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Emily Hirsh:

Hello, my friends. Welcome back to this third episode of the optimized business series. I hope you guys are enjoying it. We’ve talked about high level business strategy yesterday. We talked about specifically your marketing strategy. I gave you guys all the inside scoop on how I plan my own company market. So this is not just ads or one piece of marketing, but the entire thing, the entire big picture. And today I wanna talk about your delivery and actually putting time into how you improve your delivery for your customers or your clients, no matter what type of business you have, you create an experience in what you deliver. And this is probably one of my secret weapons in my business success in growing my company to where it is right now is I put the same amount, if not more effort into constantly improving our delivery as a company and making sure that the experience that people have after they sign up to work with Hersh marketing in whatever form market, like a pro are done with you or are done for you agency offer.

I make sure that we are constantly over delivering that’s. A company value of ours is to overdeliver every single time. And this is a secret weapon because there are so many people out there who are really good at marketing, and they put all of their effort and their energy into their marketing, and then they don’t deliver on the backend of what they’re saying they’re gonna do. And a lot of times this is maybe sustainable for a short period of time for people where they can get away with doing that essentially, where can have really great marketing and it’s okay that they’re not delivering on the backend, but eventually every single time, this will catch up to you as a business and the power of referrals. And having people positively talk about working with your company and referring you to their friends or referring you to their colleagues, or telling somebody about you, that is so extremely valuable for your business.

And the only way to make that happen is to have the best delivery and experience on the backend in your company. And so I think a lot of times us entrepreneurs are maybe bored by operations and bored by process and SOPs. And that’s really ultimately my, the boring work right in owning a business. And fortunately for me, I actually love it. I’m very process oriented. I’m very organized naturally. And I think there are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who are visionaries and who really struggle with this and without a solid operations person in the background, running things for them, they really struggle here. So I think that just noting how important it is to make sure you’re putting company resources, whether that’s your time, whether that’s your team’s time, whether that is actual investment, whatever it is, you are doing every single month, something to improve your delivery.

And the reality is I said this on a previous episode, but honestly, your delivery and monitoring your retention and your resell, like, are you reselling customers? Are they staying? What is your retention rate? If that is something that you should be tracking because you have people staying month over month, are you measuring how many referrals you’re getting? And if that is numbers increasing or decreasing, it’s almost more important than marketing because marketing is going to get new people in and generate those leads. But then once you start to generate the snowball effect where you’ve got your marketing working, but then you’ve also got happy customers and happy clients talking about how amazing your company is and how amazing their experience has been. Then you’re able to capture all of this almost like free, but not really free, you know, uh, attention on your business and traffic to your business.

It’s not free because you put in the work to get there. But it, it is start to feel that way, where you’re in able to get this momentum. And every single time you need to remember, it’s going to cost you more as a company and resources and money to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one, to have an existing customer stay. If you offer a monthly service or come back for more is easier than acquiring somebody brand new, who has no idea who a company is. So you gotta remember that. And that means your actual priorities and resources as a business need to line up with that. So here’s my, I could literally do like 18 podcasts on just this because to grow a service business, to grow an agency, it is all processed like 100% set of what I feel like we do on our delivery.

Just comes down to process whether that’s process for recruiting and hiring new team members or process for onboarding a client or process for sending out our weekly reports or training team members like in the list just goes on and on. So that’s probably one of my first things is everything is process and you have to become obsessed with process if you wanna have good delivery or if you’re never gonna be that person, which I do know some of those people where it’s like, it doesn’t matter how hard they try. They’re just not process oriented. You need somebody in your business who can be process oriented and be obsessed with process and not only obsessed with creating process the first time, but obsessed with up, keeping up that process and updating that process. And so that’s what I’m gonna talk about here is the first thing that you could do.

And this is like a to-do that you could do right now, listening to this episode. And, and this is something I’ve done many times and continue to look back on is out all of the major processes you have in your company. So some examples could be onboarding a new customer. That’s always a major process, right? During an onboarding experience. And honestly, whether it’s a customer or a team member, there’s a lot of information transfer. You have to get information from them. You have to set expectations, you have to explain things that might be confusing or overwhelming. You have to set people up for a good experience, and there’s a lot that goes on in onboarding. And so that could be, you know, a process that you’re always gonna have in your company. And as I’m gonna get to you’re go and always be improving that.

So listing out what are the ongoing major processes that drive your company? So onboarding a new customer could be one, uh, any sort of regular communication with your customers and your delivery. So like for us, it’s the weekly reports that we send out to clients. It is, you know, if we look at our done with you program, it’s the one on one biweekly calls that people get with our ad account manager. It is the weekly ad account audits that people get when they’re a market like a pro member and how we go in and audit their account with a loom every week, it could be your customer service. It could be calls that you have with clients. It could be coaching, it could, um, actual product delivery. If you have a product, it could be setting that first product and your shipping time, you probably could think of like 10 to 12 main core processes.

And just think if you were a, a new customer, like think about the first thing that happens. And then the next thing that happens, all of those are processes. And so the first step is to list out all of your major processes that drive your company, that drive your delivery and that drive the experience that your customers or your clients have with you. And then you can look at that and say, where do I have gaps? And ultimately what happens in the place that you wanna get to is you wanna have all of these processes listed out. And then you want to about on a quarterly basis, maybe every three to six months, depending on the process, go and revisit it, audit it, figure out where the holes are and then fix it. And one thing I have learned, so the hard way, and over and over again, and in my company and continue to learn is as you grow a team, I’m telling you guys the best piece of advice that I have for you growing a team is that leadership is all about repetition.

You can never assume that because you have created an SOP or because you have stated the way a pro should be, or your expectations on something that you can say at one time, or honestly, even two or three times, and that everybody will get it. You essentially, if, if I was to break down your delivery and then delegating that to a team, which I am gonna talk about leadership in a different episode, but this is really directly related to process. You have to repeat your expectations. The way a process should be the way the experience should be, what your, what you are thinking it should be like. And then if you have feedback, if you want feedback on that, what it should be frequently every three to six months, because what’s gonna happen is people are going to veer off to their natural tendencies, or they’re gonna forget something, or you’re gonna forget something, or there will be confusion, but you’re not gonna know there’s confusion because you’re not the one doing the process every day.

And then all of a sudden you have three or four people who are all doing something different, and they’re not following your process doing like 75% of it, but then 25% there’s room for interpretation, and they’re doing different things. So if you have your process listed out and you have all the core processes in your company listed out, then what I would do is like I said, every quarter, or maybe every six months, if you feel like you can go that long, you’re going to actually spend time you or a director of op operations. Somebody who is in charge of your operations in your company is going to actually audit. And I mean, going deep, like if I was to do this, we just did this in our onboarding process. I mean, looking at every single checklist you have every email, that’s a part of it.

The actual communication that is happening live, you’re gonna shadow. You’re gonna go deep. And, and this is the mistake you guys make. And I make this too, where you assume something is good and you don’t take the time to actually sit there for like an hour or two hours and go deep and audit something and find all the holes. And I can promise you if you’re not doing that, you have a lot of holes in your business that you don’t know about. So every three to six months, each one of these core foundational processes, you’re gonna audit and you’re gonna audit them and you’re gonna assess. And then you’re gonna figure out, like, where do we need to improve? Where are they broken? Because things are always changing. Your customers might be changing. Their needs might be changing the level of services, probably, hopefully, always improving that you’re delivering.

You might be making small tweaks that these processes that you then forgot to update. And I have learned that businesses are just about constantly doing that because it, it will constantly be going out date cuz you’re changing. And if you’re changing fast and you’re a growing company, that’s just the reality. So that’s the first piece. And you need to, you know, put that in a document or something and create, create process, create process around, checking your process. And I’m, I’m literally not kidding. Like that is what you need to do. The next thing. And this is something that is so simple, but so many people don’t do it. And that is every part of your company should have KPIs attached to it. So first note, all the major key performance indicators, that’s what a KPI stands for and they’re match. They have to be metrics.

They have to be able to be measured and you know, no questions asked about them. And so what are the main KPIs at every part, you know, think about your customer experience and how can you measure each step, each component of that experience with an actual backed number. So some big ones could be like retention rate or average cart value. If your customers come back and buy more. Um, for us, we have a major metric, which is time to get a client live, time to go from. They paid their deposit to, they are actually active and live with their ads and we took over their ads and everything is done in their onboarding, your team, bandwidth, your capacity on our done for you side. I mean our done with you side. We have metrics around the average number of calls that are account managers, taking the average number of audits they’re doing every week, the actual active members.

So we have our total members. What percentage of them are actively using our live support? Did we have to cancel any calls last month? That’s that’s a metric that I wanna know, like if we’re canceling calls, why, and that’s a red flag, but, but as a, a leader, as you grow a team, you have to one set the accountability, the expectation of what metrics you need to see that can help you identify how things are going or where there is red flags and problems. And then you have to hold your team accountable and create process around tracking those KPIs. And I think that every department, every person, every process should have a KPI attached to it. So if you look at onboarding, you could have a KPI of your average customer’s onboarding satisfaction score. You send out a survey after onboarding is complete. Obviously not every single person’s gonna fill it out, but out of those, what do you want your average, you know, score to be your average rating.

You could have a, a metric on how many clients. We could have a metric on how many clients are doing their weekly calls. We, we obviously have performance metrics like we’re unique when we have performance metrics or we’re, we’re calculating how many of our accounts are below two X return on ad spend and how many are above we want, you know, obviously majority of them, if not all of them to be above, and if they’re not like that’s flagged, we understand like that count is red. We need to make sure we’re doing funnel audits, webinar audits, email audits, you know, all the things we can possibly be doing to improve that metric. And so you even down to the point where every person in my company has a KPI that they’re responsible for when I onboard a new team member, which I just recently did and I train them, I tell them on day one, day two, these are the metrics that are going to tell me if you’re successful in your role or not.

And I tell them what those are. So I just onboarded a marketing team member. And I told them, you know, of course there’s the obvious ones. There is how many applications we’re getting, how many leads we we’re we’re signing every month. But then there is social media engagement. Um, there is the podcast downloads, like these are the metrics that you can control. And you’re responsible for, I recently read this book, scaling up by Verne Harish. So recommend it. If you’re growing a team, if you’re about a million dollars a year and above, you’ll probably get a lot out of this book. There were some advanced tactics in it, but I got a lot out of it. And one thing that they talked about is having KPIs for every role, but also what I loved was they actually said, take those KPIs and show your employees how that translate O translates over to your profit and loss statement as a business or to your balance sheet, and actually showing them like you’re in charge of this KPI in this, in the company.

And here is the line on the balance sheet that is going to be impacted by that by you like you have the power to impact our company financials. And here’s how, and so for example, like one of ’em that we could do is for our ads team is average client payment. Like if you’re, if you’re getting great results for your clients and you’re scaling their ad spend, which is what everybody wants, it’s a, win-win the they’re paying us more percentage of ad spend that increases our average client payment. So all the way down to my like frontline team members, ads managers, I’m able to show them, look, this is how you are impacting the company. I know this is getting into like some advanced team stuff, but I just dig it. You guys, I could talk about this stuff all day. So anyways, going back to you, the importance of having KPI’s important key performance indicators at every part of your company, the metrics you should be tracking, and then you have to tie process to actually getting that data in a simple way.

So having, we have a master spreadsheet that’s that we call CEO metrics and it has our company revenue, but it also has on it profit per employee, gross profit net profit. It has average client payment and has our retention rate. It has team member attrition rate, like all the important metrics that I wanna see in one place as a CEO on my company is in this sheet and we have a tab for every month and we track it and it’s just super helpful. So having those metrics is going to, to be key. When you go to grow your team, all, you can get all the way down detailed and you should to the metrics that each individual can control and even tying it back to your business numbers is so key. Cuz then you’re teaching your employees and you’re teaching your team how to think smart, like a business owner.

And you’re actually showing them the pack they actually have on the company and the company’s financials, which, who doesn’t want the company that they’re working for to do well, right? That’s paying them and paying their bills to do well. And it just shows them the bigger impact that they have. Okay. Moving on. So you have these regular processes documented, you have these KPIs and the next thing to make sure that every quarter and every month you have something that you are actively doing to improve your delivery. So every quarter, every month I have different sections of goals. So I talked about in the previous episode, how I plan our marketing and our projects in marketing, I do the same thing for delivery. So operations and delivery, we have our own sections and we plan out like this exact quarterly goals. So for example, this quarter, one of our quarterly goals is to make sure that 80% of our clients go live within 30 days of paying their deposit.

Another one of our quarterly goals is to track and see 15 different client accounts actually improve their funnel metrics as a direct impact of our support and their funnel. So from our landing page audit or from our email sequence audits or webinar, which is all things that we do that we’ve added in since last year. And so under that now comes monthly goals where we, for example, create a better process for our webinar. Audits is something that we recently did. We created a tracking sheet so we can see every single finished funnel that we create as a team. So all of these things do drive the big quarterly goals that we set. And the most important thing is you, you can, you won’t only wanna set the amount of goals that you can work on. So it’s gonna depend on your team size and your bandwidth as a company.

But the important thing is that you’re putting company resources and time and effort into improving your delivery every month, every quarter. Okay. All right. The next piece on making sure your delivery is the best out there. This is very, very important is process making sure you have process for getting regular customer feedback. Customer feedback is going to be critical to improving your process. And just like I encourage you guys with market to go out there and talk to your audience and figure out what they are frustrated about or what they’re saying and the language they’re using. You need to talk to your customers because you can sit there all day long and think through and say, Hey, here is what I think we need need to be doing better. And you might be right, but you also might not have the most top priority thing in mind because you’re are not in it.

You’re not actually getting delivered your product or service. And so creating a process, our processes at the beginning of every month, my director of operations of the ads team sends out a personal email to all of our active clients and asks for feedback. That’s one way we do it. We also have a survey that goes out to all of our members inside of market, like a and ask them for feedback. Then we have surveys sprinkled all throughout the market, like a pro training material to ask for feedback on that. We have an onboarding survey. We have feedback and process to receive feedback sprinkled in everywhere in our delivery. Because that information to me is priceless because I wanna know in a proactive way, if there is something we could be doing better and I get that Intel from a customer, I can go fix it quickly.

I can go address the process or talk, give the feedback to the team member and they can adjust the way they’re communicating or they can adjust the action they’re taking. And that’s my next point. That is so incredibly key with your delivery is that you always aim to stay in a proactive place versus reactive. Cuz I can promise you, you are gonna hate your business, especially if you’re a service based business. If all you do is go put out fires. If every day you wake up and there’s mad customers or angry people or problems or things like on fire, you’re gonna hate your business. And that comes from not having proactive process. That comes from not everything I’m talking about is about getting to a proactive place because by having the major processes in your company written down and then you’re able to go and audit in a proactive way that makes it so that the process isn’t so broken and awful, that then it’s not even working and you have to start from scratch and, and everything’s on fire.

It makes it so you’re able to fix it before it gets to that point. By having KPIs clearly stated and clearly laid out, you’re able to see when there’s a problem before it’s like, oh my gosh, we need to go dig into this. Find this problem by getting customer feedback in a proactive way, you can save the customer, save the relationship, improve the experience before it gets to the place where they’re like, I’m not enjoying this or this. Wasn’t a good experience. I’m not gonna refer you to my friend. So having feedback and also overall proactiveness in all of delivery will save you and you will love your business so much more. So make that your goal. And that’s actually something. I also talk to my team about all the time across every place is like we are aiming to be proactive even with a client account.

Like we wanna have ad creative already ready to go when results to get saturated and, and decline before that even happens, because then we can proactively launch ads or we wanna be auditing the funnel before we even get to the place of it’s totally not working. And it’s been, you know, 45 days or whatever. We wanna be proactive at every single point. Because if you do that, even if something work or even if you struggle with a piece of your delivery, by being proactive, your customers are gonna trust you and have a better experience. Okay. I have two more points on your delivery. One is speed. So I recently did a podcast about how speed is so important and we actually have a company value that speed is queen because as soon as you find a problem, especially if it’s a critical problem in your delivery, the faster you take action to fixing it, the better your company is.

And that is your competitive advantage because I can tell you that there’s a lot of companies out there, majority of companies out there, they know there’s a problem with their delivery or something has been flagged to them and they take like three months to fix it. And if you do that in today’s landscape, in today’s market, in that timeframe, you will have lost the customer and it will be too late. So as soon as you find a hole or a gap or you find something that you need to improve, speed is quick and you need to go in and fix that. And it obviously needs to be the, the top priority thing. Like there’s always going to be, this is part of the job of a leader because there’s always going to be like 50 things that you could be doing. And so don’t waste your time doing things that are not priority, but when you find something that it’s like, wow, this is impacting every customer or every team member or every single component of our delivery.

How fast can you fix it? Forget about like, let’s do it by the end of the month. Let’s do it today. Right now. Let’s move our priorities around and let’s get this done. That is how I operate. And that is one of our competitive advantages because we’re able to get a lot, but we’re also only getting done priority things and it’s making a big difference constantly in the improvement of our delivery. The final point I have about your delivery is if you have a team, if you’re starting to grow a team and you are not as involved in the delivery, you’re not on the front lines, maybe directly talking to customers and through or service or you are not directly serving clients or you partially are. And this is true. Even in the basics of customer service. If you do not create process for asking your team for feedback on what they think your company can do better, you’re missing out on golden Intel because I can tell you every single time team members are gonna operate out of how they feel like they’ve been told that the expectations are, unless you communicate to them and you say, Hey, where are the problems?

Where are the gaps? Where could we do better? Where could we adjust our delivery? Where could we improve? What do you guys think? Then they’ll come to you and say, oh, well, we could totally streamline this. Or the client was confused here. And so I think we should do it this way. Or, you know, we keep getting the same question in our customer service inbox. And so I think we need to clarify it in the backend. If you don’t set the, the precedent that that’s allowed, they will never do it. But I promise you, if you do get so much Intel and the reality is as you grow a team, you become removed from this. So you can no longer see like what the custom box looks like, what the questions look like, where the problems are, where somebody is confused or upset or not a hundred percent satisfied.

If you don’t ask for those things from your team and, and encourage that collaboration and problem solving, then you’re missing out on serious gold. So I’m constantly like if a team member comes to a call and, and you know, week over week is like, everything’s great. I have no suggestions. I’m like, come on, no, come on. You think of three things cuz you do because they’re there and I wanna know what they are. And so my job is to probe and pull that out and that is extremely helpful. All right, you guys, the last thing I wanna share is that starting on Monday on February 21st, I’m doing something that we have never done before, which I think is going to be incredibly amazing and so much value for you guys. And I am hosting a camp. So it’s a four day bootcamp and it’s our freebie framework bootcamp in four days, what we’re gonna do is strategize and create or revamp an irresistible free offer.

So the top of your funnel, because I sat down with my team and I was like, what will make the biggest difference for so many people’s marketing strategy? And one thing that came out of that was I think a lot of people put the effort and the energy and the resources into the sales portion of their funnel. And then they come up with a freebie or something to offer at the top of the funnel. And that that’s kind of just thrown together, but with today’s landscape and the cost of ads and the saturation and the importance to stand out, I’ve created a framework that we have tested out month over month. That’s how I doubled my business revenue in the last 60 days in creating that irresistible free offer. So you’ve got people flocking to organic and paid to sign up for your funnel because if you can nail that free offer, you will have so many people coming in and that’s ultimately how you generate leads in sales, right?

So if you go to Hersh marketing.com/bootcamp, you can sign up for this 40 bootcamp, you know, true to my style. It’s going to be very, very straight to the point. Very, you know, here’s what you need to do results oriented. And by the end, you’ll go through our process where we actually combine identifying your audience’s core frustrations and pain points and turning that into an irresistible free offer that will convert and go crazy. And we’ve done this now the several months in my own business, it’s doubled my business revenue in the last 60 days, this strategy alone. And so I’m sharing it with you guys. I’m walking you guys through that framework. You can sign up, it’s free Hersh, marketing.com/bootcamp. Otherwise I’ll see you guys here for the fourth episode of the optimized business series.

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