How to Stop Being the Bottleneck in Your Business with Brooke Dukes (#77)

Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Welcome to Exit Algorithms, the podcast where we decode what it really takes to unlock growth, streamline operations, and prepare your business for a high-value exit. I'm your host, Pete Vera, and today I'm joined by Brooke Dukes. Brooke, so excited to have you here. Welcome to the podcast.

Brooke Dukes: Thank you so much for having me, Pete. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: how about we start off? Do you mind sharing a bit about your background and you know career journey and what what made you take the leap into business ownership? Brooke Dukes: So I started out, as you had mentioned, in corporate.

So I was a director in three Fortune 500 companies. And my last one that I was in, in fact, it's a lot of what I talk about, it's my transition story in the book as well. I was leading a team of 25 people, and I was working for an IT outsourcing company. And we'd been working on a deal with United Airlines for about a year and a half.

We were outsourcing. Their call center to Nova Scotia. And at umwards the end of the deal, towards that year and a half mark, the CEO of United Airlines said, We want you to go out, take the team to Nova Scotia. We want to see what we're where we're actually going to be putting this.

So I said, Great. Well, at the time I was eight months pregnant. And so I prepped my right hand person who was actually more qualified to go. I wasn't the IT person.

I was the one quarterbacking the deal. I was the one leading it, all of that. And I told my boss at the time, I said, Okay, you know, I've prepped her ready to go. And he said, Great, if you want her to have your six figure bonus.

And so I went. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Brooke Dukes: And he said, we've got the corporate jet for you. So I went and on the way home, I went into preterm labor with my second child.

She's fine, they stopped the labor. Every and honestly, I look back at it now and I'm very grateful for it. Because what it did is it helped me to look at the life I'd created. Because anyone from the outside would have looked at me and thought all I cared about was success, money, climbing the corporate ladder.

And that couldn't have been further from the truth. And so while I was on maternity leave, I really did some soul searching and I looked at it and what I recognized was it wasn't for the money at all. It was for safety because I had grown up and is as an abused, emotionally and physically abused child. And my mother stayed in a relationship 10 years longer than she should have because she couldn't financially afford to take care of us.

And so for me, climbing the corporate ladder meant safety. Money meant safety. But I didn't know that. It was running on, you know, subconsciously in all of the patterns and the way that I was focusing on my life.

I then, after maternity leave, left corporate America. I was 34 years old and I started my first business. And I've now, this is my fourth business that I've started. I sold one of them and Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm.

Brooke Dukes: It's been an amazing journey, a lot of ups and a lot of downs, as I'm sure anyone who has started a company listening to this podcast can attest to. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: thank you for sharing it. very deep and yeah, it's awesome that you you know, you know your motivation so well and I'm sure that translates translates to business success as as well. Brooke Dukes: It does.

It started my journey on really looking into psychology and behavioral science and how it relates to business. Because what I having that realization, I looked at everyone I knew, every client I'd ever worked with, and they were in the same position I was for various reasons. We really looked at, you know, at that time and still now, it's you've got to grind it out now. you know, put everything aside, your relationships, your health, whatever, to make things work and you'll reap the rewards later on.

Well, we know now that that's that's not the case. In fact, they've done several studies that typically a lot of people die five years after retirement. So learning to enjoy your life now while having you know success and fulfillment, that was my mission and it has been in every company that I've started. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah.

amazing. more. I think you get into that topic a lot there, right? I think it'd be great to start off and well you mentioned you had a you had an exit as well.

do you mind sharing a bit about that experience and you know, is there anything you would have done differently looking back now? Brooke Dukes: Yeah. Yep, Yeah. You know, I think one of the things, I think I would have waited a little longer before I exited.

It it was a great exit. and it was a health insurance company. I think I would have waited longer. I think that I jumped too quickly.

And you know, hindsight on it. It wasn't something I really started that business because I needed to fund my passions. Because I what I To do was for the long haul, right? It really needed some funds.

And so I started that business because I knew I had had, you know, a lot of success in sales and my previous work. I knew leadership. I knew all of that. It was right before Obamacare.

So I knew the I strike while the iron was hot as everyone was, and so it worked. I would say that that was for anyone looking to exit, I should have had. someone to support me in that exit. So whether that be a coach, an executive, whatever that may be, an exit strategist, I shouldn't have done it on my own.

I think that that me being an executive coach, I recognize that we all need coaches. I have a co I've always had one. Just depending upon where in my life that I need support at that time, I'm always working with someone. Because I believe you need an outside perspective.

Otherwise, you're just in this little vacuum. All you can see is your perspective, your challenges, and you're typically working from fear patterns. So someone that can speak to you outside of that can really like clear the fog away so you can see what's really going on. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, you need that third party perspective sometimes.

Brooke Dukes: Yeah. And I think especially for leaders that are starting out, or you know, they're smaller businesses and they discount that. that'll be something when we have more money. Well, it's the chicken or the egg, right?

No, that needs to be something from the beginning so you start your business outright, depending upon what your outcome is. Your outcome may not be to sell it. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Brooke Dukes: It may be to pass it along.

It may be to have it until you retire, whatever the case may be. You really want it built for your outcome. You want it built. The other thing is build it how you want to live your life now.

Don't build it so that you can live your life comfortably and have fun later. Do that now. And that's where someone can really help from the outside to help you create that. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm.

It makes a lot of sense. And a lot of those same things that make it more enjoyable as a business owner now are actually gonna add value later on too, if you do wanna exit, right? Brooke Dukes: Absolutely. Yeah, it's that old adage where, you know, doing things that may cost a little money now, maybe taking more time than you'd like now, but they really they save you, it saves you 10 plus times that in the future because you're not redoing work.

You're not trying to undo habits and systems and strategies that no longer work for the company as you grow. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: I'd love to hear what is a typical engagement with BMD consulting look like? What are maybe some of the first things you you look at when you take a business on? Brooke Dukes: So we do a few things.

I prior to this company, I was with another consulting firm. I was co-founder for 16 years. And we worked with very, very large companies. Quicken Loans, Home Points, yo, I mean la very large billion dollar companies.

Which was great, except for a consulting firm, it's typically feast or famine because they take all of your resources, those large companies, and then once then you're constantly filling backfilling that funnel. And I really I wanted to help small and mid sized businesses. I I have a passion for it. So I took all of that everything I learned from the large companies and I put it into offerings that a small and mid sized company could afford.

And that would really From my perspective, having this be my fourth company, I know the challenges that they're experiencing. I've experienced them. I've lived through them as a founder, as a CEO, as an employee, all of it. And so we've packaged it what our flagship is called success by design.

And that really installs the decision structure that removes that founder as the bottleneck of the company. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Brooke Dukes: Because that's typically what happens to an organization when they start out, they're the hub. If you think about it as a spoke, right, spokes coming out of a hub of a wheel.

That founder's the hub. And everything funnels through that hub, as it should at the beginning of a company. They have the intellectual property, they have the vision, they have the mission, they know it all, they can move things quickly. You need to move quickly when you're starting out.

But as you hit about a million or more in revenue, you, the founder being the hub, is what's stalling the growth, right? It's what that founder's bandwidth becomes the growth ceiling of the company. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Brooke Dukes: And so that's what success by design really looks at.

And it looks at it in four areas. It looks at it as stopping reactive leadership, because what normally happens is you're putting out fires constantly. If everything's going through you. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah.

Brooke Dukes: You're working in the business. You're not working on the business and those strategic decisions that you need to. And one of the things that's very costly and slows down the business when you are acting as a reactive leader is you're kind of you're from a fear base. So at three o'clock in the morning, you wake up and you're like, my God, that decision I just made, I'm not sure if it's right.

And you start overthinking it, you start second guessing yourself. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Hmm. Brooke Dukes: And you reopen a decision that you've already finalized the next day. A decision that your team is already executing on, you've already had meetings to prepare for it, you've done many things to move that decision along and you stall it and you reopen it.

Typically not because new information has come in, but because of fear, because you're second-guessing yourself, because you are in over, you're in cognitive overwhelm with everything that's coming at you. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Brooke Dukes: And they have done studies for a business, just five million in revenue. Every time they reopen a decision, it costs them two to five thousand dollars in team time.

That's just one reopened decision. How many of those do founders typically have in a month, in a week? Three? Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah.

Well. Brooke Dukes: I mean that's that's a hard hit on your PL that you're not even seeing. You don't even get that. So that's the first thing that we do within the first 30 days.

They get results, they pay for success by design in the first 30 days. And then the other thing is we move decisions down. You need a decision system. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Wow.

Brooke Dukes: Before the decisions all went through the founder. Either it's a check-in or a approval or you know a dis So we really categorize that. What decisions actually need to go through the founder? And we create a decision system.

So it's not just inferred, it's not just a maybe, because we get a lot of, well, I'm delegating. Well, are you? Are you delegating the task? Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm.

Brooke Dukes: And the authority or just the task. Because if people are still coming back to you after you've delegated a task to check in, you haven't delegated the authority. It's still a decision coming back to you. So we have a structure that we put that through.

And then we look at prioritization. Because a lot of founders at that point, when they're finding themselves the bottleneck, Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Brooke Dukes: They're working on urgent and not important things. We use the Eisenhower matrix, which is what President Eisenhower used during World War II to decide how they were going to set up their armies, you know, their military.

And we use that to really prioritize for a CEO what needs your attention and what doesn't. And then finally, we really look at what that new role looks like? How do we stabilize that leadership role? Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm.

Yeah. Brooke Dukes: Moving forward. And then within Success by Design, because my background is in integration, not just teaching someone something, but in integrating it into their daily work life. So Success by Design is a platform.

So the leaders have a weekly call with each other. I'm on every call. I facilitate it. We have wins at the beginning, we have you know some teaching in the middle, we have hot seats and coaching, so real-world time, we can help them solve problems with each other because they're all experiencing the same thing through me as well.

And then we have from a daily basis, they have what we call Oz. And that is their private coach. That they can go in and they can ask questions. They can, I'm struggling with this, and it has all of my intellectual property in it.

So it's just like they were one-on-one coaching with me, except they're able to do it within our leadership operating system. And then they can track their progress through. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: I I love that the framework. You know, it's great, that holistic approach.

do you mind explaining a little bit more about the that Eisenhower matrix you're you're talking about? Brooke Dukes: Yeah, so what it does is it does in four quadrants. You're really looking at whether you're in distraction, you know, where are you at in it? Are you working on things that are unimportant and unurgent?

So are you scrolling email and social media because you just need the distraction? Are you working on things that are important and urgent? That's where kind of that reactive comes in. Right, are you looking at things that are not important and not urgent?

So and we really want to get you into that fulfillment quadrant where you're working thing on things that are important but not urgent. So you are a proactive leader, not a firefighter with putting out fires constantly and everything you can sit back because that's a lot of what my Is on burn on, not out. It's when you are the bottleneck in a company and you're trying to grow it, you're overwhelmed. You're getting close to burnout.

You are not your best self. So we want to slow things down. We don't want to slow down the growth of the company. That will speed up while you're working with us.

We want to slow down what's happening in the founder's world, in that leader's world, because it works for leaders with teams as well. You don't just have to be a founder. And really getting you into that fourth quadrant. So that you are able to objectively see what's happening and know what is what strategic thing you need to work on that's going to move that company forward.

Because you have a lot of times founders they discount leaders in general, you discount your time. You discount how much your time is worth. And every time you answer a question, you jump into a project, you reopen a decision that was already decided. you are discounting your time.

So you are costing the company valuable, valuable money because you could be working on something that is moving the company forward instead of in the weeds on something that someone else should be doing. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Yeah. I love that.

Okay. I have heard of that framework before. I just didn't realize it originated Brooke Dukes: I always I wanna know where did it originate from because everyone takes credit for everyone else. There's there's very little that's new.

We just re we repurpose it, re- repackage it, and that's okay. But I feel like it's important to state the source and I think it gives it that much more credibility. If it was good enough for World War Two, I think it's good enough for our businesses. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: so that important and urgent category, is that typically the most ripe for delegation, do you find?

Brooke Dukes: Yes. even the important and not urgent. You can anything that really the founder should just be working on things. In my opinion, 80% of the time they should be working on things that only they can do.

20% of the time, you're gonna have that. You're gonna be where you're checking in or someone someone's new and they're coming in. You're gonna have that. But that 80-20 rule, I think, works in every area of your life and in business.

Really focusing on that and putting those that 80% in that bucket of important but not urgent. Because they may have to jump that 20% of the time, they could be working in the important and urgent. It comes up. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm-hmm.

Brooke Dukes: Right, we're all human. No business is run perfectly. They should never be in anything that's unimportant, ever. And sometimes some less and and by unimportant I mean they're less important.

They still may need to be done, but absolutely not by a leader. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Hm, okay. Yeah, would you put like calendar admin work in that in that category? Brooke Dukes: Exactly.

I mean, especially now. I mean, you've got with AI, I mean, Claude Co-work all day long. That should be taking up the lion's share of all of those, you know, admin and getting in the weeds and all of that. That's the beauty of it.

And small bits, small and mid-sized businesses, every business needs to be looking in it because it is definitely a differentiator. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: I do want to touch more on on AI, especially you have your own AI system you've you've built. It's amazing. yeah, one of the things we talk a lot about on this show is you know, making your business run without you, you know, eliminating the key man risk.

what do you find with businesses you work with, what's the biggest challenge they have when when trying to, you know, hire a a COO or someone that to run the day-to-day? Brooke Dukes: throughout my entire career, I have always, always recommended and always done myself. I fight I hire on culture fit over competence. Especially this is the only business I've ever built with AI.

So prior to that, it was, you know, even more so. But for me, you can teach competence. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Brooke Dukes: if you're looking at two people, one has this resume that's just out of this world, another has you don't want someone that's completely unqualified for the job.

I'm talking they're qualified, but maybe they're not as, they haven't had as much experience. But the one with less experience is a fit. Like you click, you get it. They share your values.

They understand your mission. They know where you want to go. 100% of the time you need to hire that person. Because you can teach skills, you can't teach values, you can't make someone passionate for your business.

They either are or they're not. And that's what makes it. My COO is as passionate about what we do and our mission than I am. That is the number one thing I believe in hiring someone, especially your COO.

I mean, they're running your business for you. If your COO isn't lockstep with you on exactly where you want to go, how you want to get there, and how you want to add value, you're not going to reach your goals. And you're definitely, and if you do, it's gonna be really painful. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: yeah, I do wanna talk about Oz a little bit.

How did you go about building that system like in Brooke Dukes: Well, I did not build it. However, we have an amazing IT person and he we'd been using, well, first we used Chat GPT when we first started the business. We've now moved into Claude. And prior to that, he was looking at what we wanted to build within Success by Design.

Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Brooke Dukes: I believe my purpose in life is to help people to understand their genius. And what they were put here to do, how they can add the most value to this world. And I choose the container of business because that's my background.

when I take on executive clients, I can only do about three at a time. It's it's time consuming, it's it's exhausting at times. Well, I don't want to help three people at a time. I want to help the masses, which is another reason why I went to small and mid-sized businesses.

You can It's kind of the difference between working Like driving a speedboat versus a big giant oil freighter. That big giant oil oil freighter to make any changes and shifts and churn direction takes forever. A speed boat, you can do that on a dime. That's a small and mid-sized business.

So understanding everyone on our team knows our vision and what we want to do. So he actually came to me and said, So we use lovable powered by Claude. and this is my area, the where I live in our businesses. I am the visionary.

I come up with the ideas, and I'm the show pony. That's really all I do. So and that's really all I'm good at. So I shell here's my vision, here's what I want to do, here's how I want it to impact people.

Now show me the how. I'm not the how person, I'm the what. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Brooke Dukes: Here's what I want it to do.

Now help me to get that there. And then I go out and I do podcasts and I have my own podcasts. And I and I share our vision and what we do with the world. And so John came to me and he said, I we can do this through this.

And I know we can do it inexpensively, so we can keep the cost down. And it will save you time. It will save our Leaders time because I'm pretty much the avatar for our company. And I know if it's not simple, if I can't figure it out really quick, really easy, I'm not doing it.

It has to be effective. I have to be able to see a ROI right away. And I want it to like go deep. when I want to know something, I want Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm-hmm.

Brooke Dukes: I need to know all the details of it. Now only in the areas that I care about. Other than that, I want a high level. So Mike, I wanted to hit all the and he created that for us.

Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Amazing. Yeah. Wow. I I imagine it was a a lot of work.

What did they what material did they use to you know, to train the the system? Brooke Dukes: all of my intellectual property. So everything from so my background is psychology, behavioral science, neurolinguistic programming, and human design. So everything that I know about those areas It that is what it's pulling from.

And so we were able to put in resource like the people that I learned from, because I didn't make any of this up. I didn't create any of it. I'm just learning from the masters. But they're gradients of masters.

There are people that are considered masters that I don't necessarily agree with their opinion or how they teach. I didn't want the whole wide web on pull from all of this. So we created a resource. I want you when this is asking, if it's not something that's in our library.

I want you to go to these sources to then pull the answer for them. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: See, yeah. Awesome. Yeah, do you see mistakes some people or business owners make when they're trying to use AI?

at least your your Oz system, it probably starts with like reverse prompting a bit, getting a lot of information right from from people. Brooke Dukes: Yep. Yep. It asks that yeah.

And it with Oz also, it remembers every conversation you had. So it keeps growing and learning about you throughout. You don't have to put in the information every time you put it in. It pulls from it.

The I would say one of the biggest mistakes I see businesses make is garbage in, garbage out. And recognizing that, hey, I will just make shit up. it's not the be-all end all. You're a leader for a reason.

You have amazing knowledge. If it's saying something, you're like, that just feels off. Push back. Make it cite its sources.

I mean, it works for you. You have to get really good on prompting. That's really the key for now, not with Oz, because that already has all the built-in like kind of safety guides for you, but when you're just using it on your own, when you're using Claude, just as your own, we have bots for our that run our company through our projects in Claude using co-work. But we also, even me looking at I just had it happen to me, I think last week.

We were talking about a webinar we were gonna do and it ran me down this path and I didn't push back when I felt like something was off because it wasn't my area of expertise. And it bit us a couple days later. Like we need to back that up a bit. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm.

Brooke Dukes: Right, and that which is fine, but just keep it's not foolproof. It's not the be all end all. Don't outsource your brain to AI. You are a genius in your own right.

Use it to support you, not totally replace you. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. well said. Definitely definitely agree.

especially if you don't have a a trained AI like how you know Oz is, but like you're just general GPT or Claude, you gotta put in the guardrails and do the work to make sure it knows you and g gives it quality outputs, right? Brooke Dukes: Absolutely. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: I want to give the opportunity to for you to share about a little bit more about your book. maybe some frameworks or or takeaways listeners can can implement.

Brooke Dukes: Well, a couple things. So my book is, it goes from when I was with corporate and all the way through up until I started this business and really my trials and tribulations through that. there's so many models that we used that I used to help to build these businesses. And it's showing me moving from that force, push, grind it out, kill yourself, giving myself, you know, making myself sit, being on preterm labor in a corporate jet, you know, almost having walking pneumonia and still working, all not taking care of myself and how I moved my way out of that to now I enjoy my life.

So we I do meetings three days a week, I do studying and all of that on two days, or I just go out and have fun. I mean, I structured my life the way that I want to live. Now, as far as things that something I think really easy and your listeners can implement today, they don't need me or anyone else today. When they're looking at a decision, if they're finding themselves as man, Everything's coming back to me.

I've tried everything because typically what leaders will do is man, what my team must be incompetent. Why aren't they following through this? So they do leadership training or training or they try delegation. They try, I'm gonna get a coach, like all the things.

They've tried everything and everything's still falling back onto them. They're still the point of contact for everything. When a decision hits their desk, they need to ask themselves three questions. So the first one is, is this actually mine?

Should this belong to someone else? Is this mine? Then they want to ask, what breaks if I don't intervene? Because that's big.

Because a lot of times, nothing. It just makes you feel comfortable that you have control of it or that you can support it or it makes you feel valuable or all the things, which I did. My last business, my story is what I found. Me being the bottleneck made me feel valuable.

It made me feel worthy. It was feeding that hole I had in myself. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Brooke Dukes: And it was not helping the business.

And then finally, you want to ask, Am I reopening something, a decision that was already finalized? So those three questions, if they can ask themselves, they use that as a filter for their decisions on their own, they will start to push the decisions down to where they are appropriately supposed to be. And they will start to get out of that reactive leadership and Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Mm.

Brooke Dukes: also helped to grow their company because I know for me when I was the bottleneck, I was subconsciously sabotaging the growth of the company because I couldn't handle anymore. I was burned out. So I subconsciously knew if we bring on any more business, if we grow anymore, I can't handle it. I didn't consciously think of that, but I look back on things that I did and I absolutely was sabotaging, but I didn't know that.

Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Brooke Dukes: And so many leaders are. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: it. Yeah, really, really great advice.

It's something something people can apply and start to make their business less less dependent on them so they can grow and scale and evolve, right? Brooke Dukes: Absolutely. Absolutely. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Amazing.

Yeah. Where can listeners find you, Brooke, and and learn more about you and and BMD consulting and yeah, your offering you mentioned earlier. Brooke Dukes: Yeah, so my website is brookmdukes.com.

Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Awesome. I'll leave that in the show notes. Thanks so much for coming on today, bro. I love this conversation.

It's great talking to you. Brooke Dukes: Thanks so much, Pete.