Greg’s Update:

Fails:

  • No fails based on my proposed plans last week

Results:

  • System.ly Revenue –
    • MRR: $23,739
      • Down just over $4k in customers we lost/said goodbye to.
      • We’ve had 2 increase their payments in the last 2 weeks
      • And we’ll likely have 2-3 more do the same soon.
  • Completed week 3 of pilot program which continues to go well.
  • The big news for me is that as some of you know, I spent a full day (well 15 hours) with my biz coach who was in town last friday.
  • Coming out of thats session I have an aggressive plan for the next 90 days as well as mapped out our product suite to hit 1 Million in AR in the next 12 months – so that’s my goal.
  • This full day was super intense and I was literally drained mentally for the next 2 days and actually had a headache by 11pm we went so hard.
  • It was a good headache though.
  • One of the biggest things I took away from the experience is to how much of a numbers game business can/should really become.
    • What I mean in it’s simplest form, if you know  how many leads it takes each month to get to the sales you need, you can continually work towards that. That obviously comes with a lot of testing and figuring it out of course but we mapped out where the revenue should / could be coming from with our new approach and where we can be generating leads from to hit those numbers.
  • In the long term we envision 80% of the revenue will come from our a combination of our courses and packages with the balance being custom work at higher price points
  • So this week, I took all my action items for the next 90-180 days for my goals and got them into Asana and started putting details to those including responsibilities and timelines.
    • I’ve begun delegating tasks as well and finding opportunities to hit some of these timelines
  • I’ll talk a bit about what i’m focused on in my plans.
  • Outside of that this week consisted of talking to existing customers, dealing with some internal operations enhancements and working with S2S members.

Plans:

  • While i have a lot of plans over the next 90 days my next week looks like this:
  • I’m working on two of 4 epic blog posts with corresponding lead magnets that i’ll ultimately be driving traffic to in order to start adding some leads but also custom FB audiences.
    • I aim to have one ready to be proofread by Wednesday
    • And the other (if possible by Sunday)
  • I have a request into our website designer to start making some updates so hopefully we see first round creative by end of next week but we’ll see on that turnaround.
  • I’ll have a retargeting ad going live for driving to consultation
  • I’ll have an add setup to drive traffic to the blog post I get live.
  • I’m reaching out to potential partners to do joint webinars late september/ early october for the sale of S2S.
  • Headed to PR to visit with JLD of EOF and do a mastermind / all day session with Kate.

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • We were going to be putting together an advanced LeadFuze usage webinar for paying users, but haven’t been able to get this wrapped up just yet.
    • Brittany has been working on updating our onboarding experience and talking to customers first and foremost. These conversations will ultimately help her shape the webinar experience as well.

Results:

  • LeadFuze software revenue is $31k MRR. Added some customers, but lost some so there wasn’t any real movement here. Damian was out most of the week at MicroConf as well so not much sales activity.
    • Interestingly though, the enterprise type deal I wrote off last month actually reached back out wanting to discuss next steps. However, that was on Tuesday and then they went silent again. Important reminder that your urgencies are not always your customer’s urgencies. In my response I asked him what “next steps” meant to them as well, so there’s clear expectations for the next meeting.
  • Settled on a lawyer to move forward with to prepare for our investment process as well as to properly issue the equity of the company as we need all of this in legal form. Luckily, we aren’t going to need to go through refiling and all this additional paperwork. We’re just going to need to modify our Operating Agreement to include the shareholders on our team as well as get purchase agreements drawn up for investors. So this won’t be as costly as expected. In the end it will be $2,500 versus the $7,500 I was originally quoted.
  • We made progress with updating all of our old blog posts. Michael went back and not only optimized them from an SEO perspective, but also looked for opportunities to improve the content as well. We ended up merging several posts together to put together some massively epic pieces of content. This should help us rank for more keywords, but also improve rankings at the same time.
  • Spoke with the Founder of Appointlet, which is a calendar saving tool. We’re going to be rolling out an offer from them and putting one together for their list. List sizes are about the same and given that it’s another sales tool, I think it will be more in line with what we’re looking for versus the last promotion we ran. We will be doing 3 emails for them and them for us. We’re also going to do a guest blog on their blog and vis versa.
  • We are looking for a server admin to help us support our migration to Amazon AWS. We were looking at a company to do this potentially, but they wanted $5,500 first month and $2,500 ongoing with a minimum of a 6 month commitment. Found some perfect candidates on Upwork that are anywhere from $50 to $100/hr, but still this route will save us quite a bit as well.
  • I began the process of looking for a developer to join the team. Went through hundreds of profiles on Upwork and ultimately ended up with only 4 to invite to a private job. The 4 people are exactly what we’re looking for though. They are in Eastern Europe, but still going to be around $25 to $30/hr. I’m more concerned with skills at this point, combined with immediate availability. Of the four, 2 declined the invite, 1 accepted and 1 hasn’t responded. So that’s making the decision easy. I need to talk to him more and give him a test project next.
  • I was interviewed for the Marketing Equation podcast. It was interesting as he used this podcast interview as a way to get to know me after being introduced mutually through a third party. That will be airing in October.
  • Wrote a guest blog which should be published later this month on a major publication. I’ll be doing these monthly going forward with some relationships I’ve built up.
  • Began the process of recording the webinar. This is taking MUCH longer than I thought. I’m literally just going one slide at a time with Camtasia, saving that slide separately, some quick editing when putting it into the track within Camtasia, and then moving on to the next slide. Very tedious, BUT my hope is that it will be super easy to update later, I can swap slides out, I can test different offers – all without needing to re-record an entire new webinar.
  • We had so much going on that Dominic canceled his family vacation. He was going to be traveling across Canada. They are going to reschedule that for next summer. We’ll be in a much better spot as we’ll have more engineers on the team by then that can carry the load. He got a week out of it at least.

Plans:

  • Need to finish going through blog posts and getting everything optimized. I want to start fixing up crawl errors as well. We have some pages with duplicate page titles for example.
  • Finalize webinar recording and actually get the full webinar funnel complete and ready to go.
  • We need to talk about partnership channels, with agencies in particular. We’re going to be doing some specific things for them, but I’ll be planning this out with Damian next week.
  • Going to spend time really focusing on data gathering on companies and prospects. We rely quite a bit on various third parties, but I’ve started to piece together a system where we’re going to be in more control of the data. This will ultimately make us MUCH more valuable while at the same time allowing us to do a lot more from a customization and filtering standpoint.

Resources Mentioned:

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