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In this podcast, Sam & Samantha Riley of Thought Leaders Business Lab talks about how automation helps entrepreneurs run a successful business while having more free time. This adventurer is having the best of both worlds: running a successful business and skiing volcanoes with his wife and brother, all at the same time.
Here are some of the things we discussed in the podcast:
- 5 different stages of business (3:30)
- Sam tells how he got started (5:30)
- The most underrated marketing channel (12:47)
- Be human where it counts (13:29)
- The ecosystem of automation (15:45)
- The two categories of tracking (24:20)
- Create a funnel (27:19)
- Figure out what works in the market and automate it (46:03)
- Travel while doing business (46:23)
TRANSCRIPT:
Sam Ovett: The very first thing we did with them was say, what’s the tool? What does it do? What do you use it for? We figure out what do you use that tool for? Cause usually they use one of the features of the tool. Now, can we consolidate these into a single tool so we can start tracking what’s going on? So you have information about your customer journey because not only do you want to automate what you’re doing, but you’d like to be able to look at it and say, is it effective?
Samantha Riley: You’re listening to the thought leaders business lab, the podcast for coaches, thought leaders and change makers who are ready to become the stand out expert. If that’s you stay tuned because you’re in the right place. I’m your host summit Riley. And I want to help you build a successful business.
Sharing your expertise, generate the impact and income. You need
Sam Ovett: to create your ideal lifestyle. It’s time to make a difference and scale up. Are you ready? Let’s enter the lab.
Samantha Riley: Welcome to the thought leaders business lab, Sam. It’s great to have you joining me today.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. I’m excited to be here and in here from Washington, Oregon, just outside of Bellingham,
Samantha Riley: it is for those that are just listening.
Their background is absolutely beautiful. Why don’t you share with us exactly what you’re up to, right.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. So it’s a unique function of being able to do business online and having automation that helps, and also a good team, but we are my wife and brother and I are skiing for the volcanoes in north America.
So we’re skiing, mountain hood, Mount Adams. We’ve done those two next step. Hopefully on Friday is Mount baker. And then Monday, if the weather holds, we’re going to go try and climb and ski off the top of Mount Rainier. I live in Colorado. We’re out traveling for three weeks and operating just, you know, quote unquote, remotely, but it’s really no different than, than how we operate every day.
We’re just in an Airbnb.
Yeah.
Samantha Riley: And you and I were discussing these. You know, 20 years ago we eat. I remember cause I’ve been in business almost 30 years now, the stress of trying to get ready to take, you know, holidays or vacation, you know, the weeks leading up to it was so intense that there was many times I went, oh, is this even worse?
When nowadays I can just pick up my laptop and pretty much head out the door and my husband and I have done it multiple times, which you and I were talking about before we even started. And it’s a beautiful segue into what we’re going to talk about today, which is setting up your business so that you can just get up and walk out so that you can automate it as the founder of actually, what are you?
Tell us a little bit about what it is you do and how you got here.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. So the I’ll give you the, what will you, in a nutshell, you can ask questions, but my father and I partnered, so we’re, we’re partners in this business to start a firm that was specifically focused around automating processes in a business that started in the marketing and sales part.
That’s where we start with everybody. But then we take that automation and business process. All the way through the five different stages that every customer goes through in a business or should go through in a perfect business, which is, and I’ll give you the background. Cause this is how we think about businesses and think this is the basis for how we’re thinking about automation.
So we have the, the first one is attract, right? You have to attract new business. That’s the hard work. That’s the creative work. That’s the marketing, that’s the advertising. That’s the content. Then the automation really kicks in at that. And it’s converting those interested people into leads and sales, and then fulfilling whatever that promise is that you said you were going to deliver when they bought something.
And then that can be services, products, whatever. And then that’s where most businesses stop. Good ones carry on and they try and delight their customers. So they have some kind of process or automation or a mix. To delight their customers and try and give them more value out of whatever it is. And that can include upsells and cross-sells to new products too.
So it’s an opportunity to increase lifetime value. And then the last one is referrals. Most people get referrals by chance. If they’re doing a good job, they get a lot of them, but very few people have a very systematic way to encourage referrals. Product-based businesses tend to do it better than service-based business.
Because it’s part of the culture, discount codes, things like that, but just the nature of systematic asking for referrals can be some of the cheapest marketing you do to get some of your highest value, easiest to work with clients. So just a little recap, there’s attract, convert, fulfill delight, refer that’s the basis.
For the processes that we look at with individuals, for the consulting of what should you automate. And then we do the implementation. So they have the technology to be automated.
Samantha Riley: Love it. Now, your business’s mobile or mobile pocket office. How did you, and you, you mentioned that you’re in business with your dad, which I find interesting.
Yeah. I, it is interesting. Could not do that. Let me just say, I could not be in business with either of my parents. How did you get to the point where you went into business with your dad and B that this was the business? Like, what’s your background that you wound up doing this business?
Sam Ovett: Yeah. So growing up, you know, our dad was an entrepreneur.
He always had his own business and did a lot of high-level business analytics and systems building kind of a sales personnel. Is what he was, but he always was looking at, okay, what’s happening in technology and making a service consulting practice out of that. And so there was kind of this natural upbringing of looking at the world from the viewpoint of an entrepreneur.
So very lucky in that way. And so my brother and I, and I say that because. Growing up. We were always doing little different things, right. Trying to like, we had little businesses here and there, no like wild successes as little kids, but like we learned about business and we had different businesses, always.
We’re always, you know, doing something that was entrepreneurial focused that combined with, we had a really strong, and I still have a really strong passion for outdoor adventure. Obviously I’m out trying to climb and ski like the tallest volcanoes. In north America, but that was, that really drew me in.
So I went and got a degree in environmental science for college on scholarships. And then I didn’t have any debt from college. It was like, I’m going to go live in the mountains, be a mountain guide and guide whitewater kayaks. And then I became a professional whitewater kayaker and was guiding in the United States and in south America a little bit.
And then was in that outdoor industry world. Got like the hunger back for, you know, doing something entrepreneurial and it was getting a little bored, frankly. I was like, it’s super fun, you know? Wow. You know, life’s a dream, but I was like, I’m bored, I’m hungry. You know? And so I was doing this and it was that.
Then I had met my now wife, uh, working on the river. And so in funnily enough, she’s in the whole world of automation now as well, but runs it for a company in the outdoor space. That’s totally separate. We, I got involved with this got really, really interested in it. And it was pretty natural because it was discussions with my dad and then decided, okay, I don’t want to be in the guiding world anymore.
That was fine after college. But like, what am I going to do? You know, what do I really want to do? And everywhere I was, I was always got involved with the sales and marketing, no matter what role I was in with the guiding, I was helping these outfits. With a bit of the sales and marketing and always had this mind for like, well, that could, you know, how can we use technology to make that easier to do, uh, which is the segue to automation.
And so this just kind of was a recurring theme. And then finally, One day was just like it was while I was working in the outdoor industry. I just, as an athlete saw so many opportunities because really what you are as an athlete is you’re part of the marketing team. So I was now working with these brands in addition to guiding people.
And I saw all these opportunities that were being missed. It’s like I was making content. So I was automating my content because I wanted to be on the river paddling, but I needed to produce the content. Yeah. Put it out on the social media channels as part of my contract. And so already I was automating things in the marketing side of that.
And I just kept seeing opportunity after opportunity, because as anybody’s probably realized, like, as soon as you get involved with any kind of tool that starts to automate things, that’s an ecosystem and a window into this world of, oh, you could do this and then you can do this and then you can do this.
Right. And so that was really exciting to me. And I had just grown up around. With our parents, both my mom and dad, but my dad specifically was entrepreneurial. And so it was just like, I kind of thought, okay, well I’m always going to do something that’s either my own or, you know, I didn’t think I was going to do something with my dad.
Honestly, that was, I did not believe that was going to happen. Yeah. That was kind of left field. You know, I figured he’d always like advise a bit and things like that and be a sounding board, but I didn’t think we’d be in business together. And so we, but then lo and behold, he was working with a bunch of corporate clients and just projects were wrapping up and he was getting a little bit bored of the real backend stuff of the business analytics that were really focused on just fulfillment.
There wasn’t any of the excitement of the sales and the marketing and the revenue generating aspect as much. Ready for a change. And he said, you know, he, we had a discussion and he was like, well, you know, you’ve got all this experience on the marketing and sales side with what you’ve done with these brands.
And as athlete, that aspect of it, I’ve got the fulfillment side of things with the history of this, you know, I’ve been doing it for however many. I can’t remember, you know, years, you know, why don’t we take there’s now some of these tools out there that are really exciting around what can be done.
Marketing and sales and the whole conversion process. That’s a segue into the rest. And so that’s how it was born. I said, you know, that sounds great. I was ready to make a transition and change out of the outdoor industry. And so we made this transition, partnered with software companies by taking their certifications, sponsoring their events.
And that is how we started the business and started getting clients for the business. And then from there. You know, we put systems in place and we have referrals that come through at and have developed relationships. So that that’s how it started. And you know, one of the big takeaways is, is partnerships to get you going with a new industry.
And it’s interesting, cause you can take someone who like my dad, who was in business for so many years, but you start down a new line of services and. There were some natural customers, one or two from his previous customers, but the reality is they weren’t looking for that. They, they already had taken care of it, or they had just a robust sales team and it just wasn’t in their interest at the moment.
And so we really started this thing together from scratch, which was really fun. You know, we had some basis much more than somebody who’s never done any of this before we weren’t new to business. I’d been involved with businesses in different way. So had he, so that was a huge. You know, leg up from nothing but starting into that new world.
I guess if I can throw in a little nugget of advice for anybody who’s looking for, it is build partnerships and go pay for partnerships because. A fast route to get up and running with things and get known, especially if you already have the skillset to make it happen, because then you can perform right away.
Samantha Riley: I love that. And it’s something I talk about so often, because partnerships is, I started multiple businesses myself, and it’s always partnerships because people power is just, so it’s the fastest route. It’s the easiest, right?
Sam Ovett: Especially with like a service, any kind of service oriented business where you’re doing consultative stuff and then implementing like any business, really partnerships are just the, I think like the most under rated marketing channel, because they’re so fast.
If you’re. Uh, huh, there, you know, it won’t work. If you’re not good, you can’t perform and you can’t do stuff, but they’re so fast and they feel slow in the moment, but they’re ultimately really fast and then go into the advertising and all the other stuff after, you know, you got something going and it’s successful
Samantha Riley: talking about people power, and I know your tagline is be human.
Otherwise automate. Is that tying into, into your partnerships or is that something different? Again, I’d love to hear more around that.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. And so the idea behind the human word accounts, that’s the whole idea here is that if you are, you know, we talk a lot about automation. That’s like the focus around here, but we always lead with that thought process because the idea is that if you have automation, you’re out of the busy work and we can talk about getting out of this, you work, where do people get started with that?
How do they even think about that? But at the end of the day, it gives you the freedom. To either do what you want with your time. But a lot of times, as a business owner, you want to continue to grow your business. Even if you have free time and you want to take the opportunities to be human, where those human touches can have a dramatic, exponential impact on the business.
Using humans, yourself or others on your team to do busy work does not change the outcome of the busy work. If it can get done in different way, it does. The customer does not care if they don’t know it doesn’t matter. Other than it’s impacting your profits probably big time. And that’s where it matters.
But where human can make a difference is like, if you have the time and you can call your customers, you can send them a personal, thank you video. Or a handwritten note and some of this can be automated to a degree, but being human in those ways and being able to address customer service issues as well in a human way, that’s the kind of stuff that has an exponential impact on growing the business and creating, you know, long-term customers and also partnerships, right?
If you’re busy doing business work, you don’t have time to develop partnerships. And those are things that feed into the lifeblood of the business. So what we want is we want people to be human, where it counts. And if I can give people a way to think about where to be human, where it counts, it’s the idea that the stuff that is either creating a delightful experience for a customer or the work that’s generating new revenue or creating partnerships that could generate new revenue.
That’s what you want to be focused on. That’s what you asked your doctor, and that’s what you want. Money for it to hire people that are really good for versus lots of people to do manual. Jasper grid work that can be automated.
Samantha Riley: I love that. You talked before about ecosystems of technology, the things that automate what I’m seeing a lot of when people start their businesses and especially in the coaching space, which is where, where I play is that
Sam Ovett: we have a decent amount of clientele in that space.
So I’m really familiar with it.
Samantha Riley: And I’m sure you see this on social media people jumping into a Facebook group and saying, Hey. What CRM do you use or what project management software do you use? And all of a sudden, and I’m not an automation specialist. However, then I get clients to me with 36 pieces of technology that don’t integrate.
Can you talk to us more about that ecosystem and. And how people should be looking at it from the beginning. And I don’t, you know, I don’t want to give away too much, but I want to hear you reverse engineering this because
Sam Ovett: I see it all the time, you know, cause we are in the technology, but we’re also in the strategic aspect of how do you think about your automation?
What does it do for you? How does it generate you more revenue or save you money? And, and so I have kind of like a tool model. So to speak that I’ve developed, because first question, hands down, people go, what tool should I use? You know, what CRM system, which this system, which marketing system, which that’s cement and the bottom line is I say like right out of the gate, I go look, tools are great.
You need the tools, but you got to think about it. Like building a house, you don’t ask the builder what tools they’re going to build your house with. First, you start with the architect and you figure out what you want it to look like. You find a builder who can execute on your vision. And then if they have the tools to make it happen, or they can give you the right tools or the right materials.
Great. That executes your vision. She got to start to take a step back and look at what do I want this architect of my business to look like? What do I want the customer journey to look like? What stuff is sucking up my time, then I need to offload forget tools. Go immediately. To a dream world. Right?
Cause I think people hesitate sometimes to like, you know, really say, oh, this is what a dream business looks like. They hesitate. They get like, they feel like they should be working more for whatever reason. I just, this like this thing. And even though they want to free up their time, the idea is that it doesn’t matter.
The tools really don’t matter. You need them, but they do not matter. And back to your point though, about people having tons of time. That are creating a bit of a mess. We see that all the time, usually in the coaching space in particular, I see this more is people get started potentially in a little bit more scrappy way, or they start with one tool because they’re building an email list.
So they’re like building that list. They start there and that’s the focus for a while until the business is really happened. Right. And successful. And then they start to get more sophisticated when we work with businesses that are outside of the coaching space that are more, what I’ll call like more traditional brick and mortar type of stuff.
They tend to have certain infrastructure just already in place. It’s kind of necessary to run in a brick and mortar operation or in a distributor type of operations where there have some products, but specifically in the coaching space, because you can get started so easily. The ones that are successful, tend to have at some point, a lot of tools that they’ve just added on to fix or create certain things that they wanted to do over time.
And so the symptom that was happening along the way, or they needed something that they wanted to do. So they found a tool that did it and they didn’t realize there are other tool also. And they had to solve it, usually in a relatively quick manner. Maybe they had a launch coming up or something like that.
And so that’s what I see. And that sounds like what you see as well and totally consistent. So one of the first things we do with people and people can do this themselves is when we have someone who comes in and says, I got a lot of stuff. We do a lot of data that we’re moving around manually because things don’t talk to each other.
Or we’re connecting it and paying a lot of money for these little pieces of middleware to move that data around. And not each time it’s not making money, you know, that’s money spent on maybe a prospect that we don’t know if this is going to close into a sale. The first thing we do is, is we step people back and we do this for everybody.
And we say, let’s make a map, big picture. What do you want your business? How does your business run? You know, what are the big bucks in your different stages then? We say, okay, let’s put that aside. We’re going to come back to that. The next thing we do is we say, let’s get a Google sheet out. Let’s open it up.
Let’s write down all the tools you use to run your business. So everything you have a login, let’s go in your login manager. Let’s go in your PayPal subscriptions. You know, everything you use to run that business over a week or two week time, period, let’s say that you have to log into to do something with, or you’re looking at let’s get them on.
Now we’ve got your 36 tools. One client had like 96, this guy’s mastering diabetes.org. They’re a very successful coaching business in the nutrition space, tons of tools. And the very first thing we did with them was say, what’s the tool? What does it do? Like what do you use it for? We figure out what you use that tool for.
Cause usually in a lot of cases, they use one of the features of it. Yeah, because they needed it. And then based on that, we go, okay, now can we consolidate these into a single tool so that we can start tracking what’s going on? So you have information about your customer journey because not only do you want to automate what you’re doing, but you’d like to be able to look at it and say, Is it effective right?
In the different stages of your process. So attract, convert, fulfill delight, refer, usually attract and convert are pretty important to understand if they’re effective also refer. And so if you can get it all organized, get your data in one spot in one tool. And we have some tools that we like for sure.
And then we partnered with, and we enjoy, but, but it’s not about the tool. So I’m not even going to name names. Cause it’s like tools don’t matter to me, but they’re important. Once we’ve understood. What is this big list of tools? What can be consolidated? What do you need to keep? What does something maybe very unique that you want to keep now in their case, in the case, mashing diabetes, you took them from 96 different tools, literally.
End to end all the way through to accounting. So we looked at their whole business and we brought their tools down to a list of like 25 that’s, including Gmail, all the different things that they use, all the different, extra little plugins, all that stuff. And now their business was way more lightweight to run way cleaner, all their data.
You know, it was a big project, but all their data was now visible and they could make decisions with it. And they also. At the end of this saving a lot of, and this was one of the core ideas is automating pieces, but also just saving a lot of time moving data around that was being done manually because like you said, tools don’t always talk or it’s very expensive to make them talk or people don’t, you know, it’s not worth the investment of the integration to make them talk because you use it occasionally.
And so first step. What’s, you know, it’s kind of like a spring cleaning we’re in this season of spring. Like it’s an opportunity to do it. I don’t know when the podcast goes out, but you know, the idea is that use it as an opportunity to look through everything it takes to run your business, the different tools and say, what can you streamline?
If you know the capability of tools, then you can do it yourself. If you don’t necessarily know, that’s where you got to bring somebody else in, that has that experience across industries and businesses and tools. That’s this first step in a lot of these cases, especially in the coaching business. And then you talk about process and automation and the two pieces of it, which is making more money with automation or saving money that you otherwise would have to.
Samantha Riley: Perfect. You talked about tracking in there in that piece. What are the kinds of things that you think that we should be tracking in our business that you know, are the absolute essentials and what types of pieces of software are they?
Sam Ovett: Okay, so there’s, there’s two categories of tracking. I would say that a really important one.
Is if you advertise, you need to be able to, and this is the exact question you have to answer. If you can’t answer this question, then you need to introduce a system and tools. It’s one specific certain tools, but if you do a lot of advertising, there’s a very specific tool we like to use. And I can, I’ll say the name of it here in just a second, but you need to be able to know exactly which advertisement made someone interested, who eventually became a customer.
So, if you look at a customer in your database, someone’s bought something and you can’t tell me which advertisement you paid money for, for that person to become interested the very first time they became interested in you and learned about you. That’s a problem. And you need to address that one because that’s how you scale your new customers and new leads coming in.
And if you can’t do that, Then you can’t grow. It’s very hard. It’s one of the key pieces. If you grow through advertising, that’s how you get business. If you have content and advertising and referrals, you know, you have to decide is your advertising a large portion of it and you’re want to invest in understanding it.
And if you do, and this is typically I wouldn’t touch this at a, at a more detailed. Unless you’re spending minimum a thousand to $2,000 a month on advertising. That’s kind of the bare minimum. Um, if you’re spending that on like paid digital advertising, then you need to be using a tool like wicked reports to do what’s called first party attribution to get all your information back.
And that also. Allows you to track everything, especially in this day and age, with all the changes going on with Facebook and apple are not going to go into that too much, but there’s changes that you now are going to really need one of these tools to be able to understand which advertisements are causing sales.
So that’s the first thing. If you run any advertising, you need to be able to tell yourself, and not me, you know, I’ll ask you the question, but you need to really be able to tell you. Which ad did that customer first click on to learn about me. Doesn’t have to be the one they bought on that’s down the line.
We need to know which one made them interested in the first place, because if you spend more money on that advertisement, you’re going to get more customers. That’s number one and not the campaign, the actual specific advertisement copy. Okay. Everything. Yep. The next piece is in the conversion component.
So that’s awareness. You’re getting people. Yeah. The next piece is in the conversion. How do you convert people? A lot of in the coach space, you know, people talk about funnels, they’ve got some kind of follow-up or funnel, or they’re just got a free training and chasing people down. But the good ones have a funnel, a they get people interested in some way with usually it’s some kind of webinar or a free training or something from an advertising or some really good content.
And then you put your email in right. We all know that you’re putting your email in a form and maybe some other contact information, and then anybody who’s good is going to follow up with you automatically. And they’re going to follow up to you, buy or die as we call it and buy or die, you know? And like you need to keep, you know, you want people to make a decision.
Are they going to work with you or are they not? And make sure you have long-term follow-up. And then at that point, what you really want to do is be able to understand. Want to improve my funnel. How do I do that? That’s most people who are successful out of the gate, they didn’t necessarily improve in front of they.
A lot of people that we work with, they just kind of lucky, you know, they made one. That was pretty good, but they don’t know. And this is a terrifying prospect of how do I improve this without taking my business as well. If I change this well, this is. Our business comes from. So that’s pretty scary concept.
Yep. And that’s where I translate some of the risk and judgment stuff we do in the app that I did in the outdoors. You know, as guiding it’s like, you gotta take a risk assessment approach and say, how do I try new things, but reduce my potential downsides and my risk. Cause I can’t take this business. And if you have a team, which I hope you’re doing well enough that you do, then you’ve got people to support and you really, you know, it’s not true.
Now, you’ve got people who rely on you and what you need to do is be able to send various amounts of traffic and just adjust it and say, this is my 75%, or even my 90% of my traffic goes down this funnel. We know how it does it converts. You know, I put that on my content. I put that on my ads. It works.
Let me play with this others 25 or 10%, whatever number you want to adjust it. And let me see if I can get these percentage rates and, um, you know, it’s not all linear, but I’m, I’m kind of drawing linear lines with my hands. Let me see if I can get this side of the funnel, a different version of the funnel to convert better first, equally, and then better than my 90%.
And let me do it at a scale. At a minimum 500 to a thousand people being put through it. So I have some scale to make some small scale, to make some decisions off of less than that. And you shouldn’t really be making decisions off of it. And so it was a question that people have is of. When we work with people, people say, well, when do I make the decision at what number of people that I’ve put through it?
You know, do I wait a certain amount of time? And it’s no, it’s, it’s like in and outside, like the dude with the lady, with the billboard spinning it. Yeah. And you know, like when a thousand cars have driven by if that’s okay and isn’t getting people in to the, you know, like grocery store or the diamond store or the carwash or whatever, your Hawkin, like on the corner there, where the sign spinner.
That’s a problem. Change the sign, do a different dance, go to a different corner with nicer cars or different cars. Yep. And so change one of the factors. So, but if you just have two cars drive by the sign, that’s not enough. Yeah. You don’t have enough data. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, put it in perspective of when you put an advertisement, you pay for one or content and views, you know, are three people looking at it or yeah.
10,000 people, you know, at that point, you probably know what you’re doing to a degree where it’s working, but are a thousand people minimum looking at this, you know, 500, you can start to feel okay about it. But a thousand people, we can make a decision on a thousand people. You can put a thousand views on something.
If we’re not getting some action of any kind, I’m going to kill it, we’re going to try something else. So that’s the next thing is that your con your conversion funnel from lead in your database, To either appointment or sale, you start with, if you do appointments and you start with that, if you do straight to a sale and the appointments, then you’d start there.
Cause you’d start to gauge the quality of the leads coming in and you’ll, you know, and then they should be selling into something at that point. But I want people to be able to automate that and then look at those numbers. What percentage is this converting it, not what numbers, because they’re going to be different, but is this converting at a higher percentage?
Over a thousand people minimum. Okay. Let’s make that the 90% because it’s then
Samantha Riley: you can that’s the kit. Yeah. I love it. You switch it.
Sam Ovett: Yeah. Then you keep playing the game of that, which is you always maintain your baseline 75%. If that gets sustained. And grow, you know, you’re happy and happy profitable with that amount of revenue coming through that channel.
I call it a versus B go with 75%. That way you can find out faster B is going to work or not, because you put more people through it with less advertising spend. And then as soon as B starts beating a. Swap them out and you just keep doing it. And now, now you’re bringing in the concepts of continuous improvement and six Sigma, which is from the process world and manufacturing.
That’s. Josh did for years and my dad. And so that idea is brought over to then your sales and marketing. How can you continuously improve without breaking your business right, without jeopardizing and putting yourself at great risk, because I see people get really excited about automate. And then they just want to automate everything and change everything.
And that’s really risky. If you have a successful business, if your business is successful, well, number one, you don’t have a business. And number two, it doesn’t matter. You know, you’re just trying stuff, nothing to break, right. There’s nothing to break, but it’s the people who have something to break and those are the people.
You’ve got something to break or you, you know, it, number one, like you could impact and tank things. And number two, you are at a point where you need to scale and you’re limited with how you do things because you can’t just keep putting more leads in the process breaks. You don’t have enough people, you don’t have enough time, blah, blah, blah.
So that’s the, I mentioned part, but as far as what you should track, it’s right there. It’s what is bringing me new business. That’s buying cause you can’t eat clicks and leads. You can eat off sales and you know, and uh, and then the other thing is that conversion process track your conversion process into leads and sales or into like appointments in sales.
And, and really then they had sales. Like that’s what matters, but appointments are usually a good indicator of that. Depending on your sales cycle. And that is at that point, what you should be tracking. And now you’ve got the ability to understand what you can spend more money on the scale-up and you also know how to improve the file you have today that risking much of your business.
You’re risking a small part, right? Because you could put a hundred percent through it works. It’s stable, it’s reliable. But if you want to try and continue to prove that. Put some of those leads to the other side.
Samantha Riley: Totally. I love what you said then. It’s so clever. What I’d love you
Sam Ovett: to do. It’s simple. Like it’s pretty simple, you know, it’s, it’s a lot of work sometimes to do it, but like, It’s pretty simple philosophy and methodology of how to approach those two things.
Samantha Riley: So what I’d love you to do is share a case study that comes to mind of someone in the coaching space that you helped to fix this process for them. But specifically, I’d love you to talk about the convert phase because a lot of things. And I don’t know if you hear this. A lot of people say that they need more traffic.
And what I find is that most times it’s not actually a traffic problem, it’s a conversion problem. So I’d love you to share a case study with a coach that, that you helped fix this conversion problem. Yeah,
Sam Ovett: no, that’s a good one. Let me think who would be a good example? And he did a bunch of different interests.
No, no. I mean, I can, our customers, these are pretty cool. So they let us mention their names so that, you know, if they don’t, I won’t mention it, but we had, there’s two that come to mind right out of the gate. One is, is this company mastering diabetes, for sure. A lot of their staff, because they’ve let us share a lot of it.
And then this other is this company, Como consulting who runs it. Practice for tutoring students to digital program that actually out of Canada. And they I’d like to talk about theirs because I think there’s a really cool opportunity that a lot of people miss, especially in the coaching business, because I know a lot of coaches while they dream about having a course, a lot of them don’t right.
They have, or they have a course, but it demands their time. And that’s what I’m gonna talk about because that’s the limitation that people have. And it’s a good thing to think about. So with Como consulting, she had ads that went to a webinar and she had, she was, it was working, she was converting business, but she had no idea the percentages.
She had no AB test to actually say, look, this side, does this decided that she just had one photo for it? And it worked really well. It was working great, but she had no methodology to make it even better. Right. She was meeting the market really well. It was in the middle of COVID that we just saw her just take off.
And she came to us because people needed to do stuff online with their students, especially they needed some kind of digital tutoring. Right. Cause kids are at home, there’s really struggling. So she just was starting to blow up. And the gentleman we worked with who was doing the advertising was really good at placing the message in front of the market.
They didn’t know what she thinks, which ads were driving the sales, right? The advertising to revenue was profitable, including all their expenses and they were blowing up. So that was a case of this doesn’t really matter right now because they’re making a lot of money, but then they needed more staff and they needed to become more profitable as they scaled because they were also hiring more tutors to do this.
And then it started to matter, you know, because you wanted to pay attention to what they were, you know, which, you know, there was the potential to save. Like, you know, if 5% of the ads were doing all the work, then we can save 20 grand or put that 20 grand towards the 5% that are really doing the work in the audience.
That’s really working for us and their situation. And so that was one aspect of it. And with her conversion, she was a business owner. Mostly work with the business owner, with her conversion. She didn’t know. Right. Which ad, and she didn’t know, she didn’t want to touch that funnel. It was an ad to a webinar.
People opted in, there was 11 emails that followed up for 11 days, but that was like, oh God, don’t touch that thing. It works. But if we touch it, it could blow up because we have no idea why it works. We have no idea why they convert, you know, so we have no opportunities. So the first thing we did right away is let’s.
Actually with her, the first thing we did is relieved a little bit of stuff off her plate cause it was working and she was just overwhelmed with tasks. We did some tasks where, and its staff cleaned it up automation perspective. She that gave her literally time to like, think about other things and also gave her time teams some time to think about other things.
People were getting overloaded at that point. And so the next step was okay, let’s get some tracking in place for those two things. What adds cost sales sales cycle was short enough. We’re finding out in a, within a two week period. Right. And then the second part was let’s understand before we change anything.
We’re not even going to bother in this case with a second and B yet, let’s find out what AA does. Where did they convert in a, you know, you got 11 emails after this webinar. Is it on the 11th when they all convert? Is it on the first one? Is it mixed? Is it kind of across the board? Boom. We put the tracking in place.
We found. That it is emails, zero, that books, the bulk of the sales calls. Wow. So like right away, right. The first one that goes out to promote the webinar, they’re buying almost everybody right near the end of the webinar. And then after that, they’ve either bought and I mean, this is impactful. Follow-up, there’s a little bit of trickle sales, that account for significant revenue that are important to have.
And over time that is. Accounting for tens of thousands of dollars of revenue over a period of months. So it’s still matters, but the bulk of the revenue. Boom’s like right away. So that means number one, you know, this is meeting the message, but what about all these other leads who don’t buy? Why is that?
What can you do with them? And this is where the big opportunity was for her in the conversion, because it’s not just about converting on your own offer. It’s she had a thing that was time intensive. You signed up 10 weeks, you’re working with someone there’s an online component that you’re logging in.
You’re doing a core lesson, and then you’re working with a tutor. You know, you’re having these costs. That doesn’t that sort of scales. You got to hire more people, right? That’s more resources. So what I like to do with people and what Josh, but yeah, and this is partly like to do with people is one of the cool opportunities is not only to track and automate, but to say, where is an opportunity for revenue?
Right? We just found out that the majority of people who are going to buy based on the current offer, they buy right away that tells me in their situation. A pressing issue. And if it’s not a pressing issue, either don’t have the money. Cause it’s expensive in her case. It’s like, what is it like $2,000?
You know, it’s high end personal tutoring. What about all the people who want to help the children, but don’t have that money to do it right. They find out about it. Well, we took the program. And said, let’s take this, package it up in a way that’s automated delivery, but there’s no personal component. You know, you’re not meeting with someone on a video call at a scheduled interval.
You’re doing it yourself. There’s still value in the program. Your child can still get help. Is it going to be as good? No, it’s not going to be as powerful, but if you want to get it and they want to go through it, then you have the opportunity, right. Just like anything. Right. You know, you work with one other wireless, somebody.
They’re accountable. That’s going to be a better experience generally, but you might have someone who’s motivated enough to do it that way. And you can try. So from a business perspective, we said, let’s make this a DIY, you know, do it yourself, but dripped out and encourage you to use it. So let’s put automation in place to encourage you to use it 1500 bucks, per course, that number of people who are buying after the $0 email went up, they weren’t buying the big package.
They were buying. The lower price package, but she also didn’t have to do any work for it once it was sold. So all delivered by a computer, totally automated. So there’s a really cool opportunity. And then now we’re at the phase where we’re adding in the B side and play some more and seeing where can we, you know, can we improve this whole experience even more?
But that is. I think the majority of coaches, if they have anything recorded on video, that they deliver have an opportunity. You know, if you only sell a few extra, that’s great. You know, if it takes off, that’s even better, but you’re still making money. And generally it’s not that much work on the coach to do it.
You know, you’re already making all kinds of content and stuff. I see typically in this space. So you’re good at. So why not give yourself an opportunity to make some more money and just put it in your funnel as your down sell. But if you don’t know your funnel curves, well, then you’re going to confuse the message, right?
You might sell more of the people that would about the higher ticket offer. We knew high ticket offer. It was sold like within the first email is amazing. This was a unique situation. Usually, you know, it’s like the first few and then it trickles down, but this was like, bam, right away. It was crazy. But we found out, well, you know, the rest of these emails, aren’t making that much money.
Over the long run they can, but they could make a lot more potentially. So let’s play with them there because if we play with them beyond this point, we know that the bulk of your revenue comes from up here. You’re comfortable with that. It’s profitable for you. So now we can play with the messaging and specifically we can give you the tools to look at it and play with the messaging and build you out of the content.
You already have an automated delivery vehicle for a course that makes money for you. And now. Well, she loves the coaching aspect of the business and she is now out of it and only does occasional case, but she’s not running the business. She’s hired and trained, you know, qualified people to actually staff and tutor.
She had loved to just sell a bunch of the DIY ones.
Samantha Riley: Well, not only is this model, meaning that you get more sales, but as coaches, you know, a lot of us do what we want because they want to help more people. So this is also so much tax, you know, we’re getting our message out to so many more people. So I just love that.
And I think that there’s so much opportunity. For, for every person that’s listening really to start to think, where could we potentially get more sales by automating so that we can create a bigger impact? You know, I think that’s really, it’s a great conversation to have and to start working through that yourself.
Sam Ovett: And if you have sold, you know, let’s say 10 of an offer that you deliver yourself, right. You have to show up or somebody has got to show up for this. I’d say that’s kind of probably the baseline to know if it’s going to be sellable, but if you sold 10 of them, you can probably, you have some kind of market match in your audience that if you offered something that was DIY would be totally, totally people, you know, play in that DIY space and they fail continuously.
Cause I see that as well. Because they’ve never actually done something. That’s met the market and worked. So, you know, do something live, sell it 10 times if that works and people are coming out of their psyched, make the DIY offer because that is, you figured out it’s going to work with the market now automate it, sell for like slightly less than your flagship with you make your time very expensive.
Yeah. You sell these others because you can sell that at scale. You don’t get your time back, you know, and that is, and then go and try and travel while you’re doing business. If you don’t believe that, you know, and do stuff with your family or your loved one or your significant other, and if you feel like you don’t have time to do that stuff, that’s like a good reminder that you need to like, do stuff to get out of your business in a way that you can live your life.
I mean, some people that’s all they want to do and that’s fine, but like, You know, life’s short and then you die. And so, and business is fun. But at the end of the day, like if you don’t have the flexibility to choose, I want to do focus on my business. Or I want to spend some time with my loved ones and do like, I want to go ski, volcanoes, you know?
So it was my wife and my brother, and like that’s important to me. And so I want to, you know, make sure that I’m doing things in a way that are set up. To allow that time to happen tightly.
Samantha Riley: And it was a beautiful
Sam Ovett: way. That’s cliche, of course, but it’s so true because like it’s not cliche, is that like you do eventually you die.
It’s over, you know, We’re all careening towards the edge of, you know, whenever we die. So like, you know, get this stuff fun along the way. Right? That’s my
Samantha Riley: theory. I’m with you on that one. Definitely. Right. Theory, Sam you’ve shared so much today. That’s been really valuable for the people that are listening that would like to stay connected with you.
Happy to do that.
Sam Ovett: It’s the best way to do it is just go to a mobile pocket office doc. People joke, you know, when they start working with this, they forget the name a little bit, and they see that sometimes they say pocket protectors, you know, whatever you want to call it. So there’s a little memorable thing, but mobile pocket office.com and we are, you know, you can book a call with us there, but also where we’re posting different things and sharing information.
And so that’s the best way. We’re always trying to share different stuff. It gives people something useful to go use, but don’t wait, you know, you, we’re happy to work with you, but you know, you also have to be at a certain level to work with us and have some real problems that you’re trying to work through.
And, and don’t hesitate to like, get started with this stuff. There’s not, you don’t need a specific date. Go ahead and do it, you know, and if you can get, try and get yourself an hour or two back a week at a time, Start there. And before, you know, it you’ll be figuring out ways to automate things and then you’ll grow to a point where it’s potentially challenging and confusing.
And then that’s when you come to us.
Samantha Riley: Totally, totally. And if you want some inspiration on, uh, traveling around and seeing people skiing,
Sam Ovett: that’s just Sam Ovett on Facebook or Instagram, you know, that’s just all personal notes. Yeah. Yeah on LinkedIn. I post ski videos too, but I have some usual business message with it.
Samantha Riley: That’s so good. And of course we’ll put all of those links in the show notes. Sam, thanks so much for chatting with me today and sharing so much value. It’s been an absolute pleasure to hang out with you today. Today’s episode may be over, but let’s continue the conversation head on over to the thought leaders, business lab, community on Facebook and connect with other entrepreneurs who are building and scaling their business to see you next time in the thought leaders business lab. .
MENTIONED IN THE PODCAST:
Link to Masteringdiabetes.org and video 👇
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Here’s the problem: You are manually doing everything in your business. And have no idea where to where to start or how to start automating. Finally, you want to be working ON your business not IN your business.
Here’s the solution: Understand what your process looks like to acquire a customer. By making a map of each and every step a customer takes in your funnel. Then reduce any mistakes they can make when entering information.
Easier said than done. Traditionally this is called Business Process Engineering and we at Mobile Pocket Office have taken this concept along with Six Sigma and LEAN manufacturing concepts concepts to improve a business … aka be human where it counts, otherwise automate!
Just because your business is still afloat, doesn’t mean it isn’t taking on water. But you probably already know this, and that’s why you are here. Identifying that there is a gap between where you are and where you want to be is the first step, but what are the next steps? Mobile Pocket Office is leading the way in helping new and established businesses augment their human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity.
