I built a complete “business operating system” using claude code

Key Takeaways

This is the actual dashboard running my 17-person, $700,000 month company in real time. Not me solo, not Slack, not a spreadsheet, this, okay? And the sad reality is that behind most businesses making 30K a month or even a million a month, it's the founder who is starting to feel a specific kind of exhaustion that they just can't explain. The problem is they're trying to hold the entire company in their head, and your head is not a system. What you're going to see is exactly how I use this real operating system to go and run my company, and why founders who run one are leading their businesses while everyone else is being run by theirs. This is my Ops Machine. I've used Claude Code mixed with Vercel, combining it with a lot of the data that I store in HubSpot to go and create this one-stop dashboard for everything I need to run my core team. There are three things that I think every core team needs: dashboard, an amazing meeting rhythm, and you need to make sure that your team has clear objectives and key results. And so, we're going to get into every one of those pieces here. So, starting out with the command center, right? This is like the cockpit of the company, right? We're able to see the core company priorities here, things like going and recruiting and building a badass founder success team. So, what I can do here with all of these goals, right, is go and see all of our goals across our week, you know, across the core leadership team, right? And as we go and check these off, right, they gradually go and just kind of show that progress bar, which is pretty cool. So, we're able to every single week just chip away at the core task we need to get done every single week, then how that ladders up to our given month and what we're working towards, right? And then similarly, how that goes and ladders up to what we need to get done in a given quarter. This is the big thing that I'm, you know, huge on in my businesses, right, is creating like this maniacal sense of urgency, right? And so, if we all have a clear direction, clear goals for the week, for the month, for the quarter, we are all rowing at the same rhythm. This next piece is the Level 10 Meeting, okay? This comes from a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. This book really talks about the importance of running level 10 meetings inside of your company. Now, the structure for the level 10 is a game-changer. You start off with wins, right? So, what are people on the team going and accomplishing? Let's share those, get the energy going, right? The more, you know, energized the team is, you know, the more that that just flows through the results, momentum, all that good stuff, right? To me, having fun in a business isn't about ping-pong tables and some culture initiatives, right? To me, fun is winning, right? I view building a business like a sports team, and that's why, just like in a sports game, right? You've got some sort of scoreboard, well, we've got a scoreboard inside of our company as well, showing things like cash collected, our margin, the FSMs that have been hired, our close rate, show rate, all that good stuff, right? So, that we know across the core business what we're on track, off track, and what we may need to get, you know, kind of grooving on. Why this is important is that on these leadership meetings each week, what we're aiming to do is understand what's off track, because then we bring that down to something called the issues and opportunity section, which I'll get to here in 1 minute, okay? Now, across the company, I think the core job of the CEO, right? Is to set the company goals. Everything inside of FounderUs, giving founders their founder operating system, um and really helping, you know, eliminate the use of like a hundred different spreadsheets, hundreds of different Google Docs, different teams running off of Notion, one person on Google Workspace, another person on ClickUp, you know, another person on HubSpot, and your business just becomes this like mess, right? And to me, that's what leads to founder chaos. My theme this year, and really helping founders, is helping turn them into architects versus just the pure operator in their business. And, you know, things like the Ops Machine are my, you know, products that I'm trying to birth and help uh founders go and implement um in their businesses. In addition to that, right? I'm really big on kind of McDonaldizing our delivery, right? I want, you know, almost like when you go to McDonald's in Tokyo or Paris or New York, you're getting that same kind of product. Well, that's exactly what we're doing in Founder OS, just to really systematize every single part of it, make it insanely scalable, scaling our team from five customer success managers to about 12 over the next 4 months. Um so, things are growing at a good clip. Um I just need to obviously make sure that as we grow, those systems get sustained. From there, you know, it's a lot of like focusing on retention. At a business of our size, trying to get to a $2 million a month, um it's a game of just retention, retention, and so um the best way to do that, right, is just to be product obsessed, deliver an amazing product for founders, really embed the infrastructure that we've made into their businesses, making their lives easier, getting their team more aligned, um helping reduce the confusion inside of their business, and really, you know, helping founders across all the different departments, right? And from there, if we're doing our job, founders are sticking with us for years to come. What I want you to take out of this is less like the details of my business, although, you know, happy for you to see it, and be transparent. But, is this this idea of like imagine your own business, right? If you had every core initiative, every company goal, all listed, and all the subtasks around there, imagine how much tighter your business would be. This is what it's all about, right? It's about knowing the details, and having every single task laid out across all core initiatives, so that nothing slips between the cracks. That to me builds a formidable empire. This is what we do. We just go from top to bottom through this, making sure that every single project is on track. If anything's missing, we talk about it, and we move it down to the identify, discuss, and solve section here. You can see that we can go and move these areas around. You know, we can move different aspects up if we think it's a higher priority. And what this allows us to do is just make sure that as a leadership team, we're addressing the biggest issues that may come up. We're solving those first, and working our way down this list. You can imagine this whole meeting, we're doing it on Zoom. My team's all over the world, and all these meetings are recorded on Fathom. From there, we're able to go and automatically pipe that Fathom recording into Claude code and this whole ops machine and this meeting rhythm is automatically updated. No more going in, you know, what did we say last week or what happened 4 weeks ago that we committed to? No more of that stuff, right? Make sure that any meeting that you're on inside of your company, you've got that recorded, right? And that that's being fed into Claude, right? So that you build this kind of company brain. Now, from there, we've got the initiatives tab, right? So this is really measures all the core aspects of our company, right? We've got our media platform across YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, right? And bunch of initiatives going on there. Things like, you know, new styles of infographics, we're doing more raw, real rant type content just like this right now on YouTube and on Instagram. Hope you like it. With all that, right? Just involves like different stuff going on across the team, right? Different things that we want to keep track of. And this is how we kind of make sure that, you know, all the core initiatives are moving forward in a nice way. We're able to track progress, see when things are behind, and basically just make sure that we're all moving forward in one organized way. You know, on the front end, right? You guys see my brand, you know, a lot of you guys have said, you know, they looks really tight, we seem to have everything together, it's really polished. Well, the way that all happens in the background, right? We're just running a seriously tight operation. And too many founders I see, um you know, that come to us in Founder West, right? They, you know, feel like they're just operating some house of cards, that everything at any moment could just fall apart. You know, the same systems that work for you at a million dollars a year start to break at five million dollars a year. And so, that's why this kind of dashboard, right? A good meeting structure and clear goals and rhythm across your team are so imperative. The cool thing about this as well is that, you know, in any given week, right? I'm talking to different advisors of mine and I'm constantly learning, right? So, folks like Dan Bolden, you know, Neil Patel, had a conversation today with Ryan Klog, and after those conversations, Claude is going and then pushing in different recommendations and action plans that I need to get done. So, this morning, had a call with Neil Patel. Now I can see this whole LTV expansion plan has all been added into our actual initiatives here, right? So, things like getting clients on ACH first payments and having a backup credit card there. Um something that he's seen work in the companies he runs, um which he's been cranking it um for 20 plus years now. And then some recommendations on where we can find CSMs, um different kind of ways of building out our conversion infrastructure. So, lots of cool stuff there. When we get to the team, right? It's also a bit of a team scorecard, right? Being able to see kind of scorecards across the team, who are the active members of the squad, um which is just a nice place for us just to have like that one-stop shop uh view of everyone on the team right now. And as well as look at things like our capacity on our team. When you're building a team, I see it almost like a sports team, right? And you're building your own fantasy roster, right? so this is my fantasy roster. I think building a business is kind of like, you know, a video game. Um and this lets me see the squad that we've got today, right? And um understand just, you know, where we can improve, where we're maybe seeing some gaps, um areas we can automate, you know, just nice to have that one-stop view. Any business is only as strong as its recruitment, okay? And so, about 30% of my job at least is recruiting. You know, I was just on an interview before filming this video. This quick side note, my favorite interview question to ask, and I learned this from Elon Musk, is "Tell me about something that you've done that is exceptional." Why I think this is an interesting question, right, is that you end up hearing responses anything from stuff that's actually exceptional like this last guy had built his organic audience on Instagram to over 180,000 followers, all the way through to things that are not all that exceptional. Um someone I talked to a few days ago had helped a high school person um go and win like a little science experiment. And I just was like, "All right, like interesting, but not quite like exceptional in terms of the level of caliber we're looking to bring people on, right?" So, good test to try to try to really understand what people are capable of, what they've actually done in their life, and if it's mind-blowing and truly exceptional, those are the kind of people we want to hire. Inside of a recruiting leaderboard, we're recruiting people from all over the world, right? We've got recruiters in Lebanon, Brazil, Eastern Europe, Latin America, you name it. If you're interested, by the way, in joining Founder OS, we're currently hiring folks like salespeople, customer success people. You can go and check out Founder OS and apply at founder os.com/careers, okay? And so, inside of this then we're just constantly going and monitoring our pipeline, um keeping our eye out for quality people, um and you know, when we find great people, bringing them on board and running them through the systems that we have for onboarding. I think what's most important is as you're building a team, right? Everyone understands the journey that your customer goes through, right? Everyone in your company must be product obsessed, and they must understand the strategy. So, here we have the founder journey, okay? When someone joins Velocity as an example, which is our core product here at Founder OS, we go and build their entire social media machine for them. Across 75 days, there's seven calls, and we deliver around 60 different assets for them, helping them go and scale up their like organic content machine, okay? So, it includes things like an onboarding call right away. We then do a bit of a brand deep dive, understanding their brand. Six days later then we deliver their brand positioning document, build out their content GPS, you know, their content pillars, their different conversion assets, and then we end up kind of building out their content machine, their revenue and monetization pack, um and then really help them go and scale out things like workshops, email sequences, and newsletters, okay? And everything that we do at Founder OS is really just reinforcing that journey, right? The automations we build, the different products we're launching, we eat, sleep, breathe, really building a really delightful, constant process here that ideally every single email we send, every asset we deliver for founders is an aha moment, right? That's the bar that we have. Um I like to think that we're trying to build this Apple for founders, right? Just like Apple when you open an iPhone has this gorgeous unboxing experience and you can just tell every single piece of, you know, the product that they're showcasing for you has a degree of intention involved in it. We want to make our process feel the same way when we're working with founders on their social media and helping them with their their organic content. We built a free tool called the Founder Freedom Score. You answer a short set of questions about where your time goes, what you control and what controls you, and then you're going to get a score, okay? And the score is going to tell you exactly which part of your business is trapping you right now, whether it's your priorities, your leadership team, your customers, or some other strategic gap, okay? It takes about 4 minutes. Link is in the description, so go do that right now, then come back because we are about to go and see is the answer to wherever your score flags. Now, every business, right, that's really trying to grow to levels we're trying to grow to, needs a flywheel, okay? And for us, again, it all comes down to building an amazing product, right, then marketing the results of that product, showing the kind of founders that we help, and then those founders spread the message, right? There's that belief that, you know, people don't buy what you sell, they buy what other people want to buy, and so by us just doing great work by founders, uh, we're able to just, yeah, attract more amazing founders of that caliber and the machine just keeps on growing. And so this is kind of a one-page company strategy, okay? On the left here you can see the different media platforms we have. We then capture that audience inside of things like our email list, which we've grown to a quarter million people, all organically. We drive people through workshops every single month that then get people interested in the kind of things we got going on. We run cohort-based programs every 3 months, on the next one being something called Cash Flow Machine. And then, you know, I've even got some software products and I got a book coming out soon. And then that brings people then to typically our core offer, which is Founder OS Velocity, right? Which I already spoke about, so we'll move past that. Now, the strategy side of things, right? Why I most like this tab is actually because every single week I aim to talk to about five different mentors or advisors, right? So, like I'd mentioned, I was actually just at lunch with William Brown. I talked tonight to Ryan Holiday. This morning was Neil Patel. I talked yesterday to Dan Bolden. You know, that's just an average week and what I typically will do is show those guys this strategy tab, right? So, that I'm able to get feedback on how I'm thinking about things like our value ladder, how I'm progressing, you know, on the product side because inevitably, just to be honest, right? There's a ton of stuff I do not know, right? I've built media companies and, you know, different industries. I've built education companies before, but inevitably, like we're all kind of on this like new frontier here with AI and how fast things are progressing. And so, one of the number one ways that I think that you can really stay ahead is by finding a tribe, right? A community and mentors and advisors. And that's what we do in Founder OS, but I also honestly live and breathe that myself, right? having my own tribe of mentors that are constantly helping me. And so, this just is this an example of how I'm kind of currently looking at things. Um, we've got some insane offers that we're constantly launching to keep things fresh and fun. I'm going and just constantly refining my business by talking to folks. You know, Paul Graham says that as you're building a business, it's important to get outside the building, right? So, I'm getting outside, talking to folks, I'm learning. It's not that I from every one of these conversations I'm getting like 20 insights that I'm implementing. Sometimes it's just like a couple epiphanies or often what I find is it's like one person says something over here and then you connect that with what someone else is saying and you kind of then come up with some other crazy idea off that. So, that's currently, you know, what I'm up to and how I'm building. Lastly here is the vision, okay? My vision with Founder OS, right, is to build the operating system for founders who want their business to run without them. I talk a lot about how, you know, I see myself as more of an artist than an entrepreneur, right? And I think that as you're building, you kind of want to be this artist who's able to be creative and then have this autonomous engine running behind you. Those two things combined allowed me to make insane content and basically have my business all run off a series of automations, all visible in dashboards with a key meeting rhythm and a team that's aligned around the same kind of goals. It's important to have your vision in one spot. I learned this from Mark Benioff in his book Into the Cloud. He always had this card that he'd show every single person in his company the mission, the vision, and their core goals. And so, I think it's important that you have things centralized, right? Producing world-class content, building folks' social media machine, and then really just keeping them on board forever because the product is so damn good, right? We want to be the Apple of founder distribution, the standard, the reference point, the brand every serious founder is proud to be associated with, the system they credit with helping them make a million, 5 million, even 10 million dollars, right? That's what I'm after. And so, when we look at the kind of stuff we're building, right? I mentioned it's all around building your social media machine, right? And for me, the genesis of Founder OS, which OS stands for operating system, it also stands for open source, right? And the really origin of Founder OS was giving away all these systems that I had used over the previous 18 years of building companies. Now, these days, I think that systems have become skills, right? And I believe that my brain can be poured into an orchestrator. And so, when folks join Founder OS, we're giving them essentially my brain and all the skills I used to run my autonomous business, okay? And so, that's what this is all about inside at Founder OS Velocity. If you're interested, what happens when you join is that we do an intake form, learn every single piece of your business. You're uploading all your core documents, things like your brand positioning, your content, your platforms, your website, your offer, your pricing. So, we learn everything about it. From there, we do a brand deep dive call, and then we deliver your brand positioning, right? So, you have content pillars, your founder narrative. You really know how to go and own your own corner of your market. One core tenant we have internally is always going the extra mile for founders, right? And we want to have that like Four Seasons, like Ritz-Carlton level of like luxury founder experience in what we do. And so, you know, it's giving people things like their content waterfall, um and not just getting access to me. What typically happens is founders are going to go work directly with me, and then they go and get access to my team. Folks like Nick to help their marketing team, Diego to help people like their video strategist. Um we have Claire to help them on the op side. Um really make ensure that we're building leverage around the founder, right? So, that um they truly do get to remove themselves from operations and have their whole real leadership team get up-leveled inside of FounderOS. And so, you know, a dedicated advisor, their social media machine, and their entire team getting trained. If that's interesting to you, you can go and check out FounderOS Velocity and go and join via the link in the description. We'll get on a brief call, learn what your business is all about, maybe what's constraining you right now, and see how we can help. So, that is how to go and run your ops machine to scale. Hope this been helpful. If you're interested in learning how to build a business that runs itself, you should go and check out this next video. I'll see you over there. Thanks so much for watching. Be sure to like and subscribe, and let's win together.