20 Mistakes to Avoid for Payroll Business Growth

"People don't plan until they get punched in the mouth." That is a quote from the famous philosopher, Mike Tyson. And today I'm going to talk about 20 things I wish I knew earlier in growing my company. This is going to be fantastic and specific to people in the payroll industry, but definitely something you can listen to even if you're not in the payroll industry, because these are just business building fundamentals. The mistakes that I've made over the years that I want to help you to avoid. So think about it like this. Imagine you're walking down the path of going up the side of a mountain. You're on a hike. In front of you, about 20 yards up, you know, it's a packed day. It's beautiful. It's sunny. There's a lot of people out here hiking this trail. But about 20 yards in front of you, you see people falling into a hole. Well, are you going to walk directly into that hole or are you going to figure out a way around that hole and learn from the mistakes that those people made that went into that hole? Of course, you're going to try to find a way around it. You're not going to fall in the same dang hole you just watched 3 people fall into. So that's my goal today is to help you avoid falling into some of the holes that I've fallen into and I've seen some of our peers fall into. And that's going to be a big component of today. So thank you so much for joining me. This is Payrollin'. Alright, well, let's dive right in. This is a big one for me, number 1, and I think I've got about 20 plus, so I'm going to lose track somewhere along the line. I'm sure in the notes afterwards we're going to have 22 mistakes to avoid when growing your small business or payroll company. But for right now, I've got 20-ish or so. I'm going to be adding to them as we go. So, the first one, and this is one that killed me last year, so this is pretty recent. And for context, I've been doing this about 10 years at Guru. I owned a couple businesses before this, nothing that really ever popped off, just some, some startup-y stuff, you know, landscaping company. You know, I've been an entrepreneur since I was a small child. I used to sell worms by the side of the road to fishermen that I would get from our yard. So, I've been doing this for a while, but 10 years at Guru, we're a 7-figure-plus business. And last year was a big year for us in a lot of ways, but most importantly, big learning year. And one of the biggest mistakes I made last year was being too big picture focused. We had a mantra going into 2024, let's focus on the 6 inches right in front of our face. We got a little too hung up worrying about the impact of things 3, 5, 10 years down the road instead of worrying about the impact 3, 5, 10 minutes down the road or months down the road. And so we've taken this a step further. Even when you look at EOS, many of you listening to this are familiar with EOS, if not practice EOS in your business. It's the Entrepreneurial Operating System based on a book called Traction. It's getting almost a little too popular now, but that's another story for another day. But one of the things we just decided last week, we're doing a refresh of our vision, which is they use a process that has you put a 10-year, a 1-year, a 90-day vision in place. That way, you know, everything's building. Sorry, 10 years, 3 years, 1 year, and then working in 90-day increments. We're actually doing away with the 10-year. We're backing that down into 5-year. It's just too far out. While it's fun for vision casting purposes and all that, the team almost never sees it the way you do. And it, it's almost more confusing than anything because unless you've got like a fantastically obvious moonshot, like we're gonna, you know, save a million lives with our, you know, with clean water, great. In our world, let's face it, we don't have anything that, that beautiful in the payroll industry. So we're moving this down to a 5-year. Big thing there is, well, it's great to focused on 5 years down the road. Let's stay focused on 90 days, 6 months, 1 year, but still use that process. Start at the end and back into where you're going to be. So, mistake number 1 I've made is being too big picture focused. Mistake number 2 is not following the blueprints that have been laid for me. So, you've heard me say on this podcast before, if you're a listener, if not, make sure you subscribe. I resisted joining the IPPA for years when we first started. So, the Independent Payroll Providers Association is the industry Association for Payroll Bureaus, where we all come together as industry bureau owners and leaders to network, share best practices, et cetera. For some reason, I thought we were different. I thought we're growing a SaaS business, they're growing service businesses, they're just going to do things differently than us. I was completely wrong, but that's not it. So if you're not in the payroll industry, find the industry association for your company. But there's a couple of other things around this. So not following a blueprint. A, I see a ton of people looking for blueprints. They're consuming content all day, every day in the form of podcasts like this. They're reading articles, they're reading blogs. They're, they're, they're really just embracing the entrepreneurial life and content around it, but they're not necessarily acting on the information that they're, they're consuming. So make sure that you're acting on the information that you're consuming. And the other challenge with that is there's so many different paths out there. And I remember once meeting One of our earliest clients, a gentleman, they've been with us for, I think, 9 years now. But when they first started with us, you imagine, so we've been in business 10 years, at 1 year or less than 1 year when they joined, I think they were our 5th customer. And I remember seeing the owner about 6 months later and he asked me, he's like, "Yeah, I know you guys were really early. How are things going?" They were a much larger company than us at the time, 40, 50 employees. And he's a well-renowned local entrepreneur. And he said, how are things going? I know, you know, you're just getting going. Things are hard early on. And I said, yeah, man, it's really hard actually. There's no black and white. There's no correct answers. He said, man, you're wrong. There are a million correct answers. Just pick one, run at it, and make adjustments along the way. And so that's a big thing for us that we've learned over the years is, for example, if we're gonna follow a sales and outbound development strategy, Follow the strategy, pick one and follow it. There are a million different ways to do it. They're all pretty similar, especially with something like sales. You know, for us, we've picked Predictable Revenue, great book, great process. We made some tweaks, but we follow that to a T when we look at our outbound sales strategy. So pick one process or philosophy and run with it. That's mistake number 2, not following a blueprint or a process that we can find, following a multitude of them. If you chase 2 rabbits, you catch None. All right, this third one is huge. So this one starts to matter way more the bigger you get, but it's, it's so important to start thinking about early on, and that is attrition math. So attrition math, what do I mean by that? I mean that the normal in our industry is 90% client retention. And if you're wondering how to calculate client retention, The people, the public companies in our industry, they track it like this. So the clients that were with you January 1st of a year, were they still with you come the next January 1st, December 31st at the end of that year? So if January 1st, I look at my book of clients, January 1st, December, excuse me, January 1st, 2024. When I look at that book of business, December 31st, 2024, What percentage of those clients are still with me? And the average for our industry is about 90%. So now when you start to think about that, that's fantastic. 90% retention. Most SaaS businesses would, would salivate over that. It's fantastic. But in reality, if you're not a sales and outbound organization and you're just taking what comes in, that 10% attrition year over year compounds also, right? So as I grow, I'm also going to be losing clients. And when you think about that, as you continue to grow larger and larger and larger, you know, you're basically going to have one, if not two, if not three, the more, you know, again, depending on your size, salespeople just backfilling the business you lost from the year before as you grow. Uh, so for those of you that are kind of at that point where you're just hitting 7 figures, or maybe you're going above and beyond that, getting multiple 7 figures, you really need to think about what the sales strategy is to backfill the existing business. And some of that can be done with client upsells, some of that can be done with inbound, but you're gonna have to have outbound, right? So I know there's that juncture between $500,000 and $1.5 million where people start to add salespeople, or they've already added them and they haven't had as much success as they'd hope. But make sure you're focused on that attrition math. And I know some of you are like, well, we're going to be better than that, we're going to have 95%, or You know, maybe I've even seen companies calculate their attrition at 96% and post it on their website, which I don't believe. I believe they're pulling out because if you think about it, like a percentage of your clients are going to either go out of business, get acquired, or, you know, get private equity backing. So even if you're selling upmarket and you're saying, oh, we don't lose as many, I would not buy 96%, I'll tell you that. Unless without some creative math on the back end, like 96% may be controllable. Turnover, but, uh, 96% with uncontrollable turnover, uh, in there would be challenging just based on market dynamics. So if you forecast for 10% attrition, then you can forecast for the growth that's needed to backfill that. So make sure you put that into your forecast as you're looking forward. All right, so number 3 was attrition math. Make sure you're familiar, comfortable with attrition math. All right, next up nitch down. So y'all have heard some of my episodes in the past about the riches are in the niches, and I stand by it. As a matter of fact, we went hard over the last year and a half directly into niches— nonprofits, technology. Uh, we've really narrowed the geographic focus on where we're going, and we have seen tremendous results from that level of focus. I finally started taking my own advice, y'all. And guess what? It worked. How amazing is that? It is kind of funny. I don't know if any of y'all were, um, I was that guy where my friends would always come to me with, you know, hey, I got this thing going on, can you help me? Can you give me some advice? I, I don't know why I just kind of took that role in our friend group. And then at some point it came up where I was like, you know, I'm giving these people great advice for their relationships or whatever back in college, and I was like, man, I need to start giving myself better advice, right? Like, take yourself out of your own shoes and then say, all right, if somebody came to you with issue, what would you tell them? And that's a really good way sometimes to just document something. Neither here nor there, but niche down is the mistake I see a lot of folks making. Uh, as a matter of fact, I see it a ton. If you're listening to this and you're a CPA that offers payroll services, the number one violator of the niche down rule, in my opinion, that in our world are CPAs. Anytime I ask a CPA, who do they serve? All, anybody, we'll we'll serve anybody with this, that, or the other. We'll serve a tow truck company. We'll serve a, you know, a pizza shop. Like, dude, you got to have some level of niche or I can't refer you any business. So that's where this really pulls dividends. If I'm thinking about 3 CPA firms, when a customer comes to me and says, I need a referral for a new CPA, and one is great at dentists, one is great at construction, and one is just like, you know, we'll do anything for anybody. Well, that third one just gets knocked out of the conversation altogether, and I'm gonna go find somebody for the niche that that person, uh, has reached out to me about. So look at your client base today if you're already there, and find— you, you already have some inherent niches if you divide them up by industry. And now that's what happened for us. One day we took a step back and realized more than 25% of our base were nonprofits. We're a mission-based company. We give away 5% of our business. It was a natural extension for us. Our story resonates with them. Their story resonates with us, we know how to serve them, on and on and on it goes. Niching down will make you far more efficient, but also, like I said, it will make it easier. So we're in the PEO space now. These PEO brokers reach out to us all the time. Another story for another day on how I feel about that particular piece of the market segment. But if we were just like, hey, we're a PEO in South Carolina that works mostly with white-collar companies, you go, okay, great. But if it's like, hey, we're the PEO for nonprofits, oh cool, now we're immediately filed into one specific segment in their mind. And so when they get a nonprofit, they're going to think about us and maybe one or two other folks, but they're not going to— we're not just going to blend in with every other provider in the bag. So niche down, that's a huge mistake I see people make. If there's one in here that's probably the biggest, it would be that one. All right, so that was number 4. What's number 5? All right, so number 5, is along the same lines. Again, huge mistake I made early on especially was offering too much to our clients. And so we started as an ASO, so it's hard to say don't offer too much to your clients because an ASO by nature is a very comprehensive service. But we started bolting on all these little things, and looking back again, that ASO was kind of cobbled together. It was going back to the Mike Tyson quote— we had a great plan until the clients started coming on board And then we realized, oh, they want applicant tracking, or they want this, or they want that. And then we quickly had to keep expanding. Oh, we need background checks, we need posters, we need all this stuff. Next thing you know, we've got 10 different vendors on the backside of our company. It came to a head in, uh, 2018. One quarter, we lost about a third of our revenue just because, like, the, the house of cards fell down, man. Like, there was just— there were too many hands in the pot. There was too much going on on the back end. The end result for the clients was terrible. And ultimately, we just had a handful of big clients all leave at the same time. And then that really, you know, when you talk about compounding, losing a bunch of clients in one quarter, it compounds over time because then, again, going back to that attrition math, everything was just trying to backfill that instead of building on top of the existing base. So if you've listened to episodes before, you've heard me say, if there's one thing I would do over again at the beginning, I would be DennisPayroll.com, baby. I would provide payroll, one service only, one market, and then expand only after I had hundreds, if not thousands, of dentist clients. Because that brings me into another mistake that's a little bit further down, but I'm going to pull it up here, is that, you know, too often people— let's see, where is it— the ancillary services. So we'll lump these two together here. Offering ancillary services. Do the math before you offer any ancillary services. So let me give you an example of what happens to me every single week. So if you Google white label payroll right now, you'll find us on page one every single day. So we have a lot of conversations with companies that are interested in offering payroll services. More often than not, they're not a payroll bureau today. Maybe they're a 401 provider or they're a benefits agency or whatever. They're, they want to start to add payroll services as an additional line. And so, you know, inevitably through the discovery, we start to understand, you know, what's their model, how are they planning on selling it, etc. And then you do the math with them, right? So if one of my sales reps has between a $250,000 and a $350,000 quota to start and they're a full-time salesperson that all they're doing is selling payroll services, now we do the math on that. Let's say best case scenario, 20% profit margin. Now I've got a $70,000 annual profit if that person knocks the ball off the COVID sells a full line. Granted, you know, we all know that that $70,000 goes on for 7 to 12 years depending on your retention, which is all well and good. But do you think that when you're offering an ancillary line of service, like you're offering it just to be able to make 70 grand a year in the long run? And do you think if it's not your primary service that you're going to sell 300 $150,000 a year of it with no dedicated sales staff versus the one full-time salesperson who struggles to hit that number as a full-time salesperson? I don't think so. So the same goes for all these ancillary things that our clients ask of us. Again, talked about them earlier. Daily wage pay, uh, I don't know what the acronym is there, I butchered that a little bit. The posters, the, you know, HR AnswerLink bolt-on, all this stuff right? Like, and we have it all the time when people come and they try to offer our Guru HRIS to their clients, and I'm like, you have 200 clients. Best case scenario, you know, you get 10 to 15% of them opt in. Here's what that means in revenue. Like, is this worth learning a new system, offering another service? More often than not, it is not, y'all. Like, refer it out, find a good partner, find a way to maybe make a couple bucks on it, but ultimately that money is not really going be worth it in the long run because it's so small. It's funny because I look at our P&L right now and the number of small line items that I'm just waiting for to fall off our book because they were some ancillary thing we didn't need that we offered. And now we're in a spot where we're going, all right, we're not selling that to any more customers. Let's cut it out of the book entirely because it's a waste of time. They will find the solution if they really, really need it, or we will help them find the solution if they really, really need But it does not have to come from us. You do not have to be a one-stop shop. That is a myth that people have planted inside your head is that they have to get everything from you. CPAs are the most guilty of this because that's how they get into payroll in the first place. And the same thing happens now. They've got $200,000 worth of payroll business on the books and they're a multimillion-dollar company. And that means, oh, so we maybe make $40,000 of profit on a line of business. That's wildly distracting from us selling other things. And so just be cautious of ancillary products. Make sure you're doing the math before you offer them. All right, so we had offer less, we had niche down. Next up, cash is king, man. So this seems like an obvious statement to make— cash is the lifeblood of your business— but I'm thinking about it from a different perspective. So for me, understanding the difference between a profit and loss statement and a cash flow statement took a long time. Understanding why a balance sheet makes sense, you know, what to read on a balance sheet, how to understand my ratios. Like all these things take a lot of time and they're my least favorite parts of the business. And that was the problem for me, was that because they were my least favorite part of the business, I ignored them for years. I thought outsourcing I thought, you know, being an ostrich and just burying my head in the sand was the solution. In reality, all that did was bit me in the butt later on because I just was not well-educated enough. I was avoiding the inevitable. You have to understand how your business makes cash from top to bottom and what the impact is every time you make a decision, or you're going to make bad decisions. You can't just look at your bank statement every month and base how you're running your business on that. So go take some fundamental online, you know, there can be simple courses, YouTube, etc. Pay your accountant for a couple hours just to sit down with you and work through all this stuff, talk about best practices, do whatever it takes, but learn more about how cash flows through your business and what reports you need to review and create to make sure that you have enough cash. And one of the best reports for this is the 13-week rolling cash flow statement. Which is surprisingly, surprisingly popular in that you can read a ton about it. But like getting your accountant or your bookkeeper or whomever to help you with it seems to be more challenging than it should be. Again, another thing where I kept trying to have somebody else do it. At the end of the day, I've just got to be more involved with it because I'm the only one who sees every side of the equation. All right. Another mistake I see people make is not investing in marketing. So referrals are good when they're good, right? When they're coming in, they're fantastic. But how do you grow beyond the referrals that you have without letting more people know about your brand? And so getting out there and marketing your business, you know, online is probably, as I say, getting out there. I can immediately see people, and this is another mistake I see them make, is they're doing a bunch of in-person marketing. They're going to all the chamber events, they're going to the BNI groups. That's one-to-one, man. You got to be one-to-many with marketing. Sales is one-to-one. Marketing is one-to-many. So putting your voice out there online consistently with a consistent, thoughtful message will be much more efficient, i.e., it will save you time in your day, week, month, year, and it will be much more impactful because, again, going back to the niches thing, like people will know what to come to you for and what not to come to you for. So marketing, invest in this channel, make sure you're investing time in marketing, but don't confuse marketing with sales. Going out and letting people know about your business, standing up in front of that chamber group, that's not selling. Calling people on the phone and asking them who currently provides their payroll service and if they'd be open to talking about how you can do it better. That's sales. Showing up at somebody's office and asking them if they can sit down with you for a few minutes, that's sales. I know each of those things made some of your hearts stop when I said reaching out to other humans that are not expecting your call or your drop-in. That is sales though. And yes, it is hard. And yes, it is not sexy. Uh, there's a lot of no, there's a lot of rejection, but again, that's why the salespeople get paid the big bucks. And that's what you as the founder, the leader in the organization, have to be the best salesperson in the organization. And that's why, you know, it's funny because I made an episode as a response to one of our marketing clients who was asking about, you know, hey, how do I get those first few sales? How do I get more sales? There's a great episode. We'll link it in the show notes. It's our most listened to episode. But I basically gave the blueprint for how to go out and get the sales engine running. And I can tell you with with a high level of clarity that the person did not follow that advice. And 90% of the people who listen to that episode will not follow the blueprint that I've laid out there. But the 10% that do will see the results and will see more sales coming in the door. Again, marketing is not sales, y'all. Know the difference. Know that sales is a proactive outbound strategy to try to get new customers. That's it. It is not posting on LinkedIn. It is not sending, you know, well, part of it is sending direct messages, but that's a whole other thing. So you've got to have 3 lead channels to be able to make sure that you can grow your business. For us, those lead channels are inbound through our search engine optimization. They're outbound through cold email and cold calling. And then they're partnership programs, which we'll talk about more here in just a moment. So along the same lines of confusion, the next mistake is people make as we start to talk about growing your business, uh, particularly payroll industry, doesn't matter what industry you're in, you've got to know the difference between hiring and recruiting. So hiring is I post a job on Indeed, I post a job on LinkedIn, and I wait for candidates to come to me, and I select one of those candidates and I hire them. So this is the very common path that most of us take when looking for new people. And obviously, you know, you might get lucky and get a referral in there. 60 to 70% of hires are made from referrals. So it'd be wonderful if you did, because then you've got that level of trust that someone who you trust referred you to someone. And that helps to make sure that that relationship has a higher level of potential for success. But now recruiting is the opposite. It's, again, it's marketing versus sales. It's inbound versus outbound. Recruiting is me going out and finding candidates who are not currently looking for work and trying to pull them into my organization. And so this means doing that direct LinkedIn outreach. This means, you know, getting more intentional with how you ask for referrals for candidates and the amount of time that you spend recruiting can be a lot. So you've got to have a system and a process. And this is one where I definitely have my VAs jump in and help me with it. But you've got to know the difference. Like, when you're— when you need somebody, go recruit exactly what you need. Don't sit back and wait for the right hire to show up at your doorstep, because more often than not, they will not. And that leads me directly into one of the other huge mistakes I've made, and that's not hiring experienced people. Man, this one, and there's a lot to this. So this doesn't mean I've got to hire a former ADP sales rep to sell for me, somebody who has both payroll industry knowledge and sales knowledge. It means I've got to pick one of those two buckets. They've either got to have industry knowledge or they've got to know the discipline inside and out. So what I don't want to do is hire somebody who's never sold before and is not familiar with our industry to try to sell payroll services. That's a recipe for failure. Now, it could be a long-term recipe for success, and if you're listening to this and you have 50+ people, yes, maybe that is a path for you. You can bring somebody in as an intern, you can, you can vet them through the process. That's a different animal. I'm talking to my folks with less than 50 people. If you bring somebody in, they better know one of the two things: they better know the industry, or they better know the job. Uh, you cannot train them to do both when you're smaller, you will burn too much cash. Pay the extra money for the person who has the experience and you will save cash in the long run, guaranteed. So again, make sure you don't have to teach them both industry and role function. One or the other is the choice sometimes. And then that's a whole other debate of, you know, do I want that person, you know, implementation specialist from ADP? Personally, I don't want both. That's where it kind of falls apart is I want half of that equation. I want them to have either industry knowledge or the role knowledge. I don't really want to try to break somebody's bad habits that's been, uh, especially at a company that's, you know, 100x our size or whatever it is. I'm not looking for that, but. All right. So next up, you've got to have a grade of B or better across the board in each of the core disciplines of running a company. So we're talking finance, sales, customer service, product development, um, you know, all the different stuff that it takes to, to run a company— hiring, talent management, you know, recruiting, all the things— you've got to try to get to a B or better. And you don't need to have straight A's, but you've got to have a process in place, for example, for performance management for your team. You've got to have a process in place for onboarding. You've got to have a process in place for onboarding your customers. You've got to have a process in place for customer service. Too often people are really, really good at a couple things and everything else just kind of sucks, you've got to make sure that you're lifting the level of the entire organization, even the things that you don't like as much, and just trying to get it up to that B level. Your weaknesses are what will kill you. If you've got A's in customer service and, you know, finance, but you've got a D in marketing and a D in sales. You're not going to be able to attract new customers and bring them in the board. So it doesn't matter how good your product and your service are, you're gonna die. So just make sure that you're focusing on your weaknesses and trying to improve them. All right, this next one, man, this one, uh, old episode with Paul Abel, uh, we kind of went all over the place on this, but Paul is, is kind of one of the many data points where I realized this to be true. Which is you cannot expect the person doing the thing to also be the person that writes the process and puts the process in place. So for example, you know, you hire an implementation specialist, you say, great, not only are you going to implement the, you know, the 10 new clients a month that we bring on, you're also going to improve the project management systems and improve the processes and, you know, put all the training in place. It won't work. It won't work. I've just— I've hired too many people at every position. If they can put the process in place, they can't work it at the same time. If they can work the process, they can't create it at the same time. It's just not going to happen. And if they do, it's built for them and not for anybody else. That's the other thing, right? So when it does happen, it's a great little process for that person. And then the next person can't follow it, can't understand it, doesn't agree with it. So either put the processes in place yourself or bring in an outside third party, a contractor, an agency, whatever it might be to help you outline, document the processes, and then have your teammates follow the processes. Do not expect them to create them themselves. All right. So going back, I guess I already hit on this one, value of peers. I think this is one that across the board, you know, it's funny because Jason is our Director of Client Success. He's been here over 4 years. He's my right-hand dude. Love him. We, we talk a lot and we almost always are talking about problems, right? So that's a, you know, maybe not a mistake, but something worth mentioning is there, there comes a point in the growth of the business where really the only thing that sees your plate on a daily basis are problems. And so getting comfortable with that uncomfort or discomfort of knowing that, hey, that your biggest client that's super upset, guess who they want to talk to? They want to talk to you., you know, your employees that are unhappy, they're going to want your time. Like, whatever the problem is, it requires your attention once it gets to be a big enough burning fire. Uh, but so one of the things I say all that to say is like, you know, we've kind of got some frameworks for thinking about how to solve a problem. And one of the things in there is what do our peers do? And so we'll almost always reach out to a couple of our peers. Thankfully, you know, again, going back to the IPPA, and I'm also a part of a mastermind group through Founder's Circle., that helps me to have peers to talk to, to help solve problems and help to, think about things in a different way or just confirm, you know, sometimes there's a little confirmation bias in there, but I almost always, bounce things off of peers. And so I go all the way back to the beginning, man. One of the first things I did, you know, 10 years ago was start reaching out to other people that own payroll companies all around the country. Just to bend their ear. And still to this day, you know, we call each other, we talk to each other frequently about what's going on in our business. How are you solving this problem? Who are you using for this service? What vendor do you like for that? Network with your peers. Make it intentional. Be better about it. Make sure that you have a strong network of people that you can bounce things off of when things are not going well or when they are going well. All right, some of y'all are gonna laugh when you hear the next, uh, mistake in— as you're like, yo, didn't I just hear a commercial for Underdog Digital? Don't you own that business too? Um, yes, yes I do. I own a couple of companies. I serve on about 5 boards. I coach multiple youth sports teams. I'm at my kids' school events. I am a loving husband. I'm a faithful servant of Jesus Christ. I'm a lot of things. So that's why this one is the hardest for me, and that's focus. But I think it goes back earlier to the services side of the business, right? So a lot of folks coming out and they think the answer to not enough sales, not enough revenue is more services. Focus on one thing, one market at a time, right? So focus— I love the acronym Follow One Course Until Success. And it's funny because this is what we do with our marketing clients at Underdog Digital that has made us so successful. It's interesting. We just brought on a new client over there last month and they actually got it. I think this might be the first time we've been able to help a client get new business directly related to something we did inside the first month. So signed contracts inside the first 30 days, which is a dope feeling. And ironically, I'm not sure if they appreciate it as much as we did. But, uh, they're like, yeah, man, that's what we pay for, marketing. Like, of course you got us new business in the first 30 days. How'd that work out with your last 6 agencies? Anywho, so one of the things we do in that process is we're like, look, we're gonna pick one of your services to one market first, right? And then we're going to expand on that. So for the first 90 days, we're talking to one specific avatar about one specific product or service to make sure that we get that voice, we get that, we get everything down and we understand it really well. And then that way we can get traction faster. If we tried to, you know, let's say we came into Guru and we, we tried to talk to, you know, nonprofits about the PEO, we tried to talk to tech companies about payroll, we tried to talk to, um, you know, white label, uh, CPAs about how to provide white label payroll services to their clients. It would get very confusing very quickly. So focus, follow one course until success. That can be in sprints throughout the year. So 90 days at a time. Hey, look, we're going to focus on this one market segment with this one product for the next 90 days. It can be 30 days at a time. Back at ADP, we used to do campaigns once a month that were focused on a specific product to a specific market. That's it. Maybe it was 401 that month to, you know, hospitality industry. Focus doesn't have to be for 10 years at a time. It just has to be until the job is done. Don't bail early. This one I posted the other day. I think generally speaking, as like a human, as a professional, one of the biggest skills that I've slept on. So this is a coming from someone who has a, I have an associate's degree in technical writing and a business degree. And I've always enjoyed writing. I've written a book. I've written, you know, hundreds of blog posts. I've written, um, you know, I would say it's ironic, I'm not a great technical writer. That was many years ago. But one of the things I wish I would have focused on earlier in my career and much earlier in this, uh, journey as an entrepreneur is copywriting. And not just writing, uh, copywriting. So copywriting is meant to captivate a reader. It is meant to— every line serves one sole purpose, and that's to get the reader to read next line. And what you can do when you can write great copy, I mean, man, you can sell your ideas, you can sell your concepts, you can convince your teammates, you can, you can ultimately just come through much cleaner in the written word, which helps you to be a better leader, helps you to drive more new business. It helps your team to better understand the vision of the company. It has exponential impact. And one of the things that I've started recently doing that I wish again I would have done 10 years ago is copywork. So if you think about what, you know, if you're, if you're like me, you play some, some guitar or an instrument. Well, what do you do when you first learn an instrument? You learn somebody else's songs, right? You do cover songs. So I like to play. I joke that I can play about 15 different versions of Plush by Stone Temple Pilots because it's the first song I ever learned on the guitar and one of the very few that I know. When I'm saying I play play the guitar. Let me just, let me just quantify that with very poorly and very rarely. Uh, but the, uh, but so the thing is we don't often do that in other areas of our life. But in copywork, what you do is, is before you start any writing session, you literally just sit down and handwrite and copy somebody else's work for 15 minutes. And you try to do that with somebody that you enjoy their work, or it's the style of writing that you're going for with what you're writing today, or maybe it's even about the topic. Topic. So for example, I was getting ready to write recently about the recent updates to the salary exemption. And I just sat down and copied another article. And I didn't really like the style of the article. I didn't really like, you know, the way that they formatted it, but it got me thinking about what I do like, how I want to format mine. And, you know, I've already got some of those frameworks as well that I can use that I can pull off the shelf at any given time. If I need to write a social post, a blog post, if I need to respond to something orally, I know that I can use some copywork— or excuse me, copywriting frameworks that are going to help me to answer much clearer and deliver a message and a story that's going to stick with somebody a lot longer than maybe just, uh, simply answering in a direct fashion. So learn copywriting. It is an invaluable skill, and you could make millions simply by being a great writer. And great writing is great thinking. So So if you're thinking well, you should be writing well as well. All right. Next up, right before we're going to get into a couple of bonuses here at the end is the people who got you here won't get you there. This is a hard thing to say out loud, but a truth that needs to be said in that the people that were with you when you were, you know, 20 clients, 50 clients, 100 clients, and, you know, were kind of— you're shooting from the hip and didn't have any processes and they loved it that way. Are not going to be the same people that are going to be there when you've got 1,000 clients and, you know, your well-defined processes, well-defined roles, they're going to struggle to make that move and that adjustment into a different world. Businesses go through iterations and through different phases of growth, and it's very hard for people to adjust that were there for the previous phase. And, you know, the biggest challenge there that I see is that people are too reluctant to move on. Whereas in reality, you know, we all know the 36 hours of pain that comes anytime we have to separate employment with a teammate. It's never fun, never good for anybody, but almost always best for both parties in the long term. So just make sure you're being honest with yourself. That is one thing. If you're, you know, we've got a million different ways of managing performance. I do like the EOS get it, want it, capacity to do it. Now that's not how we really assess our teammates on an ongoing basis, quarterly, annually. But it is like a nice eye test to say like, all right, does this person get it? Like, do they understand what the role— what the outcomes of the role are supposed to be? Do they want it? Do they really want it? Do they want to be in this seat? Like, is it meaningful to them? And do they have the capacity or ability to do the job? And if they don't check all three boxes, like, can you get them there or will that not happen? Now you've got relatively much easier decisions to make when determining whether or not somebody should stay on your team or in a role. And don't forget, people can sometimes move to other roles inside the organization as you grow as well. They may just be in the wrong seat on the bus. All right. So a couple of other things just to touch on real quick. And these aren't necessarily mistakes that you've made, but just things to remember, right? So nothing happens until somebody sells something. I don't know why early stage founders and even just companies as they grow just have this aversion to sales. Like, sales is a bad word, man. Like, it's almost like the, you know, we still got this old connotation of a used car salesman or something with salesman. I'll tell you right now, again, you talk about that attrition math, you talk about what, 90% of businesses go out of business within the first 5 years. Like, if you don't get out and sell something, nothing's going to happen. Happen. And guess what cures all your ails? More sales, baby. Go get some. Um, and one of my favorite ways to sell is 1 1 11. And so that means through partners. Again, this can't be your primary— I mean, it can certainly be one of your primary strategies, but, uh, for those people out there that are only waiting back for referrals to come in from partners, you better have a dang good partner program, and you better be incredibly intentional about nurturing those partner relationships and have a bunch of Otherwise, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna struggle to defeat the 10% attrition, let alone continue to grow. Delegation. So a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with delegation, but I love this term by— the heck is his name? The guy from SaaS Academy, Dan Martell. 80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome. I like it when he puts it this way, just because it gets— it breaks down that wall of, oh, they can't do it as well as I can. Nobody can do it as well as I can. Yeah, you've got to determine, like, are you going to be Jiro Dreams of Sushi in that you want to make sushi rolls for the rest of your life, make sure everyone's perfect, pushing every chair, and have the smallest, you know, most pristine cafe in the world? Or are you going to be, you know, your regional chain that's going to have multiple stores and you're going to be able to step up and lead and manage and make sure that, you know, the processes are followed. You're going to manage systems of processes, not people, or somewhere in between, that's fine. But you got to learn how to delegate. And then finally, the last one, man, the office space doesn't really matter that much. Stop wasting money on expensive office space, y'all. Like, it's fine once you hit some level of scale, and, you know, it's a— it's, it's just such a smaller percentage of your revenue that you can allocate towards good space. But especially right now with the hybrid environment, it's becoming less and less important. We've always cut costs on office space and we've never had anybody leave or not come to us because of, uh, the office space that we're in, which somewhat resembles my college dorm, uh, maybe slightly cleaner, maybe. But that is 20-something mistakes, things to avoid, lessons learned, if you will, with Growing Guru over the last 10 years would welcome your additions to the list or your things that you say, ah, hey, you know, there's that. That's not something I'd be too worried about. As always, you can ping me at matt@guru.co. Leave a comment on the post when we share this online. Comment on your favorite provider of choice, Spotify, podcasts, wherever you listen to it. Thank you so much for tuning in. Make sure to leave us a review. I appreciate you. Have a wonderful day.