Announcements:

We start this episode with a recap of some background on our companies. This was sparked by our first 2-star review in iTunes which had this to say:
Podcast reviewThough the podcast was meant to be viewed as a story (since listeners are literally brought in as things are happening), we understand this can be confusing for new listeners. A new intro is coming that highlights more about what is happening so you can jump in the middle and know what’s going on.

If you haven’t yet listened though, we encourage you to listen to episode zero and episode one just to familiarize yourself with the concept of the show.

In another piece of news, Zero to Scale Insiders doors are now open. Click here to get access to our private community of entrepreneurs who are just like you!It’s a community of like-minded people that are trying to scale their businesses. We meet daily in a private slack group and we have an ever growing forum of discussion and resources. In addition, we host a monthly Ask Us Anything (AUA) call and have a member hot seat who would really like for Greg and I to go deep into their business. 

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Greg’s Update:

Fails:

  • Didn’t Finish indoctrination campaign for MME but almost done
  • I didn’t Finish Roadmap template and didn’t Complete 2-3 Build & Launch Roadmaps but I’m 90% done on the template
  • I didn’t Setup onboarding experience in Infusionsoft so that it auto bills into the monthly at the 4 week point or at trigger of Internal form. (mainly because other things were priority)

Results:  

  • MME $3488 New Biz: $2500 one time this month and $2793. In 30 days it will be $4190 when the monthly of the 3 latest customers roll in. Combined this month earnings are $8781.
  • Pushed the new onboarding questionnaire process live and that went through to the first customer and was extremely helpful
  • Moved the team to the new HelpScout/Trello solution and notify customers of the new process
    • Had my VA do the SOP for the new onboarding process
  • 2 sales calls – one will most likely sign but finishing a few hours she has with another consultant.
  • Launch call for one of the new customers
  • Launching a new campaign for an MME customer
  • Postponed camping because the USA pro cycling challenge comes through denver sunday so we’re aiming for next weekend
  • A an old high school friend reached out with a potential mobile project and I provided a proposal for a one-off project with a  professional sports team for MME and should hear back today. It would be a one-off thing so we’ll see where it goes.
  • Getting interviewed today for a video show called Handshakin’ Holmes and they are coming to my house to film a little interview at my house.
    • An online video series featuring today’s most successful entrepreneurs on how shaking hands and personal relationships played into their success.
    • Headquartered in Denver, CO, a city that Forbes named the second best place to launch your startup, the Handshakin Startup-Preaccelerator was launched parallel to the video series in 2015 to educate aspiring entrepreneurs on the best practices of personal relationship strategy.  Paired with action tasks to raise funding, make the first sale, and hone applications for startup accelerators, Handshakin Founders are creating tomorrow’s big companies.  Learn more by joining the Startup Denver Group (and always free events) on Meetup.

Plans:

  • Get Lisa to start 3 hours per day
    • Need to figure out how to reduce back and forth
  • Finish the audit template and get 2 – 3 audits complete
  • Make a list of the 10  most common tasks I’ve seen so far/think I’ll see – I’ll use for content on a monthly basis to existing customers
  • We have 4 SOP’s my VA is going to create and I’m going to record videos on them so she can write them up
    • This is the beginning of getting my VA up to speed on smaller, repeatable, time consuming tasks that we don’t need myself or Lisa working on.
  • Outline my “welcome kit” that gets sent to new customers when joining
  • finishing a new campaign build for an MME customer
  • MME indoctrination campaign

Backlog:

  • Affiliate opportunities
  • Mini Mobit course
  • Mini Mobile Primer
    • All need to take no more than 5-10 days to complete

Justin’s Update:

Fails:

  • Did not get commission tracking plan in place. Software out there is either for enterprise or it’s affiliate tracking software. It is easy to manage right now anyway, but definitely want to try and get something workable in place soon.
  • Did not get an onboarding sequence mapped out for the software. Decided to wait on this until we have a customer success person in place so they can sort of take ownership.
  • Had 3 customers end up canceling the done-for-you service. Churn is becoming a problem now with customers that signed up in the last couple of months and this is where I feel a Customer Success Manager is going to play a huge role.

Results:

  • $24.5k MRR w/ $1k coming from the software.
  • Completely re-wrote our email finding and testing process which has dramatically improved results. This process really has us excited about the future.
  • Started mapping out next phases of the software. We’re going to incorporate the functionality of our old backend in some ways into the software in the future as well which will just add so many new ways for people to prospect. However, in prioritizing how we are going to build this out – we are putting these things after the next major release. This is because the next major release will allow us to double our prices due to the added value we will be bringing and so I’m prioritizing features based on that. Can’t share too many details on that just yet.
  • Mentioned in the past I wasn’t going to hire another developer as a contractor, so we are looking for a Node.JS developer. We are going to look offshore right now because that’s what our budget allows, but we are going to have them be full-time with no other commitments.
    • Upwork to source
    • Review code samples and send to Dominic to get feedback on people that initially past the “communication” test
    • Assign them a test project – which is part of our overall software – and have Dominic review/communicate with them to make sure we have the right fit
  • Started doing interviews for the customer success person. This is such a critical role so I’m not rushing into any decisions here. I posted it to Craigslist and had several responses, but only did a few interviews with people I felt were qualified. From there I also went to LinkedIn and just decided to send an InMail to people who were already holding down Customer Success positions in the software space.
  • Recorded a podcast interview for Inbound.org’s Inbound Toolbox podcast which is a new podcast as they launched a network of different podcasts. Should be airing in a couple of weeks. It was interesting because this was literally just a promo for LeadFuze since they highlight specific tools and how they work.
  • First tradeshow/networking event where we demo’d the software live for the first time. I don’t know if the audience is ideal for our software, but we had a lot of people taking pictures of our banner (we didn’t have business cards – intentionally). We offered additional free leads for people that put their cards in the fish bowl.

Plans:

  • Make a decision on developer hire
  • Make decision on Customer Success Manager hire
  • Work with sales team to really help them be successful – evaluate our lead gen campaigns, provide feedback, etc.
  • Start putting training material in place for new hires

Zero To Scale Insiders Update

MRR: $940 (lost one member this week)

Results:

  • Forum is beginning to get populated with content
  • Invited everyone to the forum

Plans:

  • The doors are open again!
  • Planning hot seat session for the next call
  • Continue populating forum with resources
  • Launch a fantasy football league

Goals:

  • Stretch goal of 65 total members by end of year
  • 50 is normal goal

Episode Takeaways:

Justin’s Takeaway:

  • By the end of the month we could be at 9 team members. Definitely a little crazy since I don’t really have a new employee orientation type of thing setup.

Greg’s Takeaways

  • I’ve been committing to a lot less recently (mainly meetings and calls etc) and I’m starting to feel the benefits of that as my calendar is more wide open this week and really open next week for me to focus on what’s important vs all the little distractions and I feel like I’m starting to gain better control on my days/weeks – So if you’re a planner, and you you have a tendency to plan things out a few weeks like me, when you want to scale back, it’s going to take a few weeks to get there so stick to your previous commitments (the ones that make sense anyway) and get through it.

Resources Mentioned:

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