135: Live Coaching Call: Insights from Wendy Lieber

All right, if you're really trying to.

Scale up 10x100x, some global sort of big, hairy, audacious goal, then the scaling up framework is great for that. But what does a coach provide? What are the insights in the beginning of a coaching relationship? I often have conversations with people about what are some approaches and tools that they'd want to do next. And that's what this episode of the show is. It's a live call with someone who is trying to 10x the business in the next 18 months.

So listen in and hear what their might be of value for you. Hello, welcome to the Scaling of Business podcast. This is a special episode of kind of an experiment. We're doing some live coaching. So welcome to the show, Wendy.

Thank you, Bill.

All right, so I'm not going to introduce Wendy like I would a normal guest, but I'm going to instead use questions, that kind of thing. We're going to look like as a. I was talking to a brand new kind of coaching client, distinct from our team coaching, but like that. So Wendy is from South Florida and your company is Content Bacon.

It is.

Awesome. So thanks for doing this and experimenting with me in this way. Tell me about the business, Give me the background.

Content Bacon is an inbound marketing service. So we help companies tell their story through digital content with a subscription model. So our customers, depending on their goals and needs, sign up for one of our subscriptions, which usually includes a certain amount of blog or article content, email content, social media, and then there's a range of various things and they sign up for it and our team goes to work and delivers it consistently on a monthly basis.

So inbound marketing. Right. I want to generate leads in. And one of the ways to do that is to generate a lot of content that creates inquiry, discussion, establishes you as a presence, a leader out there. Right?

Yeah. I mean, we really advocate for kind of the inbound marketing funnel. So top of the funnel, you know, awareness, you know, which can be measured in traffic. Middle of the funnel leads people raising their hand, saying, hey, I want more information. And then bottom of the funnel, converting those leads to customers, referrals, advocates, et cetera.

Right. I could probably have you critique all night since I produce a blog and post and do the podcast.

We love doing that.

Yes. Let's talk about you. Right. Well, first of all, the big thing, Right. What's the big goal? What do you want to accomplish?

Yeah. So we're finally at a point where really over the next 18 months, you know, we are looking to grow 10 times and we're ready to do that. You know, we've been. We started the company in the fall of 2014 and really kind of officially started more of the spring of 2015 and have been having really nice growth. But we've also been very careful in making sure we've got the infrastructure to support bigger growth. And so I say we're there. I mean, we're still putting pieces together to be there, but all in support of being able to scale and scale rapidly, but not at the expense of quality and really doing what we love doing, which is help tell our customer story in a very powerful way.

You've been investing in creating something that could scale from an operational or capacity standpoint. And now you want to 10x. 10x is it?

Yes.

In how, what period of time?

18 months or less.

All right, so that's like rapid, right? My clients who have doubled or more than doubled over the last year, it's not all of them. The average is a little over 50%. But like it really feels like something when we do that. So to go 10x in a couple years is cool. Right? So let's. What makes you think you can do that? What is it about your strategy or what you're going to do? Or do you even know that yet? Is that just a goal?

I think we know. So a couple things we've really been working on building our infrastructure. We use different systems and tools and resources. Right now we've kind of figured out what, like the next level of that. So now we're investing and taking what we're using today and customizing it to fit our needs. So a lot of what holds us back today or potentially holds us back is we're still using systems. There's a lot of moving pieces and parts to what we do today. So there's a lot of as we grow, if we don't have the people resources to support that growth, it's very challenging. And so we've been working on automation and what tools and resources can replace certain aspects of the process which really then make the process better because you're not relying on human beings or you're using tools. That's really, I think the biggest factor is that we finally got to a point where we found the right partner to help us with this software. We have the resources to invest in that. And so we're about to launch the first version of it, the mvp, which will be internal facing. And they'll be and external facing part 2.

So the MVP, the minimum viable product of the production or of the marketing.

Engine, the production piece. Okay, yeah, the production piece.

So you've worked on creating that, but what is it that makes you believe that you can get your growth, your top line growth?

Yes. So we, again, we've really worked on refining our marketing, our sales process, building the machine. We've invested in additional salespeople. So for the first couple years, my partner and I were really, you know, who were, you know, growing the business. And so now we've got other people that can do that, and we're seeing that really come to fruition. And so we feel confident that the top line piece, dare I say it's going to be easy, but that that piece feels the most right now. It's really that once we bring in our customers, it's really the production piece that's been the stumbling block.

Okay, so you feel like your main challenge is going to be you've been working on, and you feel like the main challenge is going to be actually producing the work, Delivering the work performance.

Correct. Without continuing to just add human bodies to do that. So. Yes.

And what rate are you growing at right now?

About 40, 40% year over year.

Okay, so you're 40% year over year for a couple of years running?

Yeah, I think we had higher growth. I mean. Yes. An average of between 40 to 60% each year.

And you see or feel like if you just add some gas or energy to that, you can get it to the 10x thing.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably going to be some other things that we have to mix and mix in there that we don't know, but there's been a couple of things.

You have a plan?

Yeah. One of our biggest achievements this past year was we increased our average monthly recurring revenue from $1,500 a month up to $2,500 a month. And that continues to increase. So that's also been a big factor in our growth, is increasing the average MRR as well as, you know, just additional, you know, customers and the rate of growth with customers and the rate of inbound leads that we were getting from our own efforts. You know, we take our own medicine.

So your MRR is 2,500amonth right now?

The average MRR is $2,500 a month.

Per client or for the company?

Per customer.

Oh, got it, got it, got it.

Got it, got it, got it. Per customer? Yeah.

That doesn't matter. I'm a much bigger business. Yeah, got it. Okay, good. So you've got, so I hear a business model there and I hear a marketing engine there. And you've been working on the automation and the other things. Let's just check in on the people for a minute. What's so about your team? How many leaders on the team? What's the total team size? Like that?

Yeah. So our internal team, we have 10 full time people and then we have kind of a nice pool of contractors, freelancers that really feel like part of our team. But we have about 30 freelancers, contractors that we use. But our core team is 10 people. That's also definitely been an area of focus this past year. We realized that the team we kind of started out with, team that got us here, wasn't going to get us there. We truly realized we had to start investing more in our team and higher, you know, higher level people and you know, it's kind of funny this time last year if you would have told me, you know, the kind of salaries we would have to pay, I'd be like, there's just no way. And we just did it and it, you know, it makes sense and it works. And so, you know, I really felt like we ended 2018 with, I mean we still have a few open spots but you know, with our, with our.

Dream team, well, given the market for labor in the US this year, that's really great. Right. So good job.

Thank you.

So getting the business model dialed in and feeling like you've got that and then going through the difficult process of starting to pay more and take the leap of faith that if we pay more, we're going to get a different caliber person. I think we see again and again there are quite a few examples of companies that pay really above average, but they're also highly discriminating. The kind of people they get in the results, that's great too. And then what about the. Before we go into the execution, which is where it sounds like you feel the most challenge, where are you at in terms of the gross profit and the cash production of the business? Yeah. Can you fund the growth internally or do you need to raise money?

No, at this point we can fund the growth internally and we, we've got nice profit margins, we've been stashing some cash so we feel like we can fund the growth at this point.

Okay, and did you run a cash model with your 10x over 18 month gross to see does it continue to self fund?

Yeah, I haven't done that. That's not my biggest area of strength.

Not most of us. Right.

Some of those things that seem like basic questions like though I would I've done that yet.

So I was going for a very large growth with a prior company once and I had our consulting CFO come in and do that. I said, okay, this is what I envision. And then he sat there and built out with me the cash plan. And he said, okay, well, let's plug in what you think you could sell, you know, ideally. And then he plugged in how quickly we got paid. Right. So we had certain aging and we had. And it was different for different categories of our customer base. So we. A little bit more complex sales model was needed and then we plugged in the production. When would that be done? When would you have to pay for different things?

Yeah.

And then the base costs of operating the business and ramping those up. So we put all of that into this cash model based on the actual experience of the timing of things. And we saw that it didn't work.

Yeah, yeah.

So what we had to do was tweak a little bit. So we went to work on getting better term. I mean, well, we could have raised money, right. Or we could have just used a line or something like that and maybe it would be big enough. So then we would test like how deep we were into the line and did we clear it out instead? What we did is we went using that customer funded business model and we took a big group of customers and we got paid earlier on those. And then we also got. We shopped around our sourcing to a few people and we got better terms and we ended up making it so that it could fund itself.

I definitely would be interested in going through that exercise.

Yeah. So you want to probably do that. And that is really like, it's modeling it out. And if you're not that kind of background, your CFO controller, Greg Crabtree, does it. I've got a local guy in the Bay Area who does a good job with this. So a specialist can help build that model for you and see can we get it. But getting to that place. And then of course, some of the standard tools that we use, like Power of One are helpful at optimizing. What they don't do is model the future. So we want to create a specific plan for that. Right. So it's not that hard to do. You can build this model with the 10x future that you envision and see where does it break. And then you can get way ahead of the curve. Now, do you run a rolling cash projection?

Yes. Yes.

Okay. How far out in advance do you use? You do.

I mean, we don't go that far out. I mean we're usually looking, you know, 30 days, 60 days. So I guess one of the things, the, you know, the things in our business, because we're a subscription based model and our customers sign up and they put a credit card on file. So maybe. Yeah, I mean that's, it's good. But I think in some cases it's maybe caused me to be a little bit, you know, you know, not do as far out as I probably should be doing. So I say that out loud, 60 days, it doesn't sound like that's really the right amount.

So I have worked with a number of companies where they were in a good cash position for a very long time and they were accustomed to keeping substantial cash reserves in the bank and funding things, sometimes funding their own insurance and things like that. So well run cash businesses. But then we went for these big like double, quadruple, 5x type growth periods and then things started to break down or they went in and they tapped some of that stuff for key investment. We're going to build a new production facility or we're going to buy a building or we're going to do some things like that. And then the traditionally conservative things started to break. So building a cash projection that runs say six months out and you keep it live with the current thing and you update that every week ought to be part of your practices when you go into a 10x growth period. So the cash plan and then the actual cash report that projects it out for you, those are two. And they're not that hard to do if you've got some good accounting support.

Sure.

Just a new practice, right?

Yeah, definitely.

Okay, let's go on to then the production, the execution side. So I know you're already somewhat familiar with the scaling up framework and all that. What are you doing in terms of our basics? Are you doing like an annual plan, quarterly plan, updates, that kind of thing?

Yeah, so we, we do an annual plan. We do quarterly, you know, planning sessions. We actually have our kickoff next week.

Okay, good. Do you have a coach?

We don't have a coach that's helping us with that. Yeah, I mean we've brought in coaches at different times, but we haven't been using one specifically recently. But we, so we're, we have like different people facilitating different, different aspects of that. You know, we do, you know, we have our meeting rhythms down, you know, the daily huddle. We call our weekly, the weekly sizzle. So yeah, so we've got, we've got those things. We have, I mean all of these things, you know, could be tightened up at our.

Do you use software.

Or for the.

Tracking of the overall business plan and the execution?

No, we don't.

Okay.

We kind of pull together dashboards using different pieces of software we use for other things. So we use a lot of Google sheets.

Yes. Okay, good. That's fine. And then do you use whiteboards?

Oh, yeah.

Okay. How many people on the team did you say?

10, but our team is. Even though we have an office here in Davie, Florida and we have, you know, some people based in our office here, for the most part we're remote. Even some of our local people here work remotely. So everyone's not in one location.

Oh, really good. So I recommend that you look strongly at a couple of the software tools. Two that are really cost effective are aligned today. The official one of our thing and the Metronome Growth Systems Metronome software, which are both purpose built tools for the scaling up framework. And in that you build your one page plan, you build your quarterly priorities, you can run your weekly meeting and you can even use it for your daily huddles. Most of my teams do use it just for the weekly and then they'll also use it for one on one reviews of team members to look at their scorecard. So look at the scorecard in there and look at the metrics and so on. So it's a purpose built tool for both of those. I currently have more people in the Metronome software, but I've used both a lot. And then there's a handful of others that are a little more expensive but offer different features that are available as well.

Okay.

They're all spinoffs of our work, but with remote team members and going for this 10x kind of future, it's worth thinking about 10, 20 bucks a month per user to get a comprehensive plan and great visibility. So that dashboard now moves online. Now things like daily huddle and other kinds of metrics are really great. I think on whiteboard type boards and if you have remote people dialing in, you can put say a camera focused on the board for some part of the meeting or that kind of thing. There's something valuable about touching it on a board like that and having teams interact with the data in that way. But having a primary vehicle like the software can make a real difference. Okay, thank you. Yeah. And it's not a big investment.

It is.

A lot of teams struggle with it though, and they struggle with it, I think in terms of embracing a new tool and developing a new habit. So There is a certain discipline around going and entering it and updating and so on. But you can run the meeting in there and build the agendas and that kind of thing.

I like it.

Yeah. So it'll make your life easier and bring the chaos of like Google sheets and things like that. There's a little, I mean, it's cheaper, but at this point that's worthwhile.

I agree.

And then the other thing. So about the coach thing, if after this or later thing you'd like a rec, I can make some introductions to a coach in your area as you go through a big growth period. It sounds like you're doing an awful lot of things well and you've been a good student and applied them. But the coach will sometimes see things that you didn't see and didn't understand. And all the coaches are a little bit different. But we have a couple hundred in our world and I'm happy to suggest somebody in your neighborhood that.

Yeah, Jen Berkowitz is in my forum and she's a coach.

Awesome. Okay, good. Right. So having. Well, but I, you know, I have actually coached people on my own form.

No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have her. We have a, you know.

Right. Have somebody else do it that has a little, also some detachment and whose voice is somebody that, like you, you love their style, you're willing to listen to them. It's not that they don't know your business. They know the framework and they'll see things. Right. So, okay, so you have good meeting rhythms. You have a little bit of a dashboard now and you do a planning sequence. How many days do you spend for your annual and your quarterly?

So we don't really have a distinction between annual and quarterly. We're just always doing quarterlies. Right now it's two and a half days.

Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. So I've changed over time, but I try to do two day quarterly and a three day annual. And it's useful. I mean we run our businesses in years and things like that. What's useful, I think about the tying the quarterly to an annual plan and maybe distinguishing between the two is getting that longer term view. Right. You're now going for a 10x future thinking about what does the company look like three years from now, creating a clear picture and all the metrics and then a roadmap to work on that. Now every quarter things change. Right. You have all sorts of intentions about how it's going to go. And then there's how it actually goes.

Yeah.

Which is totally Different.

I think what, what we've been doing, which is my partner and I have been doing the annual and then we kind of then, you know, roll the quarterly then rolls into that. So we haven't to date brought the whole team in for the. The annual.

Well, given what you're up to, your team is still a little small.

Yeah.

When you go for. So it'd be good to envision 10x do like a 3 year vision beyond the next 18 months that you anticipate and you could use. I just re released Brian Scudamore talking about his painted picture to make it really rich, especially between partners. But imagine. So what does the leadership team look like in three years or on that team with a 10x kind of future like that? I'm guessing that you're going to need about six or seven people on your leadership team by the end of this period. So when would you slot those people in? What would that look like? Right. And how will some of your process change? Will your tools need to change over that? What point will you upgrade your accounting system like that? So all of the different things that go into it. Right.

Yeah. I just started redoing my painted picture because we had done one in 2014, early 2015 and. And then we created a visual out of it and we've used that but the time.

Right. Some people like all words. Brian likes more of all words. I actually like to create a kind of a visual because I'm super visual. So I turn my annual and my three year into a collage and I keep it up around my office and my home and it's very like. It's just really subtle. I don't have to read anything. It just registers on me all the time. Oh, I said this year was going to include that. Right. So like a year ago I put surfing on my thing and I've been surfing all year and I'm starting to feel like I don't suck so much.

Right, that's great.

So that, that it bears some updating now. And I think you really want to look carefully at this 10x future. The business, the people, the systems, the structure will look different. Right?

Yeah.

Now you're planning to scale with a lot of outside contributors, right? Remote contractor type folks.

Yes.

Yeah. So you've built the systems to coordinate their work?

Yes, yes, we have. We have really good systems around that. And then our editing team is all in house. So you know, our writing team by design, we wanted to have lots of writers that we could add breadth and depth. But our editing team is all in house, and then they manage the writers.

Now, have you done. Have you identified your core processes, map those things out, applied lean to those, and metrics to those.

So we've done some of that. We've certainly defined our core processes and we've mapped them all out, or at least a good chunk of them. But we've not applied lean or we have applied some metrics like we have. One of our key metrics is average editing time. So we have quite a few metrics that we look at on a weekly basis that give us indicators of what may be happening, right or wrong. But we have not done that to every process. That sounds like a worthy endeavor.

So in the book and in the tools, we talk about the pace or process accountability. Right. And that exercise. So identify the top processes that cross departments, cross functions where there's handoffs to them. Right. And then name those, establish an owner for those. And then I would say two primary metrics. You could have additional metrics, but two primary, that counterbalance. So we're tracking how well this does. But then could this throw us off or how could this go wrong? And that is the other thing that we might track, especially in. So if I'm driving the efficiency of my labor, I might want to look at the labor retention or the happiness of them, or I might want to look at errors or that kind of thing. So something where I think, like, if I'm really optimizing this one, how could that go wrong? And then measure something else that keeps it in check so that it doesn't scrub, especially as you scale. Right. At one point, I was, this is a multimillion dollar mistake, right? This big tuition moment here I was really tracking a whole range of sales orders and had implemented a new or first ERP system. Right. And as we were scaling up significantly and I took for granted production, but now we're ramping up and we've got new suppliers and new staff and things like that. And the long and short of it is the production and purchasing folks misread the demand numbers in the system because people are using a new ERP system and they ordered things that I wouldn't need for 10 years.

Oh, wow.

So that's millions of dollars of cash tied up in my world. Right?

Yeah.

That's a valuable, painful lesson. Right. It cost me millions of dollars. And that's the key thing to do. Identify the processes, have an owner, and the last piece of it is like mapping them out and continually tweaking those processes, asking yourself, is this one working? Especially all right, so is there anything we didn't cover that you'd love to cover? You're like, I really have this challenge. You didn't address this?

No. I mean, you gave me so much to think about and things that I'm not doing that if I really want this to be reality, I've got to do. So this was super useful for me.

Awesome. Let me give you one last thing that I noticed in experience with coaching folks, and I certainly noticed it myself, and as I started to coach others, that comes true again and again. And that especially as you go for growth, the you have the company you deserve right now. The company that you have right now is a complete match for who you are and how you've been operating. So as the company grows, you want to keep developing yourself as a leader, keep shifting your approach. So as you have more people, become more of a coaching leader, teach people. Right. Think about. Did you ever read the Gerber's E Myth?

Oh, sure.

Right. So think about how do I. What role am I playing? And how do I evolve the role that I'm playing over time? What's the gap now for me? Where do I need to level up myself as I level up the company so that you keep it working?

No, that's great. Great feedback.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for letting me probe in and around your company a little bit and understand and hopefully it's given you some food for thought and some key areas to drill in on. So the cash plan, the software and processes. Processes. Right. And then behind everything, developing yourself and the journey.

Absolutely.

Awesome.

This was great.

Bill, keep us posted. Tell me how it's going and that kind of thing. If there's anything I could do or recommend or connect you with this, please let me know. I will.

Thank you.

Well, we'd really love some feedback on this show. If you like this and want to hear more of this, or if you know somebody that would like to be on a live coaching call like this, we'd really love to hear more before.

We try and do too many more.

Of these, so drop us a note info scalingcoach.com and tell us what you think about live coaching on a podcast. I want to give special thanks to our original growth guru, Verne Harnish. The show is produced by Crystal Carson with audio production by Podfly Productions. Our audio editing is done by Albert Burge and show notes are compiled by Images Codena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of the show, please share it and with somebody else and let us know the parts that you love with an email to info scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening and keep scaling up.

Sa.