Greg’s Update:

Fails:

  • Start a job posting for Account Coordinator position

Results:

  • System.ly Month to Date Revenue –
    • Mar One Time: $3000
      • $1000 was a partial payment for my speaking fee in September in Michigan
    • EMRR: $18,344
    • March Revenue: $21,344
  • My week was pretty chaotic too in that I was in and dealing with a lot of customer support tickets as Morgan was still on vacation and she returned Thursday and it’s nice to have her back. Definitely was in dealing with customer support tickets a bunch.
  • I Completed 2 more video recordings for project packets
    • This means making the slides and scripting what I want to say
  • Holy cow. We’ve received so many applications. I had 19 –  15 min call interviews.
    • Today I’ll be reaching out to those that I want to advance to the “next round”.
  • We had a kickoff call with our new client and preparing for their launch which is essentially happening right now.
    • This is the first client to go through our new onboarding experience and we ironed out a few kinks but I think the presentation I put together that we took him through really is going to help us set better expectations.
  • I reached out to Dan Martell whom I’m getting some coaching by right now as we’re at this point of optimizing our process for scale and he shared some things that I’m really thinking about and wanted to share that as I think it’s valuable. I posted a question in this private fb group and he responded.
    • Here’s my question:
      • So my current question / challenge is visualizing scale with such a client services heavy model.
        I know we’re delivering value (I know we can also be better) but it seems even though we have tons of “procedures” and documentation that the number of calls we need to have / be on / are wanted on is constantly growing and part of me feels like the only solution is more team members.
        While I”m not against growing a bigger team, I want to make sure we’re as efficient as possible with the team we have.
        Does anyone have any feedback/thoughts on things I should be thinking about, considering with an ever growing number of calls that we have to be on?
        Many of them I feel like are not needed but it makes the client feel good. How do we create structure / balance here?
        Open to any ideas.
    • His response
      • Setting the expectations for your customers (parameters / limits) for the work you’re doing. 2) You’ll need to figure out your teams utilization per customer to understand your LER (Labour Efficiency Rate). We got over that in Module 5 of EE. But it’s simple right now… you know what you charge, you budget for X amount of hours of your teams time, and that needs to be tracked. If a customer is taking more, find out why and fix the process/business model. If you’re at capacity with no room to improve efficiencies, then hire more, but that should be done with a top line ($) focus. You don’t want to hire to quick until you’ve extracted the most efficiencies first, or you could be scaling a business model that looses you money smile emoticon… and more growth = fast death spiral. I’ve seen MANY companies do this. Hope it makes sense.
      • Greg Hickman exactly… but more on sales call since they need to know the limits before buying so there isn’t any misunderstandings. It’s also important to educate your team on how to say no/decline/reinforce those parameters to avoid situations where they agree to do something and then you need to step in. Ever customer needs to generate a profit… run the numbers to build your business model for hrs / customer and start tracking each team members time / allocation to a customer
  • We’re in launch mode for one of our other clients and that is off to a great start.
  • Got interviewed for the Podcasting success summit
  • 5 Sales calls
    • 2 i’m confident will become customers
    • One of the sales calls was a really interesting opportunity that I’ll be putting a quote on once we get more details.  
  • Got another blog post started and in the works. Needs some finishing touches.
  • Had a call with the guys from ConvertFlow. They won the best new app at ICON and it’s a really sweet tool. Started setting up my account which we’ll be playing with on our own site.

Plans:

  • Finalize my decision on the exec assistant role and get them started hopefully by end of next week
  • Start a job posting for Account Coordinator position with Infusionsoft experience.
  • Going to be working on our pricing plans and updating some language in those to be a bit more specific.

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • NO fails for me this week

Results:

  • LeadFuze software revenue is $11.8k MRR.
  • Worked for 3 hours on Sunday and felt like an entire work day of productivity.
  • By the end of last week, I was really feeling stress free. I have been trying to diagnose why I was feeling that way after I got back from my Vegas trip. I was hoping I could continue the feeling into this week, but that didn’t happen unfortunately.
  • I mentioned last week I needed to fire a sales rep. If you’re curious, I just told him, “There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just come right out and say it. I have to let you go. We’re going to go in a different direction with sales.” After letting him go, he mentioned he was planning to quit anyway. So I guess that worked out.
    • He wanted to know when he would get his final paycheck. So I told him I’ll check with Gusto to see if I can get it to him sooner than his normal pay period. As a contractor in Arizona, I have 7 business days or until the next pay period to give him his check, but was going to try and get it to him sooner if I could.
    • In any case, I couldn’t do that as it was scheduled and I couldn’t reschedule for it sooner in Gusto. So I sent him a text message to let him know and he said “Ok thanks – have a good one.” Then Tuesday morning he sends me a text saying, “What’s the status of my paycheck?” I said, “What do you mean? We told you Friday it would be coming this Friday.” He said, “No you didn’t and why would I waste my time if I told him already?” I was just so confused I felt like I was talking to some one else. So I literally took a screenshot of the text message and sent it to him. Then he just escalated things out of hand. Long story short, he would go on to tell me to “eat a hard one” and I told him “Ain’t nobody got time for that” and that’s how I left it. It was pretty wild. I’ve had to let go of a lot of people unfortunately, but this ended up being one of the stranger scenarios I’ve had.
    • I’m reminded why I wanted to not have any employees at all. Such headaches… why can’t people just do their jobs?
  • A lot of time Monday and Tuesday was spent finalizing a new business.
    • This new business was actually constructed to help LeadFuze promote our content.
    • Basically, I was reaching out to find a done-for-you content promotion service and apparently there wasn’t one. So I decided to have my agency spin this off into a separate brand called Buzznami and do everything I knew needed to get done for content promotion.
    • I actually put together the website, the content, images, and created the entire sales process. I mirrored the sales process I created originally for the done-for-you LeadFuze service. It just works so well for productized businesses.
    • I’ll be doing the first few sales calls as well just to fine tune everything, and then I’ll let the people at my agency take over from there.
    • This will be pretty helpful for LeadFuze though, since we’ll now have the content promotion done for us.
    • Buzznami went from a team meeting last Friday to being launched on Thursday the following week.
  • In evaluating the LeadFuze sales process, I decided I am just going to focus on users that already sign up. We had 23 sign up on Tuesday. Another 19 on Wednesday, and 21 on Thursday. These are people that have been at least sold enough on the product to start a trial, so why not focus there instead of trying to get more people at the top of the funnel. We have a good base to pull from with the trials.
    • What I did the first day was manually do some research on their company to try and suggest a potential target market. Of 15 emails I sent, I got 3 responses back. So I decided to automate this process inside Intercom next time so we could capture them early. So now when a user logs in, there’s an auto message that asks them for their target market. I have it coming from Michael, but I’ll help out from time to time as well with it. So far we’ve gotten a 17% response rate, so roughly the same as my manual approach. The nice thing is though inside of Intercom, aside from it being automated, is I have a goal set up to track the conversion to paid user. So we’ll be able to see what this process actually does to convert users.
  • I sent out our March product update email yesterday afternoon. Was hoping to see some new signups. It looks like 1 or 2 came in after that email went out, but I’d like to see more considering the list size is about 4k now. We need to work on simplifying the product.
  • I have been spending SOO much time in chat with people and handling support emails.
    • Whether it’s dealing with small bugs or just general questions. It is incredible how time consuming this is. I literally spent first half of Thursday just doing nothing but support.  I wouldn’t mind, but I couldn’t get much else done. If a bug was reported, it meant I was in Slack talking to our developers and working through it with them, then going back to the customer. It was a lot of back and forth.
    • It’s good because it gives me a beat on where we’re at, but when I feel like I have so many other things to do it weighs on you. I didn’t have this on my task list, yet I spent half my day on that so I just didn’t feel productive.

Plans:

  • Going to MicroConf. I leave tomorrow and will be coming back Wednesday night.
  • I want to knock out a couple sales calls for Buzznami so that my partner can take over and has some good examples to follow.
  • I want to start focusing on our demo process with LeadFuze. I have a webinar being created, but also want to get into a good rhythm here.
  • Lastly, later today I’m actually taking the wife to a horse racing track here in town. We’ve never been, so should be a new experience.

Resources Mentioned: