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Entrepreneur Spotlight
Chris Gwinn – Owner of Great Lakes Advisory
“So what do we do at the core of all of it is we offer fractional C.O.O. or a chief operating officer services on a monthly basis.”
Founder and CEO of Great Lakes Advisory, Chris Gwinn, shares the tools and processes he implements to create a scalable organizational structure for their clients.
Chris Gwinn and Great Lakes Advisory use expert industry knowledge and SaaS tools to help entrepreneurs achieve success.
Background
“But I actually became really proficient with Excel by applying the quantitative principles taught in the CFE Exam to develop proprietary spreadsheets to predict and bet on sports.”
Having a vision is a great start, but without a plan, it’s hard for businesses to see the level of growth that they could achieve with the proper tools.
Great Lakes Advisory gets entrepreneurs organized.
“We help entrepreneurs achieve their vision by improving their processes, implementing a scalable organizational structure, standardizing their operations, and elevating their leaders to get everyone aligned so the business runs faster.”
They serve as the head of operations for their clients, improving efficiency to lower a business’s operating costs.
“So what do we do at the core of all of it is we offer fractional C.O.O. or a chief operating officer services on a monthly basis.”
On top of that, Great Lakes provides coaching and development services for leaders within their client’s organizations. This empowers the leadership teams of the companies they work with to intuitively gain a competitive advantage and increase profit.
“We also offer leadership development and coaching, and then we perform process improvement and training development projects.”
Interesting Fact
While spreadsheets are some folks’ personal nightmare, Chris prides himself on his mastery of the popular Microsoft tool.
“I'm actually very advanced in Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, which I guess doesn't really make me terribly too unique.”
“But what is maybe a little bit unique is that I got really good at Excel because I'm also a chartered financial analyst, which is essentially the investment equivalent of the CPA. Exam. Part of the exam actually focuses in on quantitative mathematics and analysis.”
While most probably assume his skillset would be applied to his financial career, Chris took a different approach to hone his Excel skills.
“You think that maybe I would apply that towards more finance and get really good at Excel through there. But I actually became really proficient with Excel by applying the quantitative principles taught in the CFE Exam to develop proprietary spreadsheets to predict and bet on sports.”
Finding Talent
Favorite Place to Find Talent: Upwork
“It's an excellent source for hyper-specific projects and one-off tasks, but we've actually found quite a bit of luck and success in bringing on several full-time employees that are actually formally from instructional design or education to actually work on the back end of our client solutions.”
Chris' Toolkit
Favorite Project Management Tool
“[Asana] just ensures that all of our projects are organized and our folks are accountable and that all the projects are on track and delivered on time.”
Favorite Time-Tracking App
“Harvest is a time tracking application that actually integrates with Asana and provides insights into the time required for each task in each project, just so that we can actually monitor productivity and see how much time it took us to be able to complete each of our projects.”
Favorite CRM Software
“It's really the central infrastructure for all of our contacts, our marketing, our sales. I also love the fact that they have automated workflows. I use those very intensively to be able to create automated reminders to ensure that deals are in contact so they don't fall through the cracks.”
“We also use sequences for a lot of our sales, outbound, and outreach, and use all of their task lists to be able to ensure that we're following up with our contacts, our clients, and potential leads.”
Favorite Tool for Creating KPIs
“Databox is an awesome customized dashboard SaaS product that actually integrates with all of the previous mentions applications to be able to actually create real-time KPI s and metrics so that we can monitor our progress towards our goals and initiatives.”
Favorite Tool for Playbooks and Onboarding
“And finally, the last and one of my favorite applications is Trainual. Trainual is a playbook application or somewhat of an internal Wikipedia. Really the single place of truth for all of our operations. And it’s actually where we build out all of our processes, improvements, and training for our clients. We also use it internally to reduce the amount of time that we spend onboarding a new employee.”
Bonus Tools
- Slack – for internal communication
- Grammarly Pro – for spellcheck and grammer
Where to Find Him
You can reach Chris through his agency website, or follow Chris through Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
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