How to Grow a Recurring Revenue Business without a Freemium Model with Edgar CEO Laura Roeder

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All right everyone, today we have Laura Roder who is a social media strategist and a speaker who has been named a top 100 entrepreneur under 30 multiple times. Um, she's also the CEO of Edgar, a social media scheduling and marketing automation app which I love. Laura, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great. Thanks for saying you love Edgar.

No, it's been super useful, but I'm going to let you go ahead and explain kind of— well, we'll talk about the company in a second, but I'd love to hear a little more about your background and how you got to where you are today.

Yeah. So, I started working for myself when I was pretty young. When I was 22, I quit my job to become a freelance web and print designer and developer. And when social media started to become a big deal in 2008, 2009, I was helping my web design clients use social media and get leads to their site with social media and all that kind of stuff. So I transitioned to social media consulting and from there I moved to social media training and now I'm in social media software. So I've been in the social media marketing space basically for as long as it's existed and kind of done every different business model you can within social media.

Got it. Let's talk about that company you had, I think you still have today, LKR Media. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, so that's the social media training arm. So LKR Social Media is focused on teaching small businesses how to use Facebook and Twitter and all the other social media platforms as marketing tools. And that was a big inspiration for Edgar because I think it can be really confusing in social media, that line between marketing and just using social for fun. And because most of us do both, you know, I use— I use social media as a huge lead generation channel for my business, but I also use it to look at pictures of my friends' babies on Facebook, you know, and those are all happening on the same site. So I think a lot of businesses make the mistake of using social media kind of as a casual user and then don't get any results for their business and don't really understand the difference between the two.

Right. Okay. Now this transitions perfectly into Edgar. So can you talk a little bit about Edgar?

Yeah, yeah. So I'll actually tell the story of how Edgar came to be. So in the training business, we have this program called Social Brilliant that teaches you basically an advanced content marketing strategy for social media. So we teach you how to batch your social media updates, which means writing them in categories. So you write a whole bunch of updates sending people to your blog, a whole bunch of promotional updates, maybe some inspirational quotes or words of wisdom or whatever applies to your business. And we were teaching people this really complicated method that we were using at our company where you make this giant spreadsheet and go through the rows of the spreadsheet one by one and load them into your social media scheduling tool. And we had been doing it and our customers were using the same methodology with the spreadsheet and it was getting really messy and really complicated. And I kind of thought, why, why don't we have software that does this already? One of the things that really frustrated me about social media tools before Edgar is that Most of the tools don't store your updates, which I found really odd. I thought, why am I storing my updates in a spreadsheet? I want to store them in my tool. It's, it's, it's the same thing as if WordPress, you know, sent out your blog posts but didn't store your blog posts so you could modify them and edit them and all that stuff. So I wanted a tool that had a library of all my social media updates, which Edgar does. And I also wanted a tool that would allow me to load up that library and the tool could cycle through it automatically, which is Really, the big differentiator for Edgar is that you load up a library of all your old blog posts, all your old podcasts, all of your old content that's still evergreen and still good for social media, and then Edgar just cycles through it over and over again, top to bottom.

Got it. Okay. Now, yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, most people, you know, the term content marketing is getting bigger and bigger and it still continues to trend up. And it just makes sense. If you're creating so much content, it makes sense to just schedule it and not just post a one-off because you're gonna forget over time if you don't automate it, right? So that's where Edgar comes in.

Exactly. It's a really valuable tool for content marketers because it's crazy to spend hours and weeks creating all these great podcasts and videos and blog posts and then just send them out once because every person who discovers you after that day is gonna have a hard time finding that content.

Right. Now, for Edgar, I mean, I know you have certain schedules that, you know, templates people can kind of just go into and start using immediately, but At what point does it become a little— when do you recommend people clean out their social media calendar so they're not repeating the same things or things that are out of date?

That's a good question. We have a post on our blog about performing a social media audit. I would say you don't need to clean out your social media, but you do need to do an audit, which is basically making sure that your links are still working, that the content's still relevant. But a tool like Edgar that's repeating your content, obviously you only want to put things in that will stay evergreen. To the best of your knowledge. You know, sometimes things happen where some— I don't know, maybe you had a bunch of inspirational quotes from Donald Trump. Maybe you don't want to share them anymore. Stuff like that can definitely happen. So you, you don't need to start from scratch, but it is a good idea, you know, maybe every 3 to 6 months to kind of flip through your library, make sure that everything is still representing your brand well. Maybe some things aren't so relevant anymore that you thought would stay evergreen, getting rid of those, adding in new content, that kind of thing.

Right.

Okay.

Now, does Edgar— I mean, is it meant to work in tandem with all the other social media tools out there?

So, yeah, it can. That's actually, I think, a common misconception about Edgar is that sometimes people will come to us and be like, oh, well, you guys don't track influencers on Twitter. And that's really not the purpose of our tool. Edgar is really a content marketing tool. So, it just kind of depends on how you use social. At our company, we actually only use Edgar. It meets all of our needs. But if you want a tool that does something, yeah, like makes lists on Twitter or tracks influencers or tracks brand mentions or allows you to do customer service through social media, you might use another tool as well. So a lot of our customers are using Edgar in conjunction with another tool.

Yeah, and just personal anecdote, I mean, myself, you know, using Edgar, I mean, it's once you set it, I mean, you're— I might look at it every month or so. I might do, you know, the audit that you're talking about, but I also use it in conjunction with tools like Buffer out there that I, you know, love as well. I think it just works perfectly. So I don't think it's, you know, they're mutually exclusive.

Yeah, definitely. You know, Buffer has great— I love how they're integrated everywhere. You know, you can be right in— I use Pocket, for example, and you can click the Buffer button right from there. So I know a lot of people maybe use Buffer to help with some of their live content and then use Edgar to fill in their evergreen content, is I think a pretty common usage.

Totally. Okay. So how about, you know, talk about some numbers. I mean, how are revenues and, you know, number of users looking today for you guys?

So we've grown really fast. We launched just about— it's been about a year and a month now since we launched. And we have— I'm actually— I've got our numbers pulled up in front of me right now. We have 2,922 paying customers. So we have almost 3,000 users. We don't have a freemium model, so those are all real paying customers. The growth has been fantastic.

Okay. That's great. I think the launch strategy was really interesting. I didn't know what Edgar was. I just saw this weird octopus, and for some reason, I just took out my credit card and I started paying for it. Can you talk about your launch strategy a little bit?

That's exactly what we want people to do. We had a very interesting advantage for our launch because, as I mentioned, we already had this training business. So, we already had a huge database built up of small businesses that were interested in social media marketing. So, it's sort of— we have grown quickly, but we also have a super unfair advantage because we were able to parlay one business to the other. So, we started out just by kind of dropping little teasers to that audience, telling them that software was coming, something new was coming. It's been interesting with Edgar because I found that we really do fill a hole in the market. I mean, we created this because we were having a problem ourselves and we created a tool to solve it. And right now, there aren't any other tools that does— that do what Edgar does as far as repeating your content in a really intelligent way. So, it's been sort of easy to launch because once people understand what it does, and that's the part we're still working on. We can do a little better job explaining that more succinctly and clearly. But once people understand what it does, it's just sort of a no-brainer for a lot of people. Why would I not have a tool that just makes sure that I have great content on social media all day without having to do anything, sending a lot more traffic back to my site?

Right. Okay. That makes total sense. Now, the launch sequence, I mean, the email launch sequence, I mean, how does that— can you dive a little deeper into that? Was it spread over a couple of months or how did that look? And how many emails was it? Just any details around that.

Yeah. I mean, it's not super exciting about the launch, actually. We didn't do a huge launch event. We did do some more segmented strategies. So, instead of having one giant launch, it's launch day and making a huge to-do, we did a little bit of that. But we also wanted to test out different messages for different segments of our audience. So, for example, in the LKR business, we had some people who had purchased products already. So, we sent them a special email sequence with maybe a better offer for Edgar since they're a customer already, or different messaging for people who had maybe been with us for a while but hadn't bought anything because maybe they're interested in software that does it for them, but they weren't so interested in training. So we did some experimentation with different email messaging there.

Got it. Okay. And what tool are you using for this email messaging?

We use MailChimp and we use Mandrill for transactional emails. And we've also been using Intercom a lot lately for emails as well.

Good tool. Good tool. Okay. Now, so I mean, it sounds like you've already had this base to build off of. And so that kind of just transitioned you into the first few hundred, or we can say the first few hundred customers, right? Now, what's one unique thing that you're doing today to acquire customers?

So, I'm trying to think what we're doing that's unique.

Or it can be something that's just working really well.

Yeah. Because I'm like, well, there's really only so many things you can do. I don't know if we've come up with anything. Super new. We spend a lot on Facebook ads. That's something that's working really well. I love Facebook advertising. I love how targeted you can get. We advertise to people who are using other social media tools, so the odds that they're interested in social media tools are really, really high. One of our most successful campaigns has really been just messaging that basically says, here's a new social media tool. Because we found that people who are interested in the tools, like me, like if you showed me a message that said, here's a new tool, I would absolutely check it out because I'm really into social media marketing. And I think that's been an interesting lesson because I think sometimes you can really overthink these things. And I'm not saying that's the only message we use or the only message we'll use forever, but when people are looking for what you have, or if you're selling something that there are enthusiasts in that market, Just telling them there's a new product they haven't heard of is actually really compelling.

Right. You know, the problem that you solve is almost, you know, people that are fanatics about social media, it looks like a no-brainer, right? I mean, that's why I took out my credit card to do it, to buy it. So I think, you know, the fact that the product itself solves a major problem makes it really easy because a lot of times when people are doing Facebook ads, they talk about, yeah, you know, you got to build up that retargeting list first and you go after that and you start building lookalikes. But then at the, you know, you're saying you can target directly at people that are interested in similar tools and it's working out perfectly for you.

It is working really well. And I'm sure we'll do some more sophisticated things down the road because we're not doing that typical send people to content and then they opt in and then you tell them about Edgar. We're just sending people— we don't even have a special page set up, which we really should. We just send people to the general Edgar homepage from Facebook ads. But again, that's been enough because we're saying, here's a new social media tool, and they're like, oh cool, a new social media tool. And the page explains what it is. Keep it really simple.

I love it. I love it. You know, one interesting thing you talked about with Steve Chu was, and you know, this is another podcast that Laura was on talking about Edgar as well, but you talked about, you know, when you focus on user acquisition, you're not really looking at the full lifetime value of the customer. You're really looking at the first month, right? Can you kind of go into that?

Yeah. So, you know, this is my first SaaS business. So there's been a lot of interesting things for me to learn about the economics of SaaS. And I think a lot of people in a SaaS business, they get really excited about that lifetime value number. That's the number they're always looking at. What's the lifetime value? And because there's this theory like, okay, well, you can pay for a lead as long as it's lower than the lifetime value, the math's gonna work out. The problem with that is it's called lifetime value as in it takes a lifetime to collect that much money. I like that. Right. So, I mean, this is a problem even with funded companies, and we're not a funded company, so we're playing with a lot less money than a company that is. But even in a funded company, it can really sink your company if you're thinking, okay, our lifetime value is $2,000. So if we spend $1,000 for a customer, that's cake, right? Oh, we made $1,000. But if you're spending $1,000 this month and it takes you a lifetime, aka, you know, maybe years to get that money back, then you have to have the cash flow to fill in in between. So I would really advise for SaaS businesses, don't get so obsessed with your LTV. You know, that's a number that you want to know for various purposes, but look at basically when can we recoup this money? Are we recouping it in the next month, in the next 3 months? I think 3 to 6 months is kind of a realistic timeframe for most businesses. But then you really have to look at your cash flow. If you're spending money that you're not recouping for 6 months, you have to be able to make that up in your cash flow for the next 6 months.

Got it. Yeah, I think that's super important. I think that's super valuable, especially for a lot of startup founders that are listening to this. It's not just about the LTV. You have to take these other 3 variables into consideration or else you can burn all your cash and end up like a Zirtual, right?

Yeah, you can run out. I mean, that is how people run out of money without kind of realizing it.

Right, okay. So let's talk about the decision for you to not take venture funding.

Yeah, so this is something I wrote a Medium post about recently with— in light of the whole Zirtual debacle. That was such a fascinating story to me because it was a company that seemed to be going so well, and you think, how can a company that has 400 employees just fold overnight? It was so crazy, and it really made me think about the decisions that they made in taking funding. And I think when you take funding, there is an expectation To grow at any cost, to just focus on growth. Because of course the whole idea once you take funding is that you need to have this massive exit, otherwise your investors can't make any money. And something that's been pointed out about Zirtual is that maybe they were going for a maybe software-type growth model, but a human-powered— they were a service business, right? They were basically a service business trying to grow. Like a software business. And for Edgar, we thought a lot about, do we want to take money and go down that road? Because I've never done it. All my businesses have been bootstrapped. And for Edgar, I think it's really more accurate to call it self-funded rather than bootstrapped, because we had some money from the profits of Delicate, our social media business, that we used to start Edgar.

Got it.

Yeah, I just decided that I would rather just have full control over my business. I didn't want to be— I didn't want to be under anyone's thumb. I wanted to be able to just do anything I wanted with the business. And the Zirtual thing really made me see that pressure there is to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, even if it's not going to make sense and it's going to run your business to the ground.

Yep, I totally agree with that. I think the other thing is, I mean, first of all, I think it feels like you definitely have a peace of mind just being able to operate based on all your own decisions. And I think the other side takeaway is that you had an audience to begin with. So you spent some time building an audience and then you had profits that you can kind of double down on for your new business. And I mean, obviously it feels liberating, right? That's what I'm getting from you.

It feels very liberating. So I had a baby this year. I took 3 months off. maternity leave where I wasn't looking at the business at all. And my husband is the CTO of our company. So actually now we're both working part-time so we can both do a lot of childcare as well. And I mean, I haven't ran that idea past any VCs, but I don't know if they'd be a huge fan of the founder and the CTO both working part-time indefinitely. You know, it's definitely not the normal, the normal path for a Silicon Valley company. And I love that we're able to prioritize Prioritize our family in that way. Obviously, the business is still growing great. We're really able to do it our own way, which is kind of the best thing you can ask for.

Cool.

I love it. Well, let's switch gears a little bit. Let's talk about one big struggle you faced while growing Edgar.

It's funny to me. Whenever someone asks me this question, I really have to think about it because I'm such an eternal optimist that I really do truly view everything as like, oh, well, that's a learning experience and we learned from it and now we'll move on. I actually have to rack my brain being like, what? What is a big failure that we've had? I mean, we try out things that don't work all the time. I think I think that's part of the reason I don't think in terms of this big failure because every time we try a new marketing strategy or pricing strategy, a lot of them don't work. And I I think that's important to talk about because. Well, one, you only hear about the successes, and two, I think it makes people too devastated if something doesn't work out. Um, something that we've— we're still trying to figure out, to be honest with you, is the best pricing model for Edgar, because you don't— bigger companies don't have more social media accounts, which I think is sort of the most obvious way to price it, is like you pay more for more accounts and you pay less for less accounts.

Mm-hmm.

The weird thing about social media is MTV might have, you know, a Facebook page and a Twitter account for MTV. They're not going to have hundreds or thousands of them. It really depends on the business model. So most of our users are on the $49 a month plan, and that's worked out really well. Experimenting with other pricing tiers at higher prices, we haven't found that formula that works perfectly for us and works for our users. So that's been— That's been a constant struggle trying to figure out those plans. And I don't have the perfect ending for that one. That's something we're still experimenting with.

I think it would be interesting to go through your process on how you're solving that problem right now. So I guess how are you looking at other pricing models or looking for help around this right now?

Yeah. So part of the active experiment and something we're learning now is That our tool was really designed to work best for using it really for one brand or maybe 2 brands. Maybe if you're like a virtual assistant and you're using Edgar for your own stuff and someone else's, that'll work. And I mean on one account. So a problem that we've run into is we offer these higher plans with a lot of social accounts. So someone who is a social media manager or virtual assistant will put all of their clients' accounts On one Edgar account, and it really slows down the software. It just makes everything function slower, obviously, because you're loading— like, sometimes people have hundreds of schedules that they're trying to load on the schedule page. And it's just sort of an interesting example of how cross-discipline everything is. So, you know, you have the customer service aspect that people are like, oh, this is loading too slow. And then the person who's designing the schedule page, do they design it to show up for 5 schedules, or do they design it to show up for 500 schedules. And it's just been this interesting lesson that you really have to have a clear point of view in who your product is for. So I think moving forward with Edgar, we'll find some other solutions where if you are managing multiple brands on Edgar, you'll have a better interface to do that. And that might affect the pricing model as well. And but the only way for us to figure that out— I don't know, maybe I could have figured it out in advance— but the way that we have figured it out is to just offer that, to say, okay, if you get a bunch of Edgar A bunch of social accounts and put them on here, what happens? What are the challenges that people face? So, you just have to look at those kind of experiments and see, okay, what's worked and what's not worked, and then keep tweaking as you go.

Okay. So, that actually brings up an interesting point. I mean, obviously, you know, you've had a ton of people using this for, you know, a year and a month already. So, you know, what are some interesting stats you can share? Based on what you've seen in the app?

Yeah, so we actually just published— I'm pulling it up now because I want to see the exact number. We just published a case study on our blog because something else that's cool about Edgar is we have a Facebook group that's really active with our users. It's called Edgar HQ if you want to look it up on Facebook. I didn't know that.

I'm a customer.

I'm just kidding. Oh, I was like, we should do a better job talking about it. So someone recently just super casually posted on Edgar HQ, like just as a little side comment on another thread. He's like, oh yeah, Edgar's been working really well for me because in the past 6 months I went from 700 Twitter followers to over 20,000 Twitter followers. What?

Yeah, I know.

We're like, that, that's amazing. Can we talk to you? Can we hear about how you did this? So we published a whole case study on our blog. The company's called Wine Tracker. So if you search for like wineTracker.co Edgar, our blog post will come up. And he basically just went all in with Edgar. He talks about some of the little tricks that he did. Like for example, he put images on all of his tweets because tweets with images get a much higher click-through, much higher retweet, much higher engagement. So he's like, okay, if I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do this right. I'm gonna build images for everything. Another interesting thing to me about how he used Edgar is that he really focused on Twitter. So, he hasn't had much traction with Facebook. He's kind of gone all in with one platform, which I've seen work really, really well for businesses. I think it can be hard when you're trying to be everywhere because your attention gets really fragmented. So, instead of doing that, he said, okay, I'm going to build a huge Twitter following. I'm going to be really engaged with talking to people on Twitter and finding influencers to follow and all the different things that you do. And now that he has these 20,000 on Twitter, I'm I can promise you that if he wants to focus on Facebook next, that's going to be a lot easier because a lot of those people will come over to Facebook and he'll be able to start his page with a few thousand people instead of zero. And it's just a— what's funny about Edgar is there's no magic to it. If you're posting a lot more, you're just going to get much better results. If you go from posting a link to your site once a day to posting a link to your site 6 times a day, You're going to get a lot more traffic to your site. And that's what Edgar does for you. So we actually have a lot of stories of people saying, wow, my social traffic has doubled or quadrupled since I started using Edgar. And it's kind of like, well, of course it has. You're driving traffic back to your site all the time now and you didn't before because there wasn't an easy way to do it.

Interesting. How long did the— I guess for this case study, how long did the Wine Tracker guy take to really set everything up and make everything just kind of go on autopilot?

It definitely takes some time to set up that initial database. What we always advise is you don't have to do it all at once because sometimes people get overwhelmed looking at Edgar thinking, oh, I have to put in hundreds or thousands of updates. But you really can do it piece by piece. What's interesting is you're already spending time sending out updates on social media anyway. You might as well be saving them for later. That's kind of how I view it. So when people are like, oh, I don't have time for Edgar, it's like, well, you were going to send out your 50 updates or whatever this week anyway. Might as well just send them out with Edgar, and then Edgar automatically saves them for later too. So it doesn't have to take more time because you can do it, you can do it gradually. Okay.

Now, just for the audience to know, I mean, what does a standard schedule look like? I know you guys have a lot of templates out there, but just at a high level, what does an ideal schedule look like?

We'll just call it that. Yeah. So an ideal schedule has a good mix of different categories, which is another big problem I wanted to solve with Edgar that we haven't even talked about yet. So a big problem I was having with the existing tools is that If you want to do social media marketing well, you need to have a good mix of different types of content. So, you don't want to have all just links to other people's blog posts, and you also don't want to have all links to your own blog posts. You certainly don't want to have all promotional content telling people to buy things. That doesn't go over very well on social media. And this goes back to really having a true social media marketing strategy instead of just using it casually where you might just be sort of sending out random updates about your life. That's really not going to do well as business. So an ideal social media schedule, you want to have a really nice mix of links back to your own stuff, links to other people's stuff that's just useful and interesting, and some things that are a little more directly promotional. And that might be just a call to action. So if you do a podcast, it might just be a tweet saying, hey, subscribe on iTunes, or tell someone about the podcast. Or it might be something very promotional, like we're having a 20% off sale and you want to go to the site, or even just like, did you know that we sell this product? That's something a lot of people miss on social media is if you have an e-commerce site, like just send out different tweets profiling your different products. People don't know that they exist. So you want to have a nice even mix of that different type of content and you want to send it out. I would say for most businesses Updating social media minimum maybe 3 or 4 times a day, maximum— it really depends on your business. You can do a lot more than people think. If you're sending out updates like 20 times a day covering different time zones and stuff like that, that's actually not a crazy amount.

Hmm, okay, interesting. I think what happened was I had one of my employees set up Edgar for me, and I think it might have been too aggressive, so my Twitter growth has like plateaued a little bit, so I might need to dial that back a little bit.

Yeah, you definitely have to experiment and play around and see how your accounts are looking. Actually, some interesting feedback we've gotten from customers is that people don't really log into Edgar that much. They're kind of more looking at their own accounts to see how Edgar is doing. They're looking at the Twitter account, seeing what that mix looks like, seeing what it feels like going live, and it's little dials that you have to adjust, right? Are you sending posts to your own links to your own blog too much and people feel like that's all you send? Or are you not sending it enough and now you're not driving any traffic to your site?

Right.

And also the engagement is really important as well. That's a big thing we preach at Edgar. Edgar does the grunt work for you so that you can spend your time engaging on social media instead of spending your time loading up status updates, which a robot or an octopus can do for you. So you can't just set up Edgar and never check on your social accounts again. You're not going to see great results that way. Let Edgar send out the updates and then you go into Twitter, chat with people, follow people, participate in Twitter conversations is something that we've done a lot here at Edgar to grow our own following. Then you can spend your time on those kinds of activities.

Okay.

All right. So how did you— when did you decide it was the right time to move all in on Edgar, to transition from a training company to focus more on Edgar?

Honestly, the growth just went so well, it became really obvious because We weren't sure when we launched Edgar. We're like, is this going to be a side project that's going to take up a little bit of our time? Maybe this is going to be a huge failure and we're just going to go back to doing the training. But we've definitely gone all in on Edgar. And again, we just— the customers were there and the numbers were there. Our monthly recurring revenue is about $150K a month now. It just started out-earning. the other business relatively quickly and obviously recurring income, which is always great as a business owner. So it was a pretty easy decision.

At what monthly recurring revenue number did you get to? I mean, at what point were you just like, okay, we're at this point MRR, it's time to go all in?

It wasn't really so much about hitting the number. It was just the speed in which we hit those numbers. We hit $30K within I think a few months of launching, which already felt substantial. It was like, okay, well, if we're already at $30K, we're going to be doing a few million a year pretty quickly. Just seeing the speed that this thing is growing.

Awesome. Congratulations on the growth.

Yeah, thank you.

Okay, so let's switch it back to you. What's one piece of advice you'd give to your 25-year-old self?

Build a team more quickly. I think I actually built a team faster than a lot of people do, but I think that's just how you multiply your success and multiply your growth. Most people hang on to things themselves way too long. I see growing a business as it's just been a continuous exercise of getting rid of myself, getting myself out of all the details of the business and bringing in experts that can do it better than I can and just can create a lot more activity. You know, there's just only so much. Like, we have this fantasy that somehow we're going to be able to do a lot more in the future. I don't know. It doesn't really make sense, you know. If you picture your business now and 5 years from now and it's still you doing everything 5 years from now, I don't really see how you're going to 10x your business. There's just not— you're not going to get that much more productive. You're not going to uncover the secret strategy that you hadn't discovered in reading the internet for the past 10 years that no one had told you about. I think these are sort of fantasies that business owners have. The more quickly you can start to add those skills that other humans add and add the hours that other humans add too. There's just only so much you can do yourself. That's how you really ramp up a business.

Yeah, I mean, people talk about, you know, you hear if you can hire someone that can do something at 80% of the level you can do it at, yeah, it's time to do it, right?

It's—

I think we all tend to have this Superman syndrome or Superwoman syndrome that we can do everything. So I guess the question for you now is, you know, people still— you know, a lot of people still suck at delegation. So are there any resources that you can recommend around just delegating better in general?

Yeah, there's a book that I really like called— it has a horrible name— it's called Coaching for Improved Work Performance. And it's by Ferdinand Foundries, which is a really awesome name. It's a pretty old-school book, and it's a really great book about managing people. And one of the best things that I learned from the book is to assume that people are doing their best. So he talks about how if you ask a manager why someone's not performing, they'll often say, you know, they're lazy, they don't care, like they just can't be bothered to do it right. And when you ask an employee why they're not performing, it's very rare that they're like, I just don't care. Sometimes they say that if it's a really bad work environment, but more often it's like, well, it's because no matter what I do, my boss Redoes it, or they have me use this stupid system that's a huge waste of time, so I just quit using the system because it's not effective and I see a better way to do it. Assume that people are doing their best and listen to people about how the systems can be improved. You know, don't assume that you know everything. And also, you know, you referenced like, oh, if someone can do it 80% as well as you can. I think that's actually a bit of a negative mindset. And you don't want to think, oh, I guess someone else can do it 80% as well as me. You want to think, well, who can do it better than me? And why do I think I'm so amazing, by the way? Like, why do we as business owners be like, clearly I'm better than everyone else at everything? You know?

Right.

It just seems a little unlikely to me. There's lots of talented people in the world. And also remember, a lot of it isn't that you're so great at it. It's just your personal preference. And not everything in your business has to be done to your personal preference.

I like that. I like that. Okay, so Ferdinand, what's his last name?

Fowndries. I think it's F-O-U-N-D-R-I-E-S.

Sounds like a British king.

I don't know who he is, but he wrote a really great book.

Okay, we'll drop that in the show notes. What's one productivity hack you can share?

Be really deliberate with your time. I mean, it's nothing amazing, just deciding what you're going to do before you open up the laptop. I think it's so easy to just spend an hour just kind of like messing around, checking on this and that. Instead, before you sit down to work, be like, what am I going to work on? And then ask yourself, am I doing this? You know, so don't look at your email unless email processing is the task that you're doing. Don't let yourself sort of wander to another task. At our company, we're really big on single-tasking, which is something that I'm definitely working on training myself to do, which is really difficult. Just meaning single-task, don't move on to the next project until you have actually finished. Because if you had to finish that before you were allowed to do anything else, you would get it done. You know, we see these projects that months later we're like, well, we're still like waiting to finalize it, or I kind of thought Then I'd get this input from someone else. Or most often you just kind of don't feel like doing it and you just let it sit around. Well, if you weren't allowed to do anything else in your business until you had finished that one stupid task, you would get it done. That's sort of our focus as a company. I'm not saying it's easy to do, but it's something that we're all trying to get better at.

Totally guilty of that. Totally have ADD.

Yeah.

But this one book has been floating around and I'm sure you've heard of it. It comes highly recommended from so many circles, but the book is called The One Thing. So I mean, this really helps people that have ADD like myself just really focus in on that one task that's gonna have the biggest income, whether it's for the next day, the next week, the next month. It'll kind of get you locked in on that. So highly recommended. Okay, now speaking of books, I mean, you just recommended that book from King Ferdinand. But what's another book you'd recommend to everyone?

I'm a big Verne Harnish fan. So his book is The Rockefeller Habits, and they recently reworked it as a book called Scaling Up. They also have great little one-day conferences. The organization is called Gazelles that does the conferences. If you Google Verne Harnish Gazelles, you'll find all this stuff. And it's just really kind of tried and true basics for running a company because most of us have had no training on this. You know, unless you were somehow the, like, assistant to a CEO or something, I don't even know how you're supposed to learn these skills. But once you move from basically having that initial idea, getting some traction, then what you do every day is running and growing a company. And that's a difficult task. A lot of it is managing people, managing workflow, making sure that everything is being prioritized well. And Scaling Up by Verne Harnish just has— it's just super practical. Like, here's the worksheets you use, here's how often to Have these meetings, teaches you kind of the day-to-day tactics of running a business.

Right. Great books. And I mean, like you said, they're literally templates for you on how to succeed. It's repeated over and over. And Verne Harnish, I mean, I've talked about this in other episodes, but I've always recommended Entrepreneurs Organization. He's actually the founder of that group.

Yeah.

Yeah. Great recommendation. Totally appreciate that. But Laura, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find you online?

Well, I'm on social media. My personal Twitter is @LKAR, or you can find Edgar at Meet Edgar on Facebook and Twitter.

Awesome. Yeah, and if you guys use any bit of social media, you have to get Edgar. It's, again, it's a no-brainer in my opinion, and I'll drop it in the show notes. Thanks again, Laura.

Thanks, Eric.

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