Greg’s Update:

Results:

  • System.ly Month to Date Revenue –
    • MRR: $22,944
  • Success – I had a blast in Japan and from a business standpoint things went well. I wasn’t too stressed much at all and the system I’ve created with my assistant has continued to go well.
    • We had a wifi hot spot that we carried with us everywhere because free wifi is just not a thing in Japan and we needed google maps to navigate so I turned off all notifications on my phone (which I haven’t turned back on by the way) and only tried to check email a couple times and our slack to see if the team needed anything. I really only opened my laptop 2 times and once was to send the final contract to the new client that we closed which resulted in our increase of revenue
  • I finished reading Deep Work and Simple Numbers
  • I started reading Checklist Manifesto
  • Only check email 1-2 times per day at night
  • 2 sales call
  • 2 strategy calls
  • I have 3 proposals to get back to clients today
  • We published another blog post detailing the 36 tools we use to run our business
  • Annie, my assistant met up with me at the co working space and not only was it the first time we met in person but we talked through some of our current challenges and how we’re going to go about updating our packages and plans and make some transitions.
    • One of which is launching a 12 week bootcamp program that we’re flushing out and planning on kicking off mid to late June.
  • In my mastermind, I was in the hotseat and had a rough session but a good one as we figure out what the next “season” of System.ly will look like. At the short end of it, I want to do everything we can do become less of an agency and more productized. With many of the unpredictable requests we get, we’re too “agency” right now for my liking. I know there is opportunity there but that’s not necessarily something I want to be tackling.
  • I’ve spent some time this week going through other people’s funnels to do some research. I went through one of Amy porterfield’s evergreen webinars, I joined a webinar of our good buddy Bryan Harris of videofruit and even caught the tail end of one by sixth division.
  • Last night I went to an event up in the foothills a bit beyond boulder with about 100+ entrepreneurs. It was hosted by a group called The Baby Bathwater Institute and we have clients that have gone to their high level mastermind events and I have a few friends that were attending so I enjoyed myself last night with a nice group of smart ass people for dinner up in the foothills. The cool part was we had not cell service (which is a common thing they say they do when picking venues for their events/masterminds) and it was super nice to just be present and not reaching for your phone since you couldn’t do much with it.
    • It just reminded me of the importance of continuing to put yourself around smart people, getting out of your comfort zone sometimes and just having run really.
  • I started my version of Tim Ferris’s 5 bullet friday email to my personal list and have had 2 of those go out the last 2 fridays and the 3rd will be going out today and it’s essentially a quick hit to my list of (what is becoming 5) updates from the week and detailing things that I learned, interesting quotes, or books i’m reading, blog posts that have me thinking about something etc. I’ve called it Freestyle Friday because it’s short sweet and very much freestyle from me but i’m keeping notes of things as they come to me during the week to mention. So if you’re interested in that visit greghickman.me/friday

Plans:

  • Well for starters, Pat Flynn is coming into town tomorrow for an event tomorrow night hosted by Joel Comm called social media shenanigans which will have past by the time of the going live but i’m picking pat up from the airport and we’ll be spending most of the day together, getting a workout in etc so excited to catch up with him a bit and obviously spend some time with some more cool people tomorrow night.
  • As for work, I’m planning a trip to San Diego to do a 2 day session with a client that is flying me there in mid june. Excited to use this as a trial experiment to potentially offer this as a high ticket offer as a one-off and even incorporate into one of our plans possibly, meaning they get a trip to come to denver to spend a couple days with me/us.
  • I have a brainstorm scheduled with the team to discuss our bootcamp and a few other things.
  • We have about 4 strategy sessions scheduled with clients
  • 2 sales calls at the moment
  • 2 potential partner calls/meetings
  • I’m getting interviewed for a podcast
  • I’m going to be signing up for a proposal software like proposable (which ive used in the past) to have more concrete proposals to share with clients on some of the things we’re working on as well as something like docusign to get people to digitally sign the terms agreements.
  • I’m going to start flushing out the to do this for this bootcamp and get started on putting together things like the slide templates and even get started on my thoughts for the first weeks training on marketing automation strategy.
  • Updating my schedule/morning routine to focus more around tackling content creation and make it more of a priority so i’ll be doing that and with that looking to have another blog post go live and have 1 or 2 others in the works to keep the momentum going.

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • Work more on the handbook to start getting that dialed in.

Results:

  • LeadFuze software revenue is $23.4k MRR. A bad week of churn unfortunately with a couple of Rainmaker cancellations which are the $375/mo subscription plans.
  • My son graduated 5th grade and started his summer. So I told him he needed to start a business and double the $150 he has saved up from birthdays and christmas gifts to $300 by the end of the summer.
    • I gave him some options like mowing yards and a lemonade stand, but we settled on him flipping products.
    • We will go to the thrift store and maybe scope out some garage sales to find some deals and then try to sell them online.
    • He started with some low hanging fruit by taking a toy of his that he barely used and put that up on eBay. So it’ll be interesting to see how well he does with it.
  • Started reading The Snowball, which is an autobiography of Warren Buffet. Heard Rob Walling talk about it, and decided to check it out. Really glad that I did. It’s over 700 pages, but I’ve started to create a routine where I read at least a chapter in the morning and then read at least a chapter before going to bed. I’m going to continue this routine from now on just to make sure I’m reading every day.
  • Luis Perez – who is a listener – heard me talking about scheduling page issues and just my overall focus on onboarding and a user’s first experience. I got an email from him with a link to a youtube video of him walking through the website and the app and commenting all throughout. The video was almost an hour and a half and was super valuable. Was very cool of him to do this.
  • Got back a proposal from FounderShield for all kinds of business insurance, but it comes out to about $1,100/mo and I feel it’s a little overkill for what we need. So evaluating options there still.
  • From a product standpoint, we rolled out some long awaited integrations. One of which is Salesforce, the other integrations are with Outlook, Office365, and IMAP which now basically allows us to partner with a full range of users, not just google apps.
    • Outlook and Salesforce were by far the most requested features and with these, I think we’ll be able to really start to have more appeal into our target markets.
    • Zapier will be coming this next week which is big as the way we are doing this is opening up our own API which will allow for us to do some pretty cool things with other future integrations.
  • Michael and Emily, our content writers, are pumping out some awesome content on a consistent basis now.
    • We’ve had two episodes go live for the Sales Manager Playbook podcast and had a total of 3 blog posts go live on the blog this week.
    • The plan is to have a minimum of 3 posts per week. We’ll be alternating right now between 3 and 4 posts, but our Customer Success Manager will also be putting together two posts per month as well which will allow us to have 4 posts going per week. Then, when Emily is full-time the plan will be to have a 5 posts per week schedule.
    • We’re starting to see some benefits already with just over 8,000 visits the past 30 days. Just a couple days ago we officially signed up for Buzznami to do the content promotion.
  • Speaking of which, Buzznami really officially began this week. I did a sales call with Sujan Patel of ContentMarketer.io for it as the first sales call and he signed up which was cool for the team. So I helped them this week finalize the processes and get all that set up in Workado. I’ll be doing a couple more sales calls for it so the partner at the agency has a baseline model to follow and then he’ll be taking over.
  • Updated our email signature campaign within Sigstr to also promote Slice of Sales, which is the free weekly curated sales newsletter I’ve been putting together.
  • As of this moment, I’ve had 605 applicants come through. That said, I had already progressed enough with a few candidates that I decided to just ignore the last 100+ that have come through.
    • With those finalists, I held final interviews which ran right around an hour like I had planned.
    • There are two really good candidates. I wish I could hire them both. That said, I am planning on hiring both at some point. I can only hire one to start with though.
  • Had some more customer success calls with users as well as a couple potential integration partners. Between this, the interviews, and reference checks I spent a lot of time on calls this week.

Plans:

  • Finalize training agenda
  • Handbook for new hire
  • Content published
  • Need to figure out what we’re going to do for health insurance and 401k. Most likely, this won’t be something available until after 90 days so I have some time still. I want to investigate this a little more though so I’ll probably line up a call with Zenefits.
  • Organize our next weekly sprint
  • Overall get ready for our new Customer Success Manager hire

Resources Mentioned:

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