The Bottleneck Matrix | Ep 2

Speaker A

00:00:01.040 - 00:45:40.000

This is episode two, and I'm going to cover the revenue plateaus businesses hit and the most common bottlenecks at each. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long, and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits. Great to have you guys here. We're in week two of the six week Bottleneck Breakthrough series. Last week we went over the bottleneck hierarchy.

I think that was useful stuff for you guys.

I'm sure there's more questions that came up after you're able to go through it, dig into it, see where you're at and what your bottleneck area is that you can look at. And this week we're gonna dig into the bottleneck matrix.

Now, I came up with this probably 10 years ago, just started seeing patterns that would develop over time as I talked with business owners. And I kept asking friends that were consultants or in the business growth space if they saw similar patterns. And I was really shocked.

Nobody had paid attention to this stuff.

And it came about as I was talking with lots and lots of business owners working for Chet Holmes and his Business Breakthroughs International Company. And I just saw so many repeat patterns of challenges tied to revenue plateaus. And I could then start predicting somebody's problem.

I could read their mail if all I needed to hear was their revenue, where they were at and how long they'd been there. And so it became kind of like a little parlor trick, it seemed, but where people would say, did my staff tell you this? Are you working for the irs?

Looking at our income statements or tax returns or whatever. I mean, it was just really funny that people the responses they got. So I knew I was honing in on something meaningful and again, was shocked.

Nobody has ever talked about this stuff, ever. I've never seen this written anywhere. I've never seen this talked about in any business training I've ever been through.

And so I knew it was meaningful. I knew it was significant.

So we start page six of the book going through the bottleneck matrix, going through the key revenue plateaus that I see most businesses get stuck at as they're growing and where they stall out. And then we'll talk about what the common bottleneck is as at that point. And then what I find are the common solutions for those bottlenecks.

And so we're just going to march right through. And again, happy to dig in at the end with Q and A. If you've got questions about your specific revenue plateau, your business model, where you're at.

It's fun stuff. And this is, I think, from last week, talking about the bottleneck hierarchy.

Being able to get into the matrix of revenue plateaus is a good one, two punch. And like I said when I started this series, that bottleneck hierarchy is not in the book.

I came up with it since then, since it was published, as just another way to make it easier for business owners to wrap their head around assessing their current situation and figuring out what to work on, because it's easy to just stay busy and walk around putting out fires or chasing what you think is is best to focus on.

So the other interesting thing as we get into this bottleneck matrix was I had a number of people that wished I had written Bottleneck Breakthrough around the revenue plateaus.

Made each chapter tied to a specific revenue plateau and how to tackle it kind of a paint by numbers process that makes it easier for them to know what to do next. And I thought about that. It was an option as I was putting the book outline together, but I wanted to go beyond just paint by numbers.

Okay, this is what you do next. This is what you do next. This is what you do next.

I wanted the book to follow what I found in the six levers of growth, which we'll talk about next week.

The areas, the main levers that keep recurring as you keep growing, as you keep evolving, as your company keeps expanding, you keep going back through these levers of growth. And so to me, that's more of a holistic approach of teaching you how to think as a sophisticated business owner as opposed to follow this checklist.

When you hit 500,000, do this. When you hit a million, do this. When you hit 2 million, do this. Because those are more surface level tactics.

Again, they're beneficial, they're going to help you and you guys are going to get great insight today of where you're at and what to work on next. And it'll unlock growth and it'll be great. But I just care about more of a holistic approach. It's just how I'm wired.

I want to feed a man to fish, feed a woman to fish for a lifetime and not worry about giving them a task that they don't understand why they're doing it, they don't understand the implications. And so as we dig into these revenue plateaus, that's why I didn't write the book around them.

That's why I wrote the book around the six levers of growth and wanted to equip you to understand all of this stuff at a deeper level and be able to repeat these things over and over and over in your entrepreneurial career. So for those of you that are listening and you're not quite to 100 grand, this is skipping that.

I've got a great blog post on what to do until you get to six figures. I'll put a link to it in the resources with this.

So that if you're not quite to six figures, if you're not generating ten grand a month, eight grand a month consistently. There's two steps that I outlined in that of what to focus on. Nothing else matters. Funnels, landing pages, traffic, none of that matters.

It's all about figuring out your offer and finding more people that fit the prospect profile that you want and pitching them until you get that offer dialed in and you know where a pile of those people are, because that's it. So we're going to skip over that in this bottleneck matrix.

Who I write this for is for people up in the million plus range because business really starts changing there. So the first revenue plateau that I see over and over is 500,000. So you're clipping over 40 grand a month.

And at this point the biggest bottleneck, as it says there on the screen, is that your staff are either unclear on what they're supposed to do or they don't have enough to do because the roles are expanding, extending you, you're probably still taking on too much as the owner. Cause you know how to do everything.

And so I define, I use the example that at half a million dollars, most clients I work with that are people that business owners I consult that are in that space, they've got four, five, seven, eight staff. Some are freelancers, a team at that size. And each of those staff I view, I say that they're like Go Go Gadget arms.

They just are an extension that allow the owner to reach around more stuff, be able to touch and extend what they're able to do on a day to day basis. But they're really just an appendage. They're the, the owner is using that assistant or that staff person as like an extension.

They're the puppeteer driving that person, telling them what to do, giving them a lot of details randomly. There's no real structure.

And so that, that's why it becomes a bottleneck is because these staff, just like I talked about, not teaching, not helping you solve your business growth tied just to the revenue plateaus. It's the same with these staff.

They're just an extension of you and you haven't explained all the reasons why they do the things they do, why you have them do the things they do. They don't understand your thinking behind it.

And so once they run into a wall or they have idle time, a lot of times they'll sit around twiddling their thumbs because they don't know the rest of the business. They don't have the rest of the understanding of what you need them to do.

So the solution as it lists here is to define the key responsibilities and assign them. So this is the beginning of creating what everybody calls an organization chart.

And this is where most small business owners just start getting frustrated because they're like, this is not what I want to do. I don't want to manage. I don't like the detail. I don't have time to write these responsibilities and job descriptions and train everybody on it.

I'm busy enough, I can't. And it becomes this purgatory gap.

I call that a lot of, especially service businesses where the solopreneur is fulfilling and doing all of the work, closing and fulfilling. And they try to get an assistant, but they're just piecemealing out little tasks.

They real, their belief is that it's just easier for me to do it than it is to try to find somebody and train them and wait for them to get up and running. And there's a quote I used by Dave Ramsey and I don't have it up, but it's essentially at the beginning of the management section.

I think it's probably in chapter eight, no 10 or 11, somewhere in there. And it starts the chapter and it essentially says that creating a team, you're sacrificing short term pain for long term capability.

And it's that gap.

It's getting across saying, well, it's just easier for me to do it and realizing, okay, I'm going to knuckle down, hunker down, whatever, and actually train these people.

Because I know that in two, three, six months, however long it takes, I'm going to have way more leverage on this company and way more ability to grow beyond where I'm at. Because the reality is a million dollar company, the owner's not working twice as hard as a half million dollar company.

That's none of this scales like that.

I remember I had a client at 5 million and a couple of the partners wanted to tap out there because they thought they'd have to work twice as hard at 10 million. It's like, well, are you working twice as hard at five million than you were at two and a half million. And the logic doesn't work.

But when we get overwhelmed, our thinking goes down and our logic goes down. So that's the gap is defining responsibilities. And I've got resources for the book.

You can go to the resources section BBG liresources and get the template for a job description for a role outline listing all their responsibilities, all their assignments, and figuring out what you need to tell them, the rules of their role are and how you measure them.

And so it shifts now from them being an extension of your Go Go Gadget arms to actually delegating things and handing things off so that they're able to do things whether you're there or not. And so as you, as you think through this, don't overwhelm yourself, don't think, oh, I gotta do it for everybody all at once.

Just start with the first person that you think is the most important person in the company. Or start with where you're spending an inordinate amount of time and start writing it down.

Sit with them and say, hey, what do you do on a day to day basis? Can you take this task that I've had you do 3 million times? Can you just write a checklist for me? Here's an outline. We've got structures.

You can get it into something that's, they don't have to figure it all out on their own, but just start with that and then say, you know what, I want you to do this every Monday at noon or something, or I want you to do this twice a week or I need you to schedule this. And then when you get that behavior going, then you can expand on that documentation, you need to expand on that role.

And then you're able to get them to be more autonomous, be more of a true delegated role as opposed to just an extension of you trying to be a mini Me version of you or those Go Go Gadget arms. So that's the first one. And it really is the shift where the business starts requiring you to step into that management role.

This is the very first beginning of what management looks like and should get you up to the million dollar mark for most businesses. So at a million dollars, this is the most common big bottleneck that companies really hit.

And it's where the owner is the rainmaker and they're tackling, getting clients and bringing in all the landing everybody. But then they're also maintaining some semblance of structure around fulfillment operations.

And as you know, most business owners aren't wired for the operations side. They're really wired for being the visionaries, the networkers, the deal makers. And so staying on that rainmaker side is better for them.

So this at the right around a million bucks and it's fuzzy. It could be 800 grand. I've seen it up to one and a half million. But that founder is beyond capacity to manage everything. And so it needs to.

What happens that I suggest is split the company in half in operations and found and function. Have the marketing and lead gen is one half and have the operations and fulfillment as the other half.

And what you need to develop there is an operations manager.

And it doesn't have to be a full stack $100,000 a year project management driven certified operations manager, but it's somebody that you can trust is going to be your little Napoleon that's going to crack the whip while you're gone.

It's going to be the resource that knows enough to get everything moving, keep products going out the door, keep services, solutions, projects getting done on time and being that trusted authority when you're gone, whether it's on sales calls, on vacation, out sick, playing golf, whatever, that you've got somebody back at the office, at the shop that is keeping everybody focused and that it's not a case of when the cat's away, the mice will play. And over and over and over this frees up the owner to continue to go grow it.

Because what happens is when you hit this million dollar ceiling and this plateau, when you realize that more business that you close means you're gonna have to do more project management, more fulfillment management, you start throttling yourself. There's no way around it.

You either subconscious or fully conscious that you're like if I close more business, I'm just gonna bury myself on nights and weekends having to manage the fulfillment and nobody likes that, that's not fun.

And so you end up staying here completely self inflicted, throttling yourself because you know the more you close, the more you're going to just be stuck managing something you don't want to really manage.

So that's why getting the operations manager in there, I find most companies it's rare to take somebody that was on your team at the $500,000 range that is a doer, some frontline employee. I find it rare that you can develop those people into an operations manager role.

And so I would say you're probably gonna have to hire from the outside.

And you might, depending on your business model you might be able to have it be a part time freelance role that depending on if your Staff's all in one office or not, that you can ease your way in if it's not and you're on site and you need somebody that's physically there.

I would start more as kind of an operations assistant that you groom into that management role so that you're not just hiring them and throwing them a big responsibility and abdicating it to them. Because that's the problem in all management structures.

As you evolve, the tendency is to hire somebody, think they're capable, and just abdicate, throw it to them and say, hey, get it done. And then six months later, you realize they didn't know what they were doing.

There was no accountability, there's no oversight, and they screwed the pooch. And you've got a lot of stuff, a lot of messes to deal with that have fallen through the cracks.

So that's one way to ease your way into an operations manager without feeling like you're making a huge salary commitment and overwhelming your staff or making a huge change. So next we've got the $2 million revenue plateau. And this one's interesting. It's not real obvious.

For a lot of businesses when they're hitting it, it feels kind of vague. They just feel busy because revenue's gone up. They've got their operations manager, but they're not quite sure what needs to change.

And this is the problem of being a business owner. The biggest challenge is it's hard to see the forest from the trees. You're the frog in the pot getting boiled as revenue goes up.

And you don't realize there are these clear, distinct transfers that the business requires a different version of you at those points to get past it. So often cases at $2 million, the business needs to upgrade their clients.

So a lot of times I see businesses where they do a lot of small projects, kind of take whatever they can get, and that gets them to a million bucks. And then they realize, gosh, or they don't realize, but they.

The opportunity there is to see that the amount of effort it takes to sell the small deals is often the same amount of effort that it takes to close the bigger deals. And so it's literally just upgrading the size of client or project you go after. And so a lot of times I find that the. Sorry, double mute, unmute.

I find that the effort to get bigger clients feels overwhelming. They, the business owner thinks, oh, well, we have to upgrade our brand. We have to upgrade our website. We're not good enough.

They felt they may feel inferior, they may not. They may be intimidated by Going after a larger client, they may think that they're not good enough yet to service those bigger clients.

And so that's the, the shift is realizing there's very few little tweaks that you need to make in your proposal, your approach.

And maybe the sales cycle is a little longer and the, the, you're used to shorter closes, but getting into a higher sophisticated level, you don't realize, you just give yourself a little bit more grace on time and you're able to meet the needs of those larger clients. And then the beauty is when you close them, it's usually larger fees, easier onboarding, sometimes the margins are better, maybe, maybe not.

But the overall chaos of fulfilling them goes down because it's one client, one project, one onboarding, things like that. So that's where I think expanding the solution is expanding or building traffic pillars for larger prospects.

And again, it doesn't have to be a complete overhaul. I was in a Facebook group a while back and it was for agency owners.

And I got invited to check it out and I was in there and they had a group call and this guy was talking about, he was right around $2 million doing Facebook traffic. And I walked through this process for him and he's all, oh yeah, that makes sense.

There was another consultant on the call, an older guy that just kind of a big ego in my opinion. And he's like, no, you need to change. You need to go after Fortune 500 companies to manage their ads.

And I mean, this guy's average client was probably half a million to a million at best. And the other consultant that was on this call was very dominant. And I don't have anything to prove. I don't care.

Nobody's paying me for saving this guy's agency. And he went so hard and so fast about new branding and create separate sales team. And I'm just like, this is so unrealistic.

There's no way this guy's ever going to accomplish that. It's too much risk, it's too big of a shift. It's a whole culture overhaul. And to me it was like you could in theory go after that and maybe it works.

But there's so much risk, there's so much downside and so much effort involved when all he really needed to do was just look at, okay, I've been working with these companies that are half a million to a million.

Maybe there's companies in the 2 million dollar range that are like us going through growth changes and I can relate with them better because I understand the changes they're going through, and we can make their ads run better. And again, a much easier adjustment, a much easier thing to test while he maintains his current book of business and doesn't forsake it.

So to me, that's a really big opportunity at 2 million to just land windfall income. I mean, it just feels like you're shooting fish in a barrel when you land bigger clients, because at times it can be easier.

The sales cycle, like I said, might be longer, but that's a small price to pay as long as your cash flow is stable.

So next is when you get up to the $5 million revenue plateau and, and this, I reference it as purgatory, but it actually might be better referenced as hell. I've yet to meet a business owner who's got a $5 million company and they've been there for more than two years, who isn't hating life.

They are so overwhelmed, they're so uncertain, they're so frazzled.

And it really is purgatory or hell, because what happens is if you can have a $2 million company that's running really, really well, that you can take a lot of time off and having a solid profit margin where you're paying all your bills, you're debt free, whatever, and you can have a good life, and it could be a great cash flow business, cash cow. But when you get to 5 million, you really are the bottleneck. If you're stuck there as the owner.

Most companies that are going to make it to 10 million grow from 2 million to 10 million in just a few years. When they get stuck at 5 million, they're stuck there for a reason. And these are the reasons why. Because you've not developed functional management.

That's the biggest key that I see is there's not enough smart managers running the divisions of the company.

So the owner gets stuck having to answer everything, whether it's sales and marketing, fulfillment, finance or software development, whatever the third leg of that business is, they're stuck being the answer man. And so everybody's waiting on you at that point.

And it just, you're working harder, you're making about the same money, maybe a little bit more than when you were at 2 million, but it's not worth the headache. And so the key, the number one solution is developing management. This goes beyond the operations manager.

This is having a functional sales manager, somebody or marketing director, somebody that actually knows what they're doing to run those functions of the business. And I've seen too many times, business owners, they've Grown it to like 3,4 million. They are the rainmaker. They're tired of it.

They're tired of managing the sales team and they've hired sales managers. I've seen this happen twice. And man, they just abdicated to sales managers. No oversight, no making sure the culture fits, no checking in with them.

And they, they just. The sales managers screw it and they drive away their best salespeople and revenue goes down.

And so that's the problem to me of again, you needing to shift the business, requiring you to become more of an organizational leader, somebody that can manage, communicate, check in, make sure that the key functions are happening and not just abdicate it. So the other part here is quality control. And I've seen this a few times where again, bigger projects.

We moved up the food chain at 2 million, but there was too many. There were too many project managers brought on that weren't trained enough in the systems, and there was no project management oversight.

And so scope creep extends, billing doesn't catch up, and unprofitability sets in. And so it becomes again, a version of purgatory, that you've got more revenue coming in, but your profits are down, actually.

And it's because of all these inefficiencies and because there's no quality control on project management and there's no oversight or review process and training, and because the business owner often would manage projects and from experience, because they're uniquely capable to deliver the product or service and they, they don't realize they have to train other project managers or other middle managers, project managers, how to do it their way. And there's not this transfer of knowledge.

And so this is the point where I tell every business owner, and I'd say a million plus, but definitely at 5 million, you need to be communicating with your staff about four times more than you think you need to, because the conversations in your head have gone up. There's more chaos going on in your head trying to keep everything organized, but those are only with yourself.

Those don't count as actual conversations. And now you've got enough staff that they're not sitting around your office like they were when you were at 500,000 or a million.

They're not just an extension of yourself. And so you end up needing to explain even more because there's such a gap between you and all of your staff.

So again, there's a whole host of challenges right around 5 million. But all of the solutions come back to better management, building managers, and better communication of what you're doing.

And what you want done in the company, and you can no longer be freewheeling.

This is where innovation, price change, product change, all that stuff needs to be done very methodically and very strategically so that you don't just come up with an idea, say, we're changing everything, and go change it, and then lose 30% of your clients because you changed price on something. This is where testing and I talk about it. I can't remember what chapter, but it was. I referenced ron Johnson from J.C. penney.

Maybe that was the Mindset chapter, but how he just was like, I know what's best for JCPenney, and he changed things across the board. And they lost a billion dollars cash in a year because they didn't test things and they didn't try things out. So that's the.

Those are the three things at 5 million that really require a different version of you. And it's great. It's forcing you to step up. I had a great post in our Facebook group Bottleneck Breakthrough Method yesterday about overwhelm that.

It's a great sign or it's a great signal to pay attention to that it helps you ferret out all these things inside that are getting stretched and stressed.

But if you work on it and you accept it and you don't just stick your head in the sand or try to retreat and wave the white flag, all these things will become much easier to handle in the future.

Looking back at where you've grown from in the last five years, I guarantee you've got more skills and the things that were challenged five years ago, you could go back through again, no problem. So that's really it at 5 million. So then moving on to 10 million. This. This is where I think the sophistication of companies really grows.

To get past 10 million, and it's really a free fall from 10 million to 100 million that if you get these couple things at the $10 million mark sorted out, that you can really drive worthwhile growth all up to the $100 million range, depending on the capacity of your marketplace.

But the key is beefing up your sales process, becoming more vertically focused, niche focused, so that your teams that are dealing with different segments of your market really speak the language of them. So I had a great client kitchens to go. They did temporary kitchen solutions for nine different industries.

So when a commercial kitchen gets remodeled, it's a big project.

And when you've got a hotel or a hospital or a prison facility and they're putting out 10,000 meals a day or university and you've got to remodel that kitchen. Well, there's very few options that aren't very costly or that don't cost an arm and a leg to keep that kitchen running.

And so kitchens To Go came up with trailerized kitchen units. And so 40 foot container would come out with a full kitchen in it. And they could set it up and have it running in a few days and it could run.

USC did it for 18 months. Harvard, their food court, they ran it for like 12 months and so they could still pump out.

And the funny thing is their temporary kitchen solutions were often better than the kitchens that were being remodeled. So the staff was happy.

But what they ran into was they had broken up their territories by geographic region so that their sales reps could fly out, be on site within a day, handle the questions.

But because they serve nine different industries, and the industries are very uniquely wired, I mean, food service for corrections facilities is drastically different than food service for high end hotels or food service for universities or all the other segments. And so when they ran into the $10 million mark, their sales staff weren't specialized in any of these niches.

And so it created friction for them when they were trying to sell into different verticals. And my recommendation, they never followed it, but my recommendation was to focus on niche specialization. And it was just too much change.

They didn't want to go through it and they muscled their way through growth. And it essentially ended up being that the owners were, were flying all over the country making sales.

And they were actually the inspiration for the first chapter of my book. Tim the sales guy fly or the owner flying all over and not having any time.

And so as you look at niche specialization, you're able to build a whole team of marketers, of technical salespeople, of onboarding staff, project managers that are focused on that specific, specific niche. And you're able to resonate with the needs of that marketplace so much better. And then I'd say adding sales and marketing team expansion is huge.

More support roles there.

Because for those of you that don't have marketing departments or a marketing director, marketing is so specialized now, there's no way that one director can know everything.

All the specialization tasks, whether it's SEO or paid traffic or conversion rate optimization or automation with CRMs or content creation for inbound marketing, each of those topics is a lifetime of study. And so I think this is where really beefing up your sales and marketing teams at 10 million is pays off in spades.

Because I got another client, I was talking to the other day that they are, they're about 6 million. And their salespeople do too much follow up and too much pre qualification.

And so for them, one thing they've tried in the past and it just didn't last because they didn't have consistent lead flow was having a pre qual appointment setter, somebody that's able to go through and make sure that the calls that the salespeople are getting on are sweet spot calls that they're dealing with qualified prospects that are ready to go. And so again that's another example of making expanding your teams in those areas to make them more efficient as you get past that $10 million mark.

So I hope this was useful. The graphic will be in the video. I'll put it with the content here so you can see it. It's on page six in the book.

If you ever need to visit it, revisit it and little detail. Page six has the revenue plateau and the common bottleneck. And I think it's page 224.

223 has the same graphic but with the column of solutions added to it.

So any questions as we end up here on the bottleneck matrix where you're at, Anything that I can help you tackle what to do next, how to approach solving your bottleneck and getting past where you're at or making your company run more efficiently. Thanks, Teresa. Yeah. Page 209, not 222. So page 209 and yes, Luigi. This will be a post in the Facebook group with all the resources.

So for those of you listening that aren't part of the Facebook group, it's bottleneck breakthrough method. You can go to BBG, LI, FB. So BBG like bottleneck breakthrough group, LI link and FB for Facebook.

And yeah, Theresa staying at the 2 million dollar level is right.

And she has been working with me for the last five years and we've got, we've doubled their business in the last five years slowly, methodically, but more about making it run more efficiently and being able to go away and go on vacation and have the thing run like a top spin like a top while she's gone. So looking back here, other questions, let's see if I can pull up. Got a few coming in.

All right, Dave, so write an ad for position for a job description. Yeah.

So the recruiting right now, it's a problem in all industries because the market is so hot, the economy is so hot, unemployment is so low that the amount of people actually available looking at job ads is really low. And so I think for a lot of businesses who maybe have demand and they can't keep up with it, putting effort into marketing for hiring is the key.

Because marketing for prospects and marketing for employees is the same function. You have to demonstrate something unique. You have to show them that it's worthwhile.

You have to show them that you know what you're doing and that it's a good company to work at and that you pay competitively to make it worth their while to leave their other job because that's who you really want to hire.

Right now in a hot economy, you do not want the 3.5% that are unemployed trolling through Craigslist, because if they don't have a job by now, they're probably not that great. So you're likely going to be snagging them from another company.

And the good news is, if you're listening to this, you're probably a great boss and you probably have great culture, because that's who I attract. I don't attract narcissists and sociopaths that scream at their employees. That's not who I am and that's not who shows up.

So advertising, what's different and what makes your company unique? It is a copywriting and advertising problem. And so I like using small steps.

Just like Seth Godin in permission marketing, just like I do with all direct response marketing is focus the ad on getting them to take the next step. So it's, hey, you may not have heard about us. So, Dave, Your business is wholesalelocks.com.

i know a lot about your business and you guys do a great job with commercial lock equipment for buildings. And so it could probably be remote. So that would be something I would highlight.

And if they, if there's something about the locksmith industry that there's people that are interested in that, that they have some propensity towards it, I would highlight, hey, are you in the locksmith industry? Would you like a different job than other than answering phone calls and showing up at 8 o' clock at your locksmith company?

Because maybe that's who you're swiping from is they've got a job at a locksmith that's mediocre, but it's dying and they want to move on to something more or are you in an office position that you'd rather work from home? And so that's something that I would highlight in checking us out, that you can work remotely. We have a great, stable company.

We've got hundreds and hundreds of great testimonials and we focus on guaranteeing that we can deliver locks that nobody else can in a timeframe that nobody else can or something like that, and focusing on the culture and what makes you unique. And so Dave, we could joke that you're not going to deal with a dramatic boss because I only have one emotion and that's an inside joke with Dave.

But that's the kind of stuff I would highlight is figuring out what you can do to really differentiate your company as a place that's great to work for. It's a copywriting project and you want to get away from the generic stuff that everybody else is putting on.

Indeed, right now of customer service rep, $14 an hour or all the vague stuff you're just selling to employees now instead of selling to customers. So you have to make that compelling case.

For some of my clients we've got in the home services space, landscape companies, they're dealing with hiring field labor. So guys out in the field mowing lawns, putting down furniture, fertilizer and chemicals.

And so they're not dealing with really sophisticated employees. So for them, it's flexibility around their hours, good enough pay, but then having a culture where everybody loves being there.

So one of my clients, he's at his office, his shop is on the outside of a big right outside the entrance to a big neighborhood. And like six of his guys work for him, live in that neighborhood. And one of the things they love is it's a 330 second commute. Plus he's a great guy.

So those are the types of things that when he advertises and we're going to work on some Facebook ads for positions because we can geotarget on Facebook a specific radius around his office and focus on showing ads around the culture of the company and getting testimonials from his employees. And funny enough, I think he's got 12 people working for him.

At his Christmas party, he said, hey, I'll pay you $50 if you come stand in front of a camera and you give a testimonial. Everybody lined up and they all did it and they loved it.

And he actually had to go to the petty cash and he owed two of his office staff 50 bucks because he didn't have enough cash on him. He thought maybe half of them would do it, but they love working for him so much. And now those are great assets to recruit with.

So great question, Dave. See if I can go up here. And so larger sales, this is more around moving into the ads. May not change. It may not be that you have to change your ads.

It's maybe you're changing where you're getting those leads.

So I know a lot of companies like the inbound sales stuff, but maybe there's an RFP source that is reliable that allows you to take a swing at getting in in front of larger projects.

I know we did that for Yamabi and Horn Engineering and I talk about it extensively in the book, that their biggest bottleneck was landing RFP projects and the proposal process that we came up with for them that became a template that increased their close rate or their success rate on RFPS tenfold. They'd only gotten 4 out of 54 before working with me.

And then when we working with me, we got 11 out of the next 14 and we closed like $3.3 million in business. So that was all around an RFP process to go after bigger fish.

So for Dave, for you going after bigger clients, I know you just closed a huge deal for Harvard and that came possibly through an architecture firm that was doing the design project.

So it's more strategic partners that might be the case instead of just hoping that somebody stumbles across your projects for SEO based lead gen or Google Ads.

Because I'm not sure in your space, if larger project managers or buyers are searching Google for your solution, they might be in your space, commercial space, going through referrals, going through trusted sources. So I think developing strategic partners would be the case.

And I think your client base and the manufacturers and the glass houses that make the doors and all that stuff is probably the source of where I would lean in to get those. So great questions. Anybody else have any more questions? So hiring for a, how does a CEO hire for a position they're not skilled in? So great question.

I think you have to have an outside resource to know what you're measuring. Hire a consultant, that's the best place. Because what you don't know will hurt you on hiring.

If you've not developed the process, if you're not comfortable with it, if you don't know what you're measuring.

I find this a lot in the software space that a lot of owners who have software running big parts of their company, but they don't understand software, they don't understand developers, they just get hosed over and over and over. They held, they're held hostage by a developer that they started with, but they don't know that they're mediocre.

So you have to have an outside advisor when it comes to these kinds of recruitment roles. And thankfully there's lots of people that specialize in sales management, sales roles. Nancy Schlesinger, she's in Perry Marshall's world.

She's based in the uk.

She's a great recruiter and she understands the psychology of recruitment and she's helped so many people hire that she's a great resource that I think would be worthwhile.

But I'd say if you don't know and you're not skilled at the role you're hiring for, you've got to have an outside source that can guide you on that because otherwise you're just going to make so many mistakes and think that the natural tendency of business owners is to hire somebody mostly like them.

And if the CEO is not good at those roles, they're going to hire somebody who's not naturally talented for it and they're just going to go down the wrong path. So, great question, Marcos, Any others? Otherwise, this was great. I hope you guys got value from this.

I hope this was useful to give you an idea of how the business evolves as revenue grows and requires a different version of yourself. And it may feel like, oh, this isn't why I got into business. I didn't want to become a manager. I wanted to do a great job at delivering X, Y or Z.

Well, it doesn't mean that you have to be the CEO forever. You can find somebody else to be that CEO. I know Tucker Max at Book in a Box. They advised me on my book and they are now called Scribe.

I advised them when they got to about the $4 million range. And Tucker and Zach really weren't wired to be the CEO or the coo.

And I helped them position a guy as the COO who they thought was going to be the CEO, but he wasn't wired for that. And then eventually by about 8 million, they found a new CEO that Tucker could step away from. And that's completely possible.

But the reality is if you want to grow your revenue, you have to become a better organizational leader, better communicator, better manager, better coach, better oversight. And you can no longer be the harebrained ADHD idea guy or gal.

That's not, I don't know anybody that's running companies over a couple million dollars that still behaves that way.

And so that's why to me, another one of the posts I made recently is that strategy versus implementation, that I think strategy is only worth about 10% in small businesses and implementation is worth about 90% of the value because I just come across too many business owners that are the ADHD idea porn. They just every new idea is a fun idea, and the novelty of it is where they put their interest and energy. But that's not what grows companies.

So I'm excited to help you guys. We'll dig in next week on the six Levers of Growth and keep the questions coming.

And again, if this is the first time you've heard this stuff and you're not in the Facebook group, that is the place where all of this stuff is shared. These sessions will be posted there with the video so you can go back and see the graphics that I'm referencing.

And I look forward to digging in with you again next week. Have a great day. This podcast theme music is an excerpt from triptych of snippets by Septa Helix used under Creative Commons.