Adam Torres and Garrett Delph discuss the Quad-Core Management framework.
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Show Notes:
How does the Quad-Core Management framework benefit a business and its management leaders? In this episode, Adam Torres and Garrett Delph, Founder & CEO of ClarityOps, LLC, explore the Quad-Core Management framework and ClarityOps, LLC.
About Garrett Delph
Garrett has over 25 years of experience in building multiple worldwide scalable businesses that deliver high-value, high-profit, and bespoke scalable technology systems managed by humans. 12 of my 25 years have been spent building and managing both on-prem and remote international teams.
His core strengths are in architecting finely tuned organizational cultures, developing management leaders, and driving business growth at scale.
Garrett is passionate about building planned-for operational business results that are dependable and repeatable. And, their benefits include decreased OpX, maximized efficiencies, org wide transparency, unity, measurable performance, scale, high happiness, low stress, decreased churn, and high margin growth.
He believes in a people-first environment where he lift up and empower one another through a unified commitment to doing the right thing operationally and culturally.
About Clarity Ops, LLC
Helping business operations become better, faster, and smarter. Clarity Ops is an expert operations management solutions service. Clarity Ops, LLC solves business problems suffering from broken or non-existent processes, bloated expenses, chaotic supply chains, high error output, chaos with people and processes, mystery costs, culture debt, and constant struggles with scale.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to Just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Garrett Delp and he’s a founder and CEO over at Clarity Ops. Garrett, welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks Adam. Great to, great to be here. All right. So today we’re going to get into the quad core management framework, why you developed it, how it’s helping businesses and business owners and management teams. A lot of business leaders that listen to the show. So excited to give them those tools and resources to help improve what they’re up to.
But before we get into all that, Garrett, we’ll start this episode with what we call our mission matters minute. So Garrett, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for our leaders out there, for people that we feel need to have their story heard and told, and for businesses we’d like to feature.
So that’s, our mission. Garrett, what mission matters to you? Yeah, well, , my current mission, I’ve had a few along the journey of my career, but , my current mission is to take, What I’ve learned professionally and help businesses that are struggling with inefficiency, bloat. Waste in their business that’s preventing them from achieving their goals, which generally relate to growth, scale and profit and help them reorganize so they can do that.
So that they achieve those things, but also just as importantly make for better lives for their people that they employ. Great. Love bringing mission based individuals on the line. So great. So great having you on here. Garrett, you said, I got to jump all over this one. You said you’ve had previous missions.
So I’m guessing that you’ve been an entrepreneur for a while. Is that accurate or am I off? Yeah. Yeah. I think we’re, just over 25 years here. So I’m plugging away. That’s awesome. And so where did, where did this, where did the entrepreneurial side, where did that begin for you? Like, how’d that all start?
Yeah, that’s a great question. It was for me anyway, accidental. Yeah, college, and then got into corporate America and did that for about eight years. And as I approached kind of that eight year without college. You know, anticipating this happening, I really fell out of love with what I was doing. And I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I had this new feeling for the first time, which was I didn’t want to work for anybody.
I, I had things, you know, things going on on the inside, and I wanted to do those. I didn’t really know what it meant or how it would play out. But that was really the beginning of it. And so I cashed in my 401k all all 13, 000 of it. At the time I thought I was rich. You were, come on man. It’s true.
Yeah, it’s true. , you’re rich with being a naive entrepreneur. , that’s a good one. Going out there and striking out. Go ahead. That’s a great, that is so funny. You’re spot on. You’re spot on. And so I started experimenting, you know, and experimenting with loves, passions, ideas, and that, is what kicked off the journey.
And I haven’t looked back since did I know this is I know this is a while ago for you, but I’m just curious if you recall do you remember like what people around you were thinking at that time when you left your nice stable gig and you went out and if you don’t, it’s okay. I’m just curious.
If you recall, like, the feedback you receive, because I know when I jumped off the ledge, that’s my term, not yours, not putting those words in your mouth. But that was my people thought I was crazy. They’re like, you’re going to do what you have this career. You’ve done this. You’ve done that. Like I raised a bunch of money.
I had all these licenses. I was pretty successful for, you know, what people were in the box that people felt I belonged in, I should say. So how was that for you? Yeah. You know, actually very similar. I think two sentences sum it up for me. Don’t do it. You’re crazy. In retrospect, I think many of the people that were telling me that were right for me.
Yeah. Yeah. It is. I think we both get it. And I think if we lined up another 100 entrepreneurs next to us, it’s not for the faint of heart. But I have heard also that it’s a calling. And so , you know, when you have that tug in that pull, , , you just. It’s almost like you don’t have a choice. You know what I mean?
Yeah, I completely get that. It’s it’s one of those things. It’s first, like, you don’t, you have that calling. You don’t have that choice. And then, and this will be for another interview. Don’t worry. We’re going to circle back to the quad core management framework, but I’ll just, I’ll just leave this piece of it with saying, then you become unemployable and you’ll find that somebody else has been an entrepreneur for long enough.
Right? That’s a fantastic statement. Because you know, I think it’s spot on. It’s spot on. All right. In other news, talk to me about ClarityOps. Let’s just start high level and maybe tell us a little bit more about the company and what you do. Let’s start there. Yeah, sure. Thank you for asking and happy to share.
Clarity Ops is a venture I started just just under two years ago as I exited the, the business that I was running at the time and it’s essentially a operational partner consulting firm. So for businesses that you know again, are, are struggling with the classic debilitators.
That’s the things that mostly and often cause businesses to crash and burn which, which are the governance and infrastructure in a business which are largely misunderstood, which is why they’re often not touched and largely neglected. It turns out that is a passion and love of mine, and I’ve over the last 25 years have solved my own operational business problems by developing framework systems tools for Breakthrough.
And I did it not because I necessarily wanted to build these tools, I just couldn’t find any tools that were meeting my operational needs in terms of solving complex problems so that we can scale and grow. And long story short, I decided to you know, compile all of those tools. Into a business that I can then use them to serve and help other founders and CEOs and often their C suite leadership team to to break through and transform.
You know, usually business don’t have the money or time to stop and structure themselves and organize themselves. And so they just kind of live in chaos and that causes a world of hurt and harm. Well, well said going further into the quad core management framework, like, how did this. Framework develop.
Is this an evolution of what you’re talking about going through all these processes or like, where is that the output of this labor? Like, let’s go a little bit, maybe further there. Yeah, I happy to share. It was evolutionary. You know, I, early on, I just focused on listen, everybody’s all over the place.
There’s a bunch of you know, unclearness or lack of clarity. And as we were growing and scaling you know, in the different businesses along the way, and I was like, okay, we need to take a play out of some of the, you know, the best examples on the planet. Right. The, the human body great sports teams you know, structure in business, so business sorry, structure in buildings so they can go 150 stories high.
These are all you know great restaurant recipes or, you know, food recipes, like, these are all great examples of, you need ingredients, you need instructions and guidelines to create something great. It always is. Founded in creating order and as I was you know, so that led me to this, this pursuit of process as a requirement.
But then along the way especially when one of my businesses really hit on the precipice of hockey stick growth we were not balanced you know, in, In computer cloud architecture, there’s a thing called load balancing. And I began to think about, like, why are we, even with great process, why are we so out of balance?
And, why are we still struggling with chaos? And it dawned on me as, you know, the owner of, of the business at the time and you know, guiding it. I was asking way too much of my leaders. I think this is a common problem. Always in business is, you know, founders or CEOs or even C suite, they find great superheroes in their organization.
And then they, not not maliciously, but they just ask them to do too much. You know, they, they ask them to be strategy. They ask them to be support. They ask them to be in charge of process building and process managing. They ask them to simultaneously manage their projects and it’s it just, it puts a tremendous amount of overload and pressure.
on people. And so it causes them to break, to burn out, to be inefficient. And then that causes a whole cascade of negative effects to the business, including culture. And so I started thinking deeply about like, okay, how do you, how do you solve that? How, how will I solve that? And that was how I came up with quad core.
And it is essentially load balancing four types of roles. And those four types are strategy, Maintenance process and project. You take somebody that is designed to be a strategic manager and you give them a dedicated lane and you don’t let them commingle by design. , you guard them and, you run block for them so that they don’t get.
Distracted and bogged down with maintaining and supporting, or distracted and bogged down by having to write or manage process, or, you know, having to project manage things, they get to stay strategy, and then, and then the same goes for the other three, you have a maintain and support manager and their primary lane, their primary focus and strength and goal is to make sure that, What they’re in charge of, they focus on maintaining that and supporting it.
You know, very similar to kind of like a, you know, you have a sales manager. And their job is to maintain and support sales, but not build sales process. That gets delegated to and is is bespoke to a process manager. And so a process manager, their entire focus, again, is to build and manage process cross functionally.
And, but they don’t, they’re not in charge of people. They’re not in charge of strategy and they’re not in charge of managing projects. They get to stay in their lane and be hyper focused. And then again, the same principle applies to a project manager. So that is really the, you know, the nuts and bolts of quad core.
And it is a a superpower strength and really does amazing things for the business and the people. So what does this look like when it’s implemented or or implemented effectively? Like, how do how do I don’t want to assume here? How did the leaders and how do the management teams benefit from this?
Well, the benefits show up in a whole host of ways, but they’re kind of like our, you know, in terms of resource supply, they’re like, for big benefits, you know, you get back and you get focused energy. You get focused time, you get focused capabilities, and then you get this lovely, lovely thing, this new found or new found resources in, in both human capital and finance capital.
Right. You know and so those are the, those are the big benefits. Maybe I should add a fifth, and that is cultural. You know, when you know, let’s talk about computers computers, the industry has invested trillions of dollars collectively in figuring out how to make these computers that we use hyper efficient.
And one of its, you know, one of its internal metrics is load balancing the resource or the energy of the computer so that it doesn’t crash and it’s really efficient. And, so when you do that, it runs really well, almost stress free. And the same thing happens to culture. When you load balance all of these components, stress goes down.
And when stress goes down, happiness goes up. And when happiness goes up, you get all these really rad benefits. Your employment churn goes down, right? Your productivity goes up. Your lifetime value of employees extends. I could go on and on. We don’t have time for it. But these are all these really amazing benefits that show up to the business.
You also get a gross margins increase, which I think is another really important benefit. What are the, what are the sizes of the companies that you found this is that this is appropriate for this type of management style? Like, is there a certain employee count? Is it revenue? Is it a combination? Is there like, give me just a flavor for some of that piece of it?
Yeah, well you know, my answer is going to be biased here. But I’m okay with the good biased answers, especially when you read with it. I just, I’m just curious because I know me like many entrepreneurs that’ll be listening. They’re always thinking of, you know, the, is this for me kind of thing? Or does this apply to that’s where I’m kind of going with that one?
Like, is it, how did, how have you found that people get our companies or organization to get the best use out of this? Like. Yeah, that’s a I appreciate the call it actually quad core really does not make sense for any business under 50 employees. I’d say, like, probably sweet spot is getting up above 75 employees and generally revenues of 5Million or more because that’s where these negative consequences and opportunities for benefit really begin to to show up.
And where, where it really makes sense to make the investment into the, the reorg and the redesign. Anything under that? I’d say definitely under 50. I don’t think it makes sense because you’re, probably still just, you know, wearing, everybody, everybody’s wearing a lot of hats and it’s necessary.
So you’re still dreaming to the day when you could start taking some of those hats off at that point. Yeah. Yeah. You still gotta, you know, you gotta grow, hustle. Yeah. You gotta grow. Yeah. Totally. Totally. It’s great. Well, Garrett, man, this has been a ton of fun having you on today and just learning more about your background as an entrepreneur.
And of course , your framework and everything that you’re doing over at Clarity Ops to help business owners succeed really that being said, if somebody’s listening or watching this, and if they want to continue the conversation with your team how do they do that? Yeah, great. They can find me online, clarityops.
co, that’s C O, and then I’m on LinkedIn quite a bit. You can, you know, go to LinkedIn and just type in my name, Garrett Delph, D E L P H between those two places, I can be found. Fantastic. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put the links to to the website, all that good stuff.
And, Garrett’s LinkedIn in the show notes. So you can just click on the links and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration.
So, again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Garrett, thanks again for coming on. Thanks so much, Adam. Really appreciate it.