192: George Papazov — Start Small and Keep Scaling Up!

All right, this episode is about an early stage company that discovered the Rockefeller habits and scaling up from their entrepreneurial spouse and then began to apply them to a new business. Quit their day job, went and started this new business, grew it in a couple years, threw a million in sales. And so they're very early stage. But whether you're a large company or small company, I think you may hear some things in an example of another. So listen in as this early stage entrepreneur talks about using scaling up to get through the first million in sales. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and your friendly neighborhood scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. So welcome to the show, George Popazov.

Hey there Bill. Thanks so much for having me on board. Really excited to talk to you in the scaling community.

Yeah, listeners, George is an early stage company and he's become a fan of the Rockefeller habits and scaling up and he some of the parts of it he's very passionate about. So we thought we'd have him on. George is the founder of a business, Trade Pro. He, he worked in bank and then he did some trading and then he started Trade Pro Academy, which is a business designed to help people learn how to trade. And he's been applying this, these tools early on. So a lot of times we work with scaling up companies later in their stage after they have 100 employees or 50 employees. And George started early though, he started applying the things early on and I thought it made an interesting story for some of our listeners who have small companies or just getting started on their own is a great topic and if you have a bigger company too. Right. This is a, a place to learn. Sometimes there are things that you've stepped over or missed along the way. So I'm glad to have you on the show.

Thank you so much, Bill. Really excited to talk about how we've implemented the scaling up framework in our own business and personally.

So the business for our listeners, your business, Trade Pro Academy is an online learning community for traders to get better at, develop themselves as traders. Right. To learn certain things. We want to talk about the growth and development of that business. So let's start off with the beginning. Right. How did you get into this business and, and where, when did you discover Rockefeller habits and Scaling Up?

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, where I got started with it, it's a pretty long journey. So I'll kind of summarize it pretty briefly. When I first started Trey Pro Academy was in 2012, but everything leading up to that is probably the important part. The Story. You know, we always wonder about a business, what's the story behind it? I started trading at Scotiabank. It's one of the big banks here in Canada. After having an education, I graduated school and I was really passionate about trading. And I kind of figured, let me make this into a career and join a company that's already doing it. I joined on the desk on customer service, worked my way up to become a trader. And really the inspiration for this business comes from a little bit of a dark place. I remember being on the desk in 2009 when, you know, a lot of traders and investors primarily lost a lot of money. So I was taking phone calls from people who had portfolios who were suffering massive losses and call after call, you know, it was very psychologically draining and emotionally I heard some pretty dark times. And during that time, as well as writing a blog, if you will, the early stages of what became Trade Pro. And I'd mentioned a lot of stuff in there as to how the housing bubble is getting a little extended. No one ever wants to be a doomsday caller, but there were a lot of signs. And seeing what was happening in my 9 to 5 job and then what I was doing after work on the blog, you know, it felt like I had to help these people. I felt like I let down a lot of people. And so the calling for me to join or Star Traper Academy was more behind the fact of, look, these days we're doing everything self directed, so why not make investing something that we do for ourselves as well? And manage your own money. Yeah. And then when the business started, at first, you know, I had this wild passion to help people. So I worked long hours to create the content and you know, countless days really going full force creating these content slides. And then I launched it and nothing happened. No one knocked on the door. So I know a lot of your listeners.

We built it. Why didn't they come?

Yeah, exactly. Where are the people? I expected a lineup, nothing. Not even a tumbleweed blowing by the front doorstep. So that's when I started to wonder. Look, you know, it's good that you have a good intention, good product, a passion for it, but how can we really scale this up? How do we turn this into a viable business? And that's when I started to really do some research both for myself and business growth strategy. I went through a lot of different stuff, a lot of fluff out there, as you guys know. Obviously all the listeners. And the one thing that really caught my eye, my wife at the time, well, currently My fiance at the time, now my wife, she hears this, she's probably going to get in trouble. But she was reading the book the Rockefeller Habits, and I kind of looked over her shoulder and I was like, hey, this looks interesting. And then I eventually ended up picking up the actual scaling up the hardcover book here and really wrote my first strategy based on this book for how I'm gonna take the business to the next level. This really was the first introduction for me to organize my thoughts on paper, because as business owners, we really wanna make an impact. We have a passion, we have a love and joy, but it's that one pager, that purpose, that really pushes you, you know, that that's lacking for a lot of people, myself included at the time. Right. So I picked up the book. One thing that had the most impact on me, Bill, is, is the seven strata, that one pager.

Yeah.

And being able to really take a wide variety of thoughts and strategies and ideas because, you know, I always ask traders and my friends, what are you good at starting or finishing things? And I find most people answer starting things. So I'd started a lot of different ideas courses. I was like, you know, I gotta finish something and create a final product. So with the seven strata allowed me to put together a crystal clear focus and vision on it, and that was kind of my guiding light. I put that together in December of 2018 for the 2019 fiscal year. At the time, we'd done about 200,000 in revenue. And in 2019, following the 7 strata, we had our first million, which, you know, some people seem small. To others, it might be a lot, but to me it was, it was a huge success with the entire team. And on the side of it, we're obviously trading our own capital as well, and there's some profit there. But really the focus of this podcast is talking about the business and the evolution of it.

Right. But look, you very early stage, you applied the seven strata and that helped you break through. So let's go down through it. Right? In turn, talk to us about, did you tackle them in order? Which was first? How did you develop it? What did you come up with? Walk us through your use of seven strata.

Yeah, absolutely. So the way that I consume content like this, like actionable book material, I try to read the whole thing front to back and then go through a second time and apply it. I couldn't do that with this book. It inspired me to just roll up my sleeves and get the action. So the first thing that was really, to me, super important was when you get down to the one phrase strategy, right? Getting like a really complex idea in your head to have it down to one phrase. And I know that part is secret, but I'm willing to share it for, for the listener we had at the time because we're going to be redoing this exercise again. But we said elite trading, development, accessible for all. That's all we got it down to. And being able to take a complex goal in the mission and to simplify it was really helpful to me. That is still top of mind when I'm trying to create new content, new material, when I'm evaluating decisions on how much money we should spend. You know, is it accessible to all and is it elite quality? Another aspect of it that we really liked was the brand promise and, you know, just being able to discuss, look, what do we stand for? What's our identity? And from the brand promises, we're also able to nail down some more corporate values ourselves. And as we hired new staff that we brought them on board, we were really able to sort of work with them to understand, look, here's what we stand for, here's what our clients expect from us. And really, even using the seven strata, one pager was very helpful to onboard new staff. It was a very good training material. Also.

How did you come up with your one phrase strategy? How did you distill that down? Did you just iterate and iterate on it? Did you use a process? What was your approach?

Yeah, so we, I kind of, at the time it was just two employees, actually three rather. The third one had just joined. We've grown significantly since, but at the time we're kind of sitting, we sat down and brainstormed, like, what is, what is our value, right? What do we do and how do we make money at the end of the day? Because it's great to give a service and a product, but you also have to think about the bottom line at all times. And so we brainstormed a lot of different ideas as to, you know, how are we going to make money with this information? What is the most important thing our clients expect from us? And we also had a chance to kind of consider this business from the client's perspective. We took a little trip across and we went into the client shoes and said, look, if we were brand new and we wanted to start out, what is the most important thing we need? What's the next step, et cetera. So we created a client journey and then from there came out with one sentence, if you will, one phrase that would Remind us of that client journey, how to take somebody from a complete beginner to the end.

So you did that first?

Yes.

Okay, great. And then you did Brand Promises next?

Yeah. Then after that we, we did Brand Prom. I didn't follow the sheet according to spec. Yeah, I kind of got a little motivation and I jumped around and then went to Brand Promise. Because once we knew the client journey, you know, it's, we were able to go with what can we promise them? What do we stand for? All right, what, what is the one thing that we could use to communicate this journey and ultimately the goal that they would get as a result of it. And we kind of settled down to everything you need to become a trader within 60 days. Very actionable, kind of one phrase. And we've massaged that a little bit. We're going to be redoing the exercise again. So really excited for it as a bigger team while more input. And then the next step here that we went to on that sheet was actually the KPIs, the key performance indicators. Going from a one man show to, you know, hiring and growing out of business. You know, that's where a lot of entrepreneurs have trouble. And I would imagine even having 100 staff, you know, adding people to the team that are the DNA, the culture of what you want to become. Right, yeah. As a challenge. So then we sat down and did the KPIs. We were wondering, what are we going to achieve, et cetera. Everything that I was shooting for kind of as a target was in my mind. But then laying that out, I found the process to be very helpful and it helped us identify a lot of metrics that we use to this day on how we're going to measure success. Because there's two ways for us to really measure it as a development company, business. One is the bottom line. How much money do we make? And we settled more importantly on choosing some non conventional KPIs that measure our client's success. Like how do we take some kind of formula to measure how many of our people are succeeding after the fact. So when the team and I sit down and we do these brainstorming strategies quarterly, annually, one thing that we really consider a lot is how do we measure the progress the traders are making? How do we get more people to the finish line? And so we developed a lot of KPIs around that. So we came up with the idea of a 10k club. Traders who have hit that amount in their first time, they've made that much money in a month, trading, etcetera A number of other ideas have come through that discussion.

Interesting. Okay, good. And then what was next after that?

And then the X factor. You know, that's the really big secret. But I could share it because it's simple. And I think that when, when people, when customers join Trade Pro Academy, you know, they, they instantly feel the connection to the community. And that's what we've really worked hard to develop. Our buzz phrase here is that, you know, our work starts after the sale. So once the sale is done, we really have to nurture and provide ongoing value because we are a subscription business. And as we know for subscription business, you got to sell people every single month. Right, right. And our X factor was, you know, we came up with three things and they've really helped us push to where we are now. We've kind of quadrupled the revenue last year and we have goals to do the same this year. It's we care, we share, and we're there. And for a content business, you know, it's very important to do all three of those things. But the number one thing also became our corporate value of we care and that caring for the climb.

So how did you decide your X factor? What did that do for you?

You know, that's a really, really good question. For the X Factor, we were thinking of different ways, like what's going to make us the one thing that stands out in this business. Our business is super competitive and you know, people have literally thousands of choices from the first time they even hit search on Google. We deliver a product online and we found that in our business for, by doing market research, a lot of people were providing a service or a product. Right. But we're not, we're not just providing the type of service that clean someone's car and then they leave and never come back. It's not a one off. You know, we're looking for repeat business. So we were looking at a way of differentiating. And I took myself as a customer and I went through every single business who I thought was a competitor in our field. And I wrote down pain points, like, if I was the customer of this business, what would I feel like I would need more of? Like, where's the loophole? Or where is there maybe a gap or a void of what they offer? And believe it or not, through the research, it really came down to look everyone. At most other places it felt like you were a number. And very few places gave kind of the presence of caring, community involvement, et cetera. And so we kind of settled on that because honestly that's what we do it for as well. We really enjoy what we do. And it lined up with their goals and mission from there. At Trade Pro Academy, one of our current pain points kind of that we've evolved to is now making a plan for the next model or the next step. Because scaling up to me was, was really important in business but also in trading itself and trading, you know, you start small and increase. So from here I guess the one part of the seven page strata that we had a hard time with at back then when we're kind of coming up with a strategy was the profit per X, like the economic engine. And it's funny because I remember in the book it says this should be pretty easy once you have everything else. But this is the part that, that I had a bit of a challenge with because you know, we settled on profit per customer like that simple, right? We referred ourselves as trade pros because Trade Pro Academy. So we settled as profit per trade pro. But I had a little bit of an internal dialogue as, you know, what's, is there a different metric? Can we evaluate it based on progress per Trade Pro? But then, you know, how do you quantify that, how do you measure, etc. So, and I think a lot of new business owners or medium business owners sometimes, you know, there's a balance between just making money and also client satisfaction. Because if I was to just run this business for a hundred percent profitability, I would do it totally different. And if you're doing it for longevity the way we've done it, we've only spent a thousand dollars on ads to hit our metric. In fact, that's our entire marketing budget for 2019 was just $1,000. So I was looking at it, I said, do I do a profit per trade probe? Then how do I feel about that? Maximizing profit per client, it makes it feel kind of cold, calculated and numeric for a community type business. You know, we felt is there a different way? But then we went back to it. We said, hey, if we're able to make the biggest impact for a client's life, like if they're, if we're able to promote them to the next step, they get some on hands on training, better courses, et cetera, then the profit per Trade Pro does become an honest measure. It's kind of like if I could summarize the internal dialogue, it was more like how do I make the most amount of money and also make it a community feel? And we found that by putting the community first, the Profit actually came second. So then we went different routes here when I was brainstorming, but we ultimately landed on let's just make the most amount of money per customer and that will be the way we measure the progress. But when we develop content, we could focus on quality.

Well, hopefully there's a connection. Right. You're producing better quality stuff, you're selling them more. Let me skip ahead. Rather than going through each one of these things. Yeah, you said you've been growing now you went from launch quickly through a million in sales. What is, what, what do you attribute the growth to? In the world of strategy, we're really interested in growth as well as simplicity. What's causing your growth?

Yeah, absolutely. So this might sound incredibly cheesy and simple, but we make our members also be our brand ambassadors. So really we give them the community feel, we engage them a lot as a subscription business and you know, obviously getting a charge every month. From a client perspective, we give ongoing value. So I think to us, our growth has been content and really putting our best material out for free. We, we've attributed a lot of our growth to YouTube. We started a channel on there where we do morning market updates. So we give people information every day before the market opens, what to watch for, news updates, etc. You know, something that a lot of other companies charge for. So by being able to give people a sample or a taste of our best product and what we do in real time has been a real big driver. So for us, the scale really happened when we opened up our content strategy for everyone rather than protect it and hoard it, distribute it freely and be able to reach as many people. So our YouTube strategy has really been helpful to us because we talk every morning about topics that are very highly searched and have a lot of search volume around them. Been able to kind of use the news cycle to generate some referral opportunities for us. Yeah.

Then what is it that people pay you for?

So in our business, we, the part about trading that's challenging is that we tend to think there's a, there's a book or a Bible that we could read and then once we read it, we know everything and we could just execute and then money just rains on us. But really the reality is it's more of a real time story.

Every business is. Right?

Yeah, exactly.

Just do something and money rains on you.

Yeah, it's simple. There's one, one little thing here that you do and that's what you've been missing and it's very convenient. Right. Because you know, look, business owners work really hard. We put in a lot of time and energy and it sounds attractive to have that one thing, but the reality of our business is that it's really a real time sport. It's more about rather being attentive to the real time. What are the news developments? How's the market shaping up? There isn't really a holy grail. So for us, the opportunity is to meet together on a daily basis. Our whole community worldwide logs in and we analyze the market as a team, really taking something that's an individual, traditionally individual activity and turning it into a team sport where people log in, we look at different markets, we share updates, some people trade currencies, other stocks, et cetera. And being able to hear different perspectives allows you to make a more informed opinion about your own trade idea. And that's the unique part of it, is that we activate our clients rather than just seeing them as an end user, somebody who consumes their product, they actually help us develop the product as well in real time.

So it's a community driven thing.

Exactly, yeah. It's in addition to community business. And at the beginning we didn't start with intention to build a community, but evolve that way and it's worked fantastic.

Well, let's inspect some of the rest of it. Did you do words you own yet?

Yes, yeah, we did words we own. Those actually ended up being the basis of our SEO strategy. Sure, yeah. These words we own ended up being something we write blog posts on, creating a lot of different link structure backlinks as well, or YouTube content. But the one that we came up with, you know, actually I have it circled here, is trading community. So it's really cool to look at this. Really fascinating. Almost a year and a bit later that we landed on that term when at the time we hadn't even. We weren't a community at the time. We're just starting to explore this concept now. Looking back at it, I look at it with a big smile. So that's one of the big ones we circled. The other one was Trade Pros, which is pretty much our brand name, but it's also used to identify each person. So those are the two words that we really focused on. Then every other one was how people would search. Because a lot of times as business owners, in our mind we have an idea of what we want, but people are searching for it differently. You know what I mean? Like on Google, I remember putting content like this is one pattern for trading that does this. But people don't really care about Patterns. They just want to know, how much money can I make, how long will it take me? So coming up with some words that we own from a client perspective was super helpful in their exposure. Rather than thinking about what we're doing, we focus more on how will people find us, what are they typing? And then we use the power of SEO to discover that as well.

Very good. Which is perfect application for that. What about the core customer then? Who have you targeted and and who have you been able to eliminate?

So this was a very interesting journey. At the beginning. One of the brand promises that we said was everything you need to know to become a trader. And then our one phrase strategy was elite training, accessible for all. But we've really discovered that everyone isn't our customer. Right. Whenever you're passionate about what you do, you want to help everyone. My wife one time, yeah, exactly like I want to help everyone. My wife one time sang me a song lyric. She's like, and if you're not broken, that's okay because I'm going to fix you anyway. It was like a song that she was listening to. And I laugh obviously, but as business owners, we think the same way. It's like, I want to help everyone, but when we focus on everyone, we got everyone. And we weren't able really to build community. So what we really found is because trading and investing is taking advantage of the unknown and taking risk, you got to turn risk into reward. Rather than teaching people that how to deal with risk, let's go to the people who already understand and value risk. Let's turn those people into the typical trade pro. So what we did was we did some research and we're able to discover that actually business owners and people who are entrepreneurial in spirit tend to have the best success rate or tendency to do well in this business as well.

Interesting. Okay, so you focused in on that. You got a picture of that? We did the brand promises. You come the KPIs. Do you have a guarantee?

Yes. Our guarantee is also one part that really differentiates us. And we came up with the guarantee using this one sheet actually, because the guarantee was something that I thought about, but I hadn't quantified it. Right. It's like I guarantee that I'm going to wake up every morning and work these long hours and create this quality content. And I've stayed true to that promise. But how are they supposed to know that? Right? So to put our guarantee in place, what we did was a 14 day money back guarantee. So because we're a subscription Business. We wanted to give people an opportunity to experience the full, unfiltered, untethered, or unrestricted rather access to all of our course material. So you sign up once and you get everything, the whole thing? Yeah, Basically sign up 14 days. Every single piece of content that we have, if you choose the highest package, it's like there's tiered packages, but whatever package you choose, you get the full access to it. It's community access, real time stuff. When I first did this, I was really worried that a number of things would happen. One of them did happen. One of the worries. But one of the worries was, I guess he could go into it, now that I mentioned it. Don't want to open these kind of loops and not close them. It was that if somebody just take the course and then it's over, they leave. They watch the whole course in 14 days, which is possible if you stay up all night, you watch it and then you leave. And the other thing that happened was people signed up, actually recorded her courses and sold them online for a fraction of the cost. And so I was saying, people ripped you off.

They. They did your thing, they recorded, they resold it.

Yeah, absolutely. And so I laughed and I'm like.

This is like why we can't have nice things, right? Like, exactly. Time and again people are like, really?

Like, exactly.

How do people sleep at night doing that kind of crap?

I have no idea. But they were selling it and I kind of laughed. I had the same reaction as you. I'm like, that something. I hadn't even considered that somebody would put their energy into doing something negative like that. But hey, you know what, it actually worked out. Because what that did is it really kind of reinforced the concept that we're trying to create a community. Because you can't steal community these days. You could pretty much replicate anything. Any product that's kind of an offering could be duplicated. Whether it's physical, content wise, if somebody really wants, they could steal your content. And so for us, we turn that into a strategy and saying, look, we don't really care. They could steal it all they want. We sent a few season desists, but these websites just pop up again, right? Because they're based out of Russia, different areas where you can't really do anything about it. So what we did was we said, look, the community is a strength anyways. Nobody could steal community. Let's focus on that. So going back to the brand promise, it was a scary thing to do, but it's a first in our industry. There's Very few people who offer. And like I've done research a lot on these, on other companies or competitors, they offer money back guarantees. But when you look at reviews, sometimes it's, it's challenged. There's like, you know, you got to fill out a questionnaire, etc. For us, we took a different approach. We said, look, you don't like it, just let us know, send us an email, get your money back, no questions asked. Because it's, we don't want to spend energy working with people who don't want to work with us.

Right.

So it's kind of a disqualifier. It was like a self disqualifying system. And very few people take a stuff on that 14 day.

Yeah, but you get some.

Yeah, we do. Yeah, absolutely. There's some people who it's not for. Right. They realize that and there are different stages of the journey. It's just, just because somebody's not a client for you today doesn't mean they won't be in the future.

Now, have you tried to study those people and figure out what it was that had them come and then alter what you do so you don't get more of them?

Yeah, absolutely. What we, that was actually that analysis led to the decision to go more business owner focused because what we found was the people who are getting or were saying, hey, look, thank you for the opportunity, but I would like to get a refund. Those people had one thing in common and it was the time. And they would say, you know what, this isn't for me because I don't have the time to put in.

Takes too much time.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like I want the money to rain on me, but I don't want to do anything for it. So in our industry, unfortunately, you know.

I'm sure that's the big, you know, I really want the money. I'm not terribly interested in the work.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Right. The dream, the holy grail. And our industry is good at doing that because if you type in trading anywhere, you'll see like people advertising with Lamborghinis and supermodels and that, you know, that's one way to do it, the lifestyle application of it. But that's not really the kind of people that we wanted to attract. It's that instant reward. So when they came in and said, look, the way I've kind of been marketed to in this industry is I was led to believe that I'll get everything I want fast. When they sign in and see that there's A whole course. There's steps, there's quizzes, there's progress to be made and we're there to answer questions. But there's a program you have to follow. And it's a program, it takes time. Having those people realize, like, this is a time commitment, I'm out. This is one of the things that we found was the biggest reason for people leaving. It's too much. I wasn't prepared to invest this much time. And so then they'll go to the, the next step of that person's journey and our client's life cycle is they'll go to another course provider that does offer them the magic pill. They'll spend the money and they'll realize there isn't a magic pill. Because if any one person could tell you where the stock market's going, it wouldn't exist.

Right.

It needs unknown in order to move.

Right.

So yeah, that's how we kind of massage that brand promise guarantee. We offered it, it came with that consequence. And then we really realized that at the time it seemed like a challenge, but that was our biggest opportunity. That was our time to step up and say, look, we're, we want to focus on community. Let's make that the part that they can't steal.

So tell me about the BHAG now. What did you come up with? How's that going?

Yeah, absolutely. The big hairy, audacious goal. So I came up with two. One for my life and one for the business. And I remember reading in the book the Microsoft one where the example was one computer in every household. Right. They've surpassed that. Right. Isn't there like an average of three or something or two point something around my home?

There's six in this room alone.

Well, you're upping that average. You're helping. I like the idea of a per household. So I borrowed from them, from Microsoft. So thank you, Bill Gates, appreciate it. And thank you guys as well in the book for illustrating that example. And what we did is to put one trade pro in every household. One person that's interested in managing their money. Because you really think about it, everyone has money to manage. And our kind of concept for coming up with this is, you know, we work very hard for our own money and at some point we accumulate more wealth as we develop, et cetera, more, you know, we go through the higher income stages, etc. We save more, kids leave, then you can save even more. Who cares more about your money than you? Right? And we looked at the industry as a whole and when we look at financial advisors, et cetera, they mean well. I come from that industry as well. I remember I was on the trading floor so I would deal with a lot of advisors who would sell these investment ideas to their clients and then our clients would call and then we'd have to execute it for them. So you know, we looked at it, we said in every household where there's wealth, there has to be somebody who manages it. And so our big hairy, audacious goal is to help train at least one person in every household who's going to manage the money, ideally every person themselves in the long run, how to manage their own finances. And that gave us a longer term goal of not just being a trading company, but like a financial management company. How do you manage your wealth down the road for different life cycles? Right now we're more focused towards active trading, but down the line in the future you have a lot of ideas and investments in technology, more passive investing as well.

So talk to us, Switch then to the execution side of things. Setting your priorities, your meeting cadence. What do you do now to stay on top of it all?

Yeah, that was the part that I had the greatest challenge with when I left my career, my corporate career at the bank. Up to that point I was very good at executing tasks, et cetera, doing my own job, sort of looking after myself. And the challenge for me really was then managing a team, right? It's like that's the part that hit me as the biggest task and that really got me to start to think about how do I communicate these things to the team because we have a very powerful team and it's just how do I get the information out of my head and how do I get the information out of their head and come up with some actionable stuff? So now our meeting cadence. At the beginning it started, you know, admittedly I'm very self reflective and honest. I was a little bit more of a, of a tougher person. I delegated more and was more task focused and now we're more project focused. So the way that our meeting cadence runs, you know, through the book I've learned more meetings is, is if they're effective meetings isn't a bad thing, right? So what we do now for meetings is we do an annual meeting where we review the seven strata. I openly share that with all of our staff. I'm a big believer of sharing information. Ray Dalio, hedge fund manager, actually records all his meetings with, with all staff and everyone could listen to them. I haven't gone that far yet, but but what we do is we do a annual meeting where we sit down and discuss our strategy. Like, what do we want to accomplish this year? One of our big corporate values is innovation. So we talk about how are we going to innovate this year. And then we break it down to a SWOT analysis. We call it Scott Strengths, challenges, Opportunities and Threats. I don't like weaknesses. I don't know, I'm a glass half full kind of guy. And we come up with that idea. Then after the annual meeting, we have quarterly meetings. So everyone's assigned a project in Trade Pro. Now we don't manage tasks, we manage projects. So it's more about what's the one thing that you own, what do you have ownership of, what's your one project? And whoever's doing a project, if they need help, they could tap anybody else and get information. So it's more like project leadership. And what we do is a quarterly meeting to review our initiatives, how it's going, and then we do a weekly meeting to do a brainstorm every Friday. And then what we've done, you know, a lot of organizations like to follow or track employees activities. And what we do is daily a little activity report on a messenger service. We have a Slack channel. I'm sure you've heard of it. Yeah, but yeah, we don't focus too much energy on sitting at the table and saying, what did you do this week? We like to use our together time to brainstorm and use each other's brain power to help it chip in from different angles. So we summarize it all. We have one annual meeting, quarterly meeting to realign our strategy, monthly meeting with the project champions, and then weekly just updates on, hey, here's what I've done, here's some successes, some challenges, and then once a week we brainstorm the key concept. So let's say somebody has a challenge. This, this past today actually was her last Friday meeting. As a recording of the episode, we talked about how we have a book that we're launching. How do we launch it? We opened it up to everyone, kind of get an opinion, brainstorm the flow, and then whoever's a project champion kind of completes that project. But after having the ability to ask everyone on the team for some input.

Now, are you doing a daily huddle? I don't think I heard you mention that.

We did do a daily huddle, but the way our day is split, it's kind of unique. And in our business because we trade in the morning with our own capital and then afterwards we do the work behind the business. So we're both traders, and then we also run the community aspect of it as well. So we don't do a daily huddle. We did at the beginning in the morning, but before the market opens at 9:30, that five minutes, you know, we try to infuse some energy. We do a little meditation, whatever it might be. But a daily huddle is one thing we don't do.

Interesting. All right, well, I think you want to keep playing with that one, because that's one of the things that we see really transformative. But it sounds like you're doing some things in the realm of it. And with a little tweaking, you could probably get there where you transition between the two or center the meditation, the. The focus. Adding something like that is probably a place to level up. So what do you feel like is the next step for you? Where's the challenge in your world overall and scaling up and what's the next milestone?

Yeah, the next step for us to scale up is to get that, you know, the scale. So right now, we've grown a lot without ads. I feel like we're at the point where we've tested the business model. We put it through some stress, and it sort of survived. But now the challenge is reaching more people, getting more clients, but maintaining that community approach. Right. And I know that's a challenge that we're constantly working with for the next milestone. Everyone kind of has that battle. But I think what we're doing now and getting into is some ads. I know that in 2019, we said we only had $1,000 that we spend on ads, and we got good revenue out of it. If we do the return percentages, quite a bit. But that's something to be proud of in 2019. But in 2020, that's something that we need to work on. So what we're doing now is putting a lot more ads on Facebook. One area that we're gonna be experimenting with as well as LinkedIn. LinkedIn's a really, really opportunistic area right now for ads. It's really low cost and high opportunity, so we're looking at that. But we started with creating based on the learnings we've had of dealing with all these clients and the pain points and coming up with the seven strata and really fine tuning our model. Now we're using that information to be able to communicate it and reach the right audience. So we're doing very good targeted marketing on Facebook, also on Google. And the next step is to really do more with our content strategy to push harder on it, reach more people, push more on YouTube and grow the channel subscription. Because one thing I didn't really mention through this episode, but I think it's a good opportunity to plug it here, is that for me personally, that's helped a lot is with social media. That's one of the newest ways. I mean, it's not new anymore. Social media has been around a long time, but I think that today, in today's world, we're so focused on followers, right? Like how many followers do they have on Instagram, how many YouTube subscribers? And one thing I've learned is that it's not about followers or subscribers. They're not necessarily going to be clients with such a low amount of YouTube followers. For some channels, 26,000. What we have at this moment is not a lot, but that's driven probably around 65% of our profit for 2019. So if we're able to increase that, obviously there'll be more opportunity. But rather than focus on subscribers, how do we engage them better create better engagement, better community, because that's the kind of business that we are. So to get to the next step, we're leaning on our content strategy because it's worked so well in 2019, but now we're focusing more on ads and getting a chance to scale up that model. And the way we're doing that is scaling the approach itself. We're starting small and then we're going to expand out. We have nine funnels planned for this year, but we're going to start out with just one. Use the information and then build from there.

So here's. So that's awesome about testing and running it through a few things that I think I hear that want to underscore, as before, we run out of time here, a methodical application of the tools. And since you wanted to grow, you put a lot of emphasis on the seven strata, and then you started to apply most of the cadences and things that we do. And then I hear as you're going forward, you're thinking about how to test and refine things before you put a lot of resource into them, which I think is also really great. And when you think about it, going from launch through the first million in sales is very much like what the couple thousand people in our accelerator program do. And it sounds like you've done it in a very. A quick order of time. So the next phase, right, of getting to that and beyond, you're looking for what's next and going back over that So I think it's really great. Hopefully our listeners have gotten a lot of out of just hearing what somebody else has gone through with doing it. Whether you're a large company and you're like, oh, we can't get to all these things, or whether you're a small company and you're thinking, how am I ever going to get to. It's useful. If you want to find out more, of course, go to Trade Pro Academy. And a reminder to all our listeners that we're here every week with another client, Case study guru, coach, whatever discussion of all things related to scaling up. And you'll find all that@scalingcoach.com all our back episodes, the show notes, the links, the offers, the things like that. Scalingcoach.com thanks again everyone for listening. We'll talk to you again next week. Well, big thanks once again to the creator of the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling up, the Growth Guru, Vern Harnish. The show is produced by Lucy Summers, Audio Production at Podfly Productions. The audio is edited by Albert Burge. Our show notes are compiled by Kudina and proofread by Tim McGowan. If you got value out of our show, share it with somebody else. Pass it along like it subscribe we love when you give us a review on itunes or Stitcher wherever you get your podcast. Of course, we're now on Spotify and SoundCloud and everywhere that you could get a podcast. So get them every week by subscribing. Leave us a review there. If you love it and you can tell us the parts that you loved or what you want more of or if we could connect you to something, we're happy to do that. Send an email to infoscalingcoach.com thanks again for listening. Keep scaling up.