Three Traits of Successful Organizations: a Q&A with Chris Evans and Taylor Welch

Maintaining healthy organizations is one of the biggest challenges for a leader in any context. But in the midst of a global economic downturn, it becomes exponentially more critical. Evans and Welch LLC and all of their subsidiary companies: Traffic and Funnels, WealthCap, Sales Mentor, have seen unprecedented economic growth and acceleration during these challenging months. On a recent webinar, Chris and Taylor were joined Matt Green to answer questions about how they function and why they continue to be successful.

Question 1:

During these tough economic times, we've continued to have record-breaking months. How did you maintain that mindset? What is the mindset that you have to keep that growth going during these times?

Chris- “First off, we expect it. We've been waiting for things to go wrong for a long time. That's one of the things that we trained our leaders on. We've communicated to our teams. Because of that because we don't operate off the best-case scenario, we always operate off the worst-case scenario. We are always hedging. We are always building margin into what we do, how we operate our business. So when resistance comes, when ‘Rona comes, when recession comes, whatever might come, we are ready. We are prepared. Not only to survive but also to thrive, to expand, to grow, to take new ground, to acquire companies because we are ready. We expect disaster to hit.

Question 2:

What have you instilled in leaders to help achieve those goals in these difficult times?

Taylor- “The biggest thing for us has been decentralization. I don't know that people believe us when I say that me and Chris don't make 95% of the decisions. We're out of it. We make maybe five percent of the decisions. We have empowered our teams. So many people want to have a team, but they don't want to empower their team.

When someone has the responsibility but does not have the empowerment or the control that's purgatory. You have the responsibility of hitting the target but you don't have the control of the decision making to hit this target. You're basically a slave. You can't make any decisions. But yet, you are responsible for some pseudo-outcome. So its really, really, really, important as leaders to give your team permission to fail. Give your team permission to make their own decisions. Me and Chris have gotten really good at that. Its perhaps one of the things we've got the best at.”

Chris- “I think many times entrepreneurs, owners, the leaders of the business, think they are protecting their team by covering for their team. But they are actually robbing their team members of the opportunity to grow and expand. They have to be the one that goes through the stuff in real-time. In real life to be able to be confronted with the decisions to make or not make. And then what the result of that decision might be, positive or negative.

Until then, its only theory for our leaders. if we're the ones making all the decisions, they aren't working that muscle out. They are atrophied and so that makes the whole organization weak. A bunch of atrophied people vs allowing them to make the decisions and own the results of those decisions again, positive or negative. Once you lock into that and start doing that it makes your whole organization way more strong.”

Question 3:

What are some of the biggest growing pains or shifts you need to just embrace, if imperfectly so be it, to empower the leader in the marketing, in CS, in sales?

Chris- “I'd say we had to attach value in letting go. Like we had the perception and the mindset that there was more value for us to hold on. There's more value for the team to hold on. When you are trying to scale a company and obviously default of scale is that there is a lot more activity. It requires a lot more hours, a lot more decisions, a lot more things have to happen. If you have this mental picture it's like you start a company out and maybe you are holding a 10lb weight.

If you've ever been in the gym going back to that analogy. But now as you are scaling the company now you have another 10lb weight, a 50lb weight, and you are carrying all this stuff, that doesn't make sense. There's no longevity in that. There's only break down, pain, and you just can't make it. Once identifying that is way more value in us letting go and when we started to experience the benefit, not only for us, but for our team, and even more importantly for our clients. That's when I was like “Oh my god how can we go all-in.

Taylor and I were having a conversation the other day where he said ” Do you know where it all changed? It was when you read ‘The strength of the leader, is the weakness of the organization.' We have the ability to jump in and do things, and fix things, but it keeps people atrophied in the business because they are not meeting that resistance and having to be confronted with the things that require us to actually get that job, those tasks, that objective done. Once we tasted that, it was like holy smokes dude, we were going all-in and since then we've been refining it, chiseling it to make it more efficient.”

Conclusion

What ways would you empower your teams? How do you plan to implement some of these ideas into your organization? Are there areas in your organization where you see room for improvement? For more content like this subscribe to The Traffic and Funnels Show, Daily Mind Medicine, and check back on the entrepreneurship blog every week.

In your service,

– Taylor and Chris