, they're getting the work done.

The analogy I've always used is on a muscle truck, you see those big tires in that drivetrain are getting it moving, but if the solenoid goes out or a spark plug comes undone, you're going to stop in the middle of the road and not be able to move. You got to respect and embrace the contribution of everybody on the team, or else that rowboat gets out of whack.

Freddy D: 00:10:10

Yeah. Everybody's rowing in their own direction. It's not even going in a circle. It's just kind of wobbling.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:10:15

It's just not going.

Freddy D: 00:10:16

And the important thing that you said, though, is that everybody really needs to understand what the vision of the company is and where the company is going. You got to know what direction you're rowing and what the goals are that you're shooting for as a company.

And so you get everybody to buy in, and that's where you start creating that momentum.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:10:35

I walk people through a process of ensuring that the vision for the company is broken down into strategic goals for organizational units, departments, or teams. Each person should know how their particular contribution ties to. To the goal that the team has for whatever time frame you're working from.

Freddy D: 00:10:54

Absolutely. So, Eden, share a story of one of the companies you stepped in as a gm, and how did you turn it around?

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:11:05

Well, it's a virtual gm. I came into the company because there was chaos and a consultant had come in and said, you really need a general manager.

You really need some organization here at the front end.

The most important thing is to articulate, right, what's our mission, what's our values, what's our vision, and make sure everybody's on board with that. Creating that organizational chart and role definitions and making sure people know their alignment.

The owner of the company, I had been there for a couple of months doing some work with the team, and he said, I really didn't think my team would like this much structure, but they seem to be really enjoying it. Owners sometimes will think, I trust my people. They should have as much flexibility as they need. What happens, though?

People really do like structure. They like to know where the guardrails are. They like to know how much authority they have, the room they have to maneuver in.

And so we brought that structure into the company, and very shortly, especially one key department that had been unprofitable within just a few short months was outperforming the level it had ever done. And the owner came back to, well, was it this or this or this that changed? Well, it was all of those things. You can't pin it on one thing.

We got the team, we got the oars, all rowing together in the same direction. To use your analogy, yeah.

Freddy D: 00:12:26

No. When I was running a company as general manager and I was doing multiple things, I was the sales guy, the marketing guy.

You know, I handled all those aspects for that company. It was a small company, about 10 people. We put in some SOPs in place because they didn't have them.

We set up some processes and more importantly, I empowered some of the team members to come up with their own processes for the departments they were handling.

I got out of the way to see what they could come up with and they came up with some brilliant ideas that I wouldn't have thought of because I empowered them, I trusted them.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:13:02

Wow.

Freddy D: 00:13:03

You know, he's empowering me to do this thing and people transform. And you'd be surprised how people that you would never think would be able to step up to the plate, actually knock it out of the park for you.

And the ones that you think would be the rock star actually fall flat on their face.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:13:24

Well, you never know how people are going to respond. And my experience, when we bring clarity and organization and delegated authority to a team, with that comes accountability.

You have authority to accomplish results, but the accountability is there to be successful as well. Sometimes you'll see people self select out because they've been hiding in the corners making it sound good, but not really producing anything.

Those folks will jump ship pretty quickly when you start to bring in real clarity and organization.

Freddy D: 00:13:55

Oh, absolutely correct. You know, I experienced one person that talked the talk but couldn't walk the walk.

And when you started assigning them things and checking up, then they started getting confrontational and saying, don't you trust me? To me that's a flag. It turned out they were faking it and not doing their job.

When you start looking into it, you find out the ones that got assigned stuff fell flat on their face because they realized they actually have to do something.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:14:24

The key point, I tell people all the time, delegation is not abandonment. There has to be a feedback loop and a follow up dialogue to stay in the conversation of do you have the resources to be successful?

And here's the successful outcome and having those deliverables.

I think when people move into the place of really wanting to trust their team, sometimes we move into like, okay, well, I gave it to them so it should be done. I gave it to them, so it should just be done. And then we get disappointed when it's not done to, to the timeline or the way that we want it done.

And so there's some skill set to develop around leading a team to successful performance.

It's not super complex, but when we build in those feedback loops, clear guidelines, clear articulated authority, clear expectation of result, then we're giving folks the tools to really deliver to us what it is that we want.

Freddy D: 00:15:21

Yeah, absolutely correct. And sometimes you uncover that some of the people you thought were going to be able to do what they're supposed to do.

You have to make decisions that they are no longer part of the team.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:15:37

Well, years ago I had a mentor tell me if someone's not doing what you want, it's for one of three reasons. One, you haven't clearly communicated the expectation. Two, you haven't provided the resources for them to be successful.

And three, they're quite simply not a fit for that role. I used to get upset when people weren't doing what I want. The moral of the story is none of those three reasons. Emotional response. Right.

We just get to be clear about it. But I definitely prove out the first two options first. Before I ask somebody to step out of a position, I gotta make sure I've done my job.

Freddy D: 00:16:13

Yeah. Reiterate those options for our listeners because I think that's important and I want to make sure we drive that point home.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:16:21

Sure. That people don't do what you want for one of three reasons. One is that you have not clearly communicated the expectation.

Two is that you've not provided the resources for them to be successful. And three is they're quite simply not a fit for the result or the position that they're in.

Freddy D: 00:16:38

Right. Yep. And I've experienced all three with people in different ways, so I can completely appreciate.

But I really like how you just put it in simple terms. 1, 2, 3. So tell us a little bit more about some of the things that you've done or experience with different companies as a virtual gm.

And how does that apply to someone that may not think that they need somebody like yourself?

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:17:07

A recent example, I have a client who's a small retailer, a local retail company. When we started working together, she said, oh, I don't need an org chart, it's just simple. We just have retail floor and then we have management.

But when I was able to show her the nuance, there's actually a differentiation of skills between somebody who's just a brand new cashier and somebody who's been on the floor for a year or two and is able to contribute in a different way. A couple things happened. One, she was super surprised that her team got so excited about it. Like, oh, there's a place for me to go here. Right.

I'm not just stuck in this flat level. And two, she got to recognize there really was a differential.

And what happened is that a really high turnover has slowed way down and people are more excited about building their skills and knowledge to be more able to contribute to the result. So that's a simple and recent example.

Freddy D: 00:18:06

That's a good example because if people don't know that there's a growth path for them, they're just showing up for a paycheck. That's the mindset, I gotta go do my job. They're not fired up, it's just a job.

But if there's a roadmap, opportunities and skill sets they can learn, that may not necessarily be applicable here, but can be down the road for them. Game changer.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:18:32

Absolutely. It's one of the components of that engagement. We talk about general management, but really internalizing that. We manage things and lead people.

We need to understand what motivates people. They're inspired by our mission, motivated by our vision. They understand where they're going to grow.

We will never motivate people to the level of performance that we want by simply paying them well enough and do what we say. That fail every time.

Freddy D: 00:19:00

Absolutely correct. For example, my wife sells hearing aids and they're high end, high quality hearing aids. And she's been with the company seven years now.

They've made adjustments, they're positioning themselves for growth. They're over north of 100 million in sales. They've readjusted the pay scales and commission structures. It just keeps getting changed and changed.

And she's making less than she was a couple of years ago. But the culture, the company, the way they treat people, they made sure that she was covered for four weeks out of the five weeks we were gone.

She got paid for that. And you don't see that, especially in US Companies. They have prizes, contest. She's won a multitude of Airbnb cards.

So you're hitting a point here that I want to make sure that our listeners understand that it's not just always about money, it's about the culture of the company. Companies need to be able to accommodate each individual's personal life goals.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:20:07

Absolutely. Without feeling taken advantage of.

When owners have that compassion for people and want to provide opportunities, sometimes they end up feeling taken advantage of. So the flip side of it is we want to support people and care about them and have compassion for their lives.

But it needs to be built on this shared agreement about what we're here to do. And what we're here to do is to achieve the mission, fulfill the vision, right?

To have a successful environment for everyone, there's reciprocity needs to be built in.

Because especially in small businesses, I've seen it where owners are like, I've offered this time off and I've offered these benefits and I'VE increased the wages and it feels like the employees are only taking. When employees are not engaged with, they have buy in for what we're up to as a business, it can get head in that direction sometimes, unfortunately.

Freddy D: 00:21:03

But you said a key word there, buy in. And I think a lot of owners don't do a good job of getting their team to buy in to the mission to be part of it.

Because if you believe in the mission and you're part of it, it's a whole different mindset.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:21:22

Absolutely. One of the founders of Travelocity said culture is a contact sport and I love that line so much. Right.

Culture is not something that we have a mission and values. We just stick on the wall and say, okay, there they are.

We have to live it, breathe it, talk it, implement it, demonstrate it and weave it into everything that we do.

If you have a company value of family values are important, then it's really important that when somebody asks for time off to go to a parent teacher conference, you don't make it hard on them. Live it or else very quickly the team sees through a story. If we're not living it and practicing it day to day.

Freddy D: 00:22:03

Oh, absolutely correct. You hit the nail right on the head. One hit, boom, done all the way through.

And you remind me of stories when I was running sales for a software company globally and we were taking a product, nobody knew about it, putting it on the map, and we hit a threshold, I think it was when we hit our first hundred thousand for the month in sales globally. I ran around, told me to meet in the conference room. Nobody knew what was up.

But I had lunch catered in, already brought in, set up in the conference room. Nobody knew what was going on.

I brought in the software developers, the owner of the company, and I basically said, you know, big market board, it says we just hit 100,000 in sales. And I want to just take a moment to thank everybody for making this happen. And we had champagne, some lunch and some cake.

Everybody was just fired up, they were high fiving one another and the energy was just contagious.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:23:04

You know, we spend so much of our life in our jobs, in our careers and our professions. If we're not having some fun, then we're not having a fun life. So that's important to celebrate. Absolutely.

Freddy D: 00:23:14

Well, Sir Richard Branson says it the same. It's not work and personal time, it's called life. It's all in between, it's all together.

You're living, you're working, but you're still living there's. No difference.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:23:29

Yeah, absolutely. The way I like to live is one time I came in on a Monday morning and somebody said, you know, how was your weekend?

I was like, my weekend was great, but I have as much excitement coming in on a Monday as I do even on a Friday. Because it's life, Right?

We're living life to the fullest in the game we're playing during the week, which is business, and the game we're playing on the weekends, on the evenings, which is family. That's how I like to live.

Freddy D: 00:23:54

Yeah, well, it's really a blend of both. We do the same thing.

We're looking at different trips that we're trying to plan and weekend getaways, but we work it around her schedule, my schedule, how do we make it happen and have fun at the same time? When she has so many appointments that she schedules, she's all excited and fired up.

And likewise, when my downloads are increasing and I'm into 34 countries now, and we've only started this in November, is just taken off. So that's exciting. And firing up as well.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:24:25

That's great. That's great. Well, you certainly.

It's a lovely conversation we're having here today, so I'm sure that everyone's enjoying listening and following and seeing what you're up to.

Freddy D: 00:24:36

Well, thank you. So let's go into some of the challenges or things that owners overlook and that you've identified they should be doing.

Let's share some takeaways that our listeners can really apply to their business that they probably didn't even think of.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:24:57

I think first and foremost, I like to share with people. My perspective is, for years we've been telling owners, don't work in your business, work on your business. I suggest you change that mindset.

Your team doesn't want to be worked on, they want to be worked with. The trick is to discover how you can work with your team to achieve the goals you want.

And it's about communicating the goals, overarching the big cultural pieces. It's also about delegating authority and building in feedback loops.

If there's one takeaway, I would say, yeah, think about how you work with your team to get things done, invite them into supporting you in what you want to be up to.

Freddy D: 00:25:41

Very well said. That's really how you get the buy in. That's how you get everybody in the rowboat. Rowing in the same direction is you're working with them.

That's something I learned a long time ago from a manager. That was one of the best managers I ever had. And I try to mimic him and he was shoulder to shoulder. There was no difference.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:26:05

Yeah, well, we all have different roles, Right. The owner has a different role, the manager has a different role. But we're all here to achieve the same results. Result.

Freddy D: 00:26:14

Right. And I remember a CEO that I worked for and the company got acquired.

And what he did, which I remember class act, was he brought in everybody and everybody got a check based upon their years with the company, their contributions to the company, everything else, instead of just the investors and everybody else making the money, he actually shared a percentage of it with the team because as he put it, if it wasn't for everybody here, we wouldn't have been able to pull this off.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:26:50

Oh, that's love.

Freddy D: 00:26:51

My hat's off to that guy. Because that was a class act. Everybody felt really good because everybody was concerned about their jobs and everything else.

But he handled it perfectly.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:27:04

Yeah, we're not doing it alone. We're not growing big businesses alone.

Freddy D: 00:27:08

Right, right, right.

So what are some of the other things that you can share another story with our listeners of how a virtual GM can actually impact a business and help them go from level A to level C.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:27:28

Well, or one of my favorite stories, and I got this just yesterday, I got a bouquet of flowers from a client I've worked with for 10 years as a virtual GM with her team and her company. You know, when I met her 10 years ago, she was working in the day to day of the company, but it really was a very expensive hobby.

She'd been in business five or six years, putting money into the business all of that time and not taking anything out. And somehow had gotten reconciled to that because it was operating, being successful.

And then we had that clarifying conversation, said, let's turn this around. Within a year, she was out of the day to day.

She and her husband went on a wonderful vacation to the Galapagos Islands and were offline for a month and the company ran itself even better. She was drawing money from the company, a very quick turnaround.

So I think that's an extreme example, but idea is that when you work with the team and go from disengaged just showing up to do the job, to engaged, inspired, active contribution to leadership. You can go from losing money to making money very quickly.

You can go from being in the day to day grind, chopping vegetables or packaging boxes or doing whatever it is that you're doing to being a true leader who's strategically planning the growth of the company, which is where you should be. I think business owners feel like they're supposed to know how to do this right. This is my job to do operations, to be an operational manager.

I'm the owner of the company. I think that we don't have enough conversation about how this is actually a skill set, a skill set that needs to be developed.

And there are people who have that skill set, like you and me, that can contribute in a way that's meaningful and impactful very quickly. But even better is this next step of beginning to build that skill set in the team to get the results that you want. I am all about business owners.

I think they should live a life that they want, running a business that they love, and not feel tied to or trapped. Very quickly, we can move out of that feeling of being tied to or trapped in a business into freedom, pride, and success.

Freddy D: 00:29:50

Yes, 100%. Because I've seen business owners that have the mindset that they're the only ones that can do it the right way.

I've learned something not too long ago is that 80% is good, considering that you did 100%, none of it. Oh, you know where I'm going with that.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:30:20

Well, it was one of the best pieces of business advice I ever got before I hired my first employee. Years ago, a business owner I knew said, if you can stand to have things done to 80% of how you would do it, then you can have employees.

And if you can't, then you should stay a solopreneur. That has held me in good stead. 20% differential doesn't mean it's 20% worse. It just means it's different.

We create space for other people to contribute their perspective and strategy and skills to the table if we're ever going to grow.

Freddy D: 00:30:53

You're absolutely right. An individual's perception is their own reality, right or wrong. And they may perceive that they've done an excellent job.

You may say, okay, well, it's 60%, but that's where you need to step in as a leader and say, okay, I really appreciate what you did. You did an excellent job, because that's in their mind. Then you got to package it to say, okay, here are a couple tweaks.

So we get you to the 80%, but that's not the conversation. But I'm just talking to. The difference between you and I is you got to somehow get them to elevate their perception.

But you can't poo poo their perception.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:31:32

No.

And again, clear expectations and clear guidelines and knowing where there's room for flexibility and where things absolutely have to be precise is a bit of how we get people on board with our vision.

Freddy D: 00:31:44

Right. So Eden, as we get close to the end of the show here, how can people find you?

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:31:52

The best place to find me right now is on YourVirtualGM.com okay. You're curious about how a virtual GM works or about the book? Activate your virtual GM or want to connect with me personally?

YourVirtualGM.com I'm also on LinkedIn, a great place to reach out.

Freddy D: 00:32:10

Okay, we'll have that in the show notes. And you happen to have anything for our listeners?

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:32:16

Yes. If you go to freebusinessbook.com I would like to gift you with a copy of my book.

It's a downloadable version but free business book and there's no s at the end of that.

Freddy D: 00:32:28

Freebusinessbook.com okay, we'll make sure that's in the show notes and great conversation, Eden. Great insights for our listeners and we look forward to having you on the show down the road again.

Eden L:ovejoy: 00:32:41

Thank you so much, Freddie. It's been great to talk with you today.

Freddy D: 00:32:44

Thank you.

Freddy D: 00:32:46

Hey, super fan. Superstar Freddie D Here.

Before we wrap, here's your three a playbook power move to attract ideal clients, turn them into advocates and accelerate your business success. So here's the top insight from today's episode. Your team doesn't want to be worked on, they want to be worked with.

So shift from control to collaboration and unlock unstoppable momentum. So here's your business growth action step. Replace your top down directives with a team powered mission session this week.

Get everyone aligning their roles to the company vision in real time. If today's conversation sparked an idea for you or you know of a fellow business leader who could benefit, share it with them.

Support the show with the donation and grab the full breakdown in the show notes. Let's accelerate together and start creating business super fans who champion your brand.