Episode 173: Make the Most of Your Metrics with Dan Fagella

So my parents got an iPad. I bought it for my mom and dad. My dad's turning 90 soon. You guys heard this movie?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's. He sits at home all the time, and he one day, out of the blue goes, I'm ready for an iPad. I'm like, okay, so I'll get for you. He never. He never uses now just sits there.

The time is now.

The time is now. I'm ready for an iPad. It just sits there. But I got him on FaceTime. And so I had them FaceTime. My sister, she's up in Connecticut, and my parents. My mom and dad are sitting there. They put the iPad on the table, and they're looking at my sister going, this is truly remarkable, Mike. All she can see is the fan above just spinning. And she's like, dad, pick it up. Pick up what? The iPad. What iPad? It was a disaster. Finally he figures it out, and now it's, like, pointing at his. Like his man boobs. And then. Well, I'm telling you. And then he's. He gets. He can't get the thing angled right. Finally he gets the angle right. He goes, okay, I'm done, and hangs up on her.

It's phenomenal.

Very sweet.

Can I not say man boobs?

Well, I think that's a little disrespectful about your dad.

I don't mean to Listen, every man has boobs or the man's boobs. Yeah, I'm not. I didn't say man's saggy boobs, if that's what you were thinking.

No, of course not. On that note, you're listening to the Profit first podcast, episode 171.

Oh. Oh, Daniel, I hear you. Oh, there he is.

There he is.

Nicely do. Nicely done.

Yeah. Welcome, everyone, to the Profit first podcast. I'm your co host, Christina Bolda.

And I'm Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit first and co owner in Profit First Professionals. You know, and I'm joined in the studio too, by the co host to the co host. Co host Kelsey Ayers.

Hey, everybody.

And you, my friends, you're listening to the Profit first podcast, where we talk about man boobs, obviously, and offend people and other things to talk about are, like, you know, profitability. And that's what we'll be focusing on today. In fact, never think about metrics or dashboards. I'm sure you have, but you do them right. I bet you you don't. And do you do it in a way that drives profitability? I suspect you don't. At least I don't. We're going to learn how to do that today with Daniel, so.

Yeah, man. And you know where you can find us? Google Play, stitcher, tunein radio, itunes, any podcaster, and of course, profit first podcast dot com.

Yeah. And make sure you subscribe.

Yeah, man.

Don't just download us one time. Have us forever.

Forever.

So what have you all been up to? Come.

Exciting.

I work a lot.

I actually have a very unexciting life.

Really?

Can we talk about your break? I know I'm really pushing the limit today.

We can talk about it.

So you're back on the market now, so to speak. Yeah. How are you going to navigate? Like, are you. Are you actively seeking someone to date or you're like, whatever.

No, I'm avoiding it.

Really? You're, like, such a catch. Like, why are you.

Oh, that's very sweet.

I mean, that sounds a little creepy, too, but. No, but why are you avoiding it?

I don't know. I think it's hard for me to balance my own personal goals and a relationship. So for now, I'm just going to focus on my own personal goals and then. Which is really cool that, like, you know, when the timing is right, it all kind of works.

Oh, yeah. And it will. But that your goals are pretty big. I mean, you're going to get that property, substantial acreage, put up this house, build a business or have your business below it. It's pretty freaking cool.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it's exciting and it's time consuming and. Yeah, everything is fun time. Yeah. Focus my energy on that and. And not really be distracted.

Yeah. Good for you.

I think that's fantastic.

What have you been up to, Cabela?

Lish?

Packing. We're moving again. I feel like I move, like, every year.

Y. Yeah.

But no, we made the very tough decision to move in with Alex's parents to save some money. So that saves us a big chunk every month. And I'm hoping to have to be credit card debt free within six months. And then we're hoping to save up so that hopefully a year and a year and a half, we can actually have a down payment for a house.

Yeah. Make it a reality, I think. Yeah, I think it's the smartest decision. I think our ego gets in the way.

We're like, Yeah, I agree 100%.

Right. We live to the maximum of our income and we get overwhelmed. I think it's a great decision. I'm proud of you.

Thank you. Yeah, it's gonna be tough.

Miserable.

I like to Think of it as, like personal character building, though.

Yeah.

Your ability to navigate those relationships and it builds strength on a level.

Yeah. It's definitely a test to our relationship, given their history and they've grown. Like his relationship with his mom has become a lot stronger. So I'm hoping this time around it'll be a little different. And his sister's not in the house anymore, but. Shut up.

Well, it's the mother.

I'm the light of his life, the mother.

You are, but it's the mother, daughter in law. It never works out, ever.

Well, thanks, guys.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Sorry, I didn't mean. No. Did you know you had a mother in law? You were married.

It's tough, right?

It is.

Very tough. Very tough.

My mother, I feel like even in.

The best circumstances, it's still very tricky.

Like my mother and my sister, the relationship is strong. My mother and her daughter in law. My wife.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

I know.

And I feel stuck in the middle.

Exactly. Exactly.

The weird thing to me is. And I'm not putting down my family in any way. And I love my mother and I'm. Her and I are very close, but.

We'Ll say whatever you want because I'm not recording this.

No, nobody's gonna. I. We do. We have a very good. We have a very good connection. She looks. I mean, I don't want to say anything bad about his sister, but his sister is very different from me. And I think she. She looks at me like I am a daughter. And I mean, we've never had the mom does conflict. Yeah. Okay, so I'm. I'm very happy about that. I'm just more worried about her and Alex rather than heard me.

Oh, I see.

You know, I see. But we'll see.

All right. Well, I. It's an impressive move. I'm proud of you.

Thank you.

I agree.

Yeah. Shut up.

Okay, fine.

That was just one.

Enough talking.

That's the first thing Alex's gonna say to his mom when he walks in. Mom, where's my peanut butter and jelly? Shut up. Without the cross. Exactly. I'm hungry. God, Mom.

Oh, we're off the track.

Okay, so what else we gotta talk about?

Shout out hotline.

Oh, yeah. So this is. We also have that listener mail. We're gonna do that a little later. Yeah. So we have a shout out. Do we. Do we have a recording of a shout out? Oh, we don't.

We do have a shout out, though. So this comes from Tyrion Clark. He said, I think it's Tyrone by The way Tyrone listening to Game of Thrones.

It's not Tyrion.

Tyron. I don't know. I want to Game of Thrones, like binge watching.

Tyrone. Tyrion.

I don't know.

It's so funny.

Cause you bust my Kelsey every time I say a word wrong. Like this morning I said, oh, I think that's a xylophone. She's like, no, it's an accordion. Every time you jump on me, she says taronian or whatever. And you're like, oh, that's right.

Kelsey and I have a very special connection. So anyway, this comes from Mr. Clark.

Yeah.

He says he's just committed to profitability after reviewing their January to August 2017 and they already found an average of $4,600 per month in expenses that can be dropped immediately. He can't believe how much money was being wasted. And he keeps thinking about how many more customers that they needed before they can make a profit. So he says they're starting a new business soon and with everything being set up, they're going to be profitable right from the beginning.

That 4, $600, that's insane.

That's unbelievable. Tyrone. Good mover. Tyronian or whatever. No, Tyrone. Tyrone, no. That was excellent, man. Good. Good. Also, we do have a shout out line. Why don't you call us and tell us how you've eradicated profitability, just like Tyrone has. Call us at 844-876-7221. It's a recorded line. Don't worry. No one's gonna answer live. Call in, get the recording and leave us your message. We wanna play over the air and plug your business like. Let's get you some more business. Okay. I wanna thank our corporate partners for making the show a reality.

Yes.

Fundbox. Which I gotta sort out the whole deal now. They may be sponsors, May not be. I may have messed it up. I don't know. Is awesome. We'll talk about them in a minute. Nextiva voiceover IP phone system receipt bank and I think that's it. Right. Okay. There was another one that did like a short run with this.

The Three Amigos.

The Trace Amigos. Okay. I think we're ready to go into it, right?

Okay.

Yeah.

It's been a little while. We haven't recorded a month. His name is Daniel Fagella and he is the CEO. I got it right. I always mess up names. He's the CEO and founder of Tech Emergence. The only market research and company discovery platform focused exclusively on artificial intelligence and machine learning, which you guys did. Not know this. I studied that in college.

Oh, cool.

My major was artificial intelligence, or what they called neural networks back then. He sold his first business for six figures, second business for seven figures, and both served as economic fuel for tech emergence. I put an awkward pause in there because I was gonna make a joke about, like, eight figures, but I couldn't think of anything.

Okay.

I don't know.

It was just awkward.

I know. It's just an awkward pause. A couple things you may not know. He bootstrapped his company to 2 million plus. To 2 million plus within four years. That's amazing. He sold a company for a million bucks with 90% cash up front. Let me tell you, that's a lot of money. That's the way you should do it. And he self funded his own Silicon Valley venture with the said exit money, which is extraordinarily impressive. Well, we'll talk to the man himself. Daniel, welcome to the show.

Michael, glad to be here. Can you hear me all right?

Yeah, we can hear you. The audience go crazy. Yeah.

Wow. The studio audience is just going nuts. That's excellent.

Yeah. Yeah.

I've learned so much about you guys in the last 10 minutes. I'm, like, way up to speed on everybody's personal life. I feel like I'm totally ready to rock and roll, man.

Our new best friend.

I know, it's kind of awkward. We share a lot.

We do, we do.

You know what was super cool, though? So we just had our profit con, our ANN conference, and so many people felt like they knew me already just because of the podcast.

And I love that.

It was, like a starting point, you know, far beyond what I would normally have.

It is unbelievable. But they know a lot of personal stuff, like, oh, how's your boyfriend? Yeah, how's this? Oh, how's the house? You know, is he still doing the firefighting? You know? So, Daniel, let's get to the topic we want to discuss.

Yeah.

You're a huge advocate for metrics and dashboards. Why are you a fan of it? And what is a metric in a dashboard?

Sure. Yeah. So I learned a lot of hard lessons like you, Mike, by doing things the wrong way.

Thank you for putting it.

It hasn't spurned me to write any excellent books, but it spurned me to try to keep some of the money I make. And so metrics and dashboards are essentially just a way of keeping track of those core numbers that lead to what I know. You know, you're a big fan of your profit, so what are the actual elements of your Business and sort of the major sub departments or divisions, even if it's only you as one person, what are the sort of activity categories that have some kind of quantifiable number that you know, almost unquestionably directly lead ultimately to that profit? So how can we distill those, how can we keep looking at those to make sure that we're sort of guiding profit in the right direction? So metrics are about kind of an extension, the desire for profit by looking at kind of the causal and correlative numbers that really take you there in customer service and marketing, in sales, etc.

What's the difference between metrics and a dashboard?

Or dashboards? Yeah, I think metrics, Mike. Well, first and foremost there's bad metrics and there's good metrics and I'll try to talk through some of the hard lessons I've had to have in discerning between the two. But a metric would be some number with some known source of truth that sort of correlates to something within your business. So a metric could be anything, could be how many support tickets did we get a day on average in the last week, in the last month? It could be how much money did we make with that last promotional email in terms of top line revenue? A metric could be anything. A dashboard, though, Mike, and this is a tougher challenge is which of those metrics do I need to keep in front of my face to make sure that I like, you know, pay rent and stuff? So which of those is actually relevant enough to maintain in front of, you know, the team's eyeballs to really guide our action? So metrics is a little bit open ended. A dashboard has to do with that very challenging task of prioritization, which as you're scaling a six figure and then a seven figure business, you've really got to start thinking pretty ardently about which of those are going to be critical to maintaining profitability while you're trying to double yourself every year.

Okay, so metrics, it sounds like a business could have an infinite number of metrics, but a singular dashboard, it sounds like, Daniel, you're cherry picking the right metrics for your business.

Yeah, I think everybody has to. For example, Mike, if you look at even kind of your own business, and I don't know all the various and sundry ins and outs here, but you've got all sorts of stuff that you could potentially look at. I mean, you have all of your professionals and you probably have pipeline for signing those folks up. You have some degree of sort of matching Those professionals to customers. And, you know, if you have too many professionals, not enough customers, that's bad. Too many customers, not enough professionals, that bad. You sort of got to balance both sides of that coin there. You know, you probably have some metrics around, potentially traffic and, you know, from what I gather, book sales is a little bit more of a marketing thing. But all that probably fits somewhere into sort of what, you know, feeding your kids looks like. And I imagine there are some things that are sort of more and some things that are less important. And kind of the critical numbers, if you want to grow and profit, are ones that you sort of have to think through on your own. And I certainly went through a lot of hard lessons of picking the wrong numbers or picking them based on the wrong sources of data. And it takes a little while to get it right. But yeah, you're right. There's an infinite number of metrics. But if you do it right, maybe there's a dozen that are basically, if you look at them week over week, day over day, are going to be the difference between a profitable month and a non profitable month.

You know, as you're using the term dashboard, what comes to mind is the car's dashboard. You know, we use metrics all the time when we're driving. Here you have the speedometer, the odometer. Give me another thermometer. But, you know, there's some things that are highly relevant, the speedometer. But maybe your car does have a thermometer. It's not really nearly as relevant. But, Dan, I'm thinking of a car, you know, it has, what, six or seven critical things in front of you? And the speedometer being the most critical, arguably is the biggest. Do we do the same thing in our business? Do we pick the set we want? Do we actually emphasize more on some and less on others? How does it work out in the real business?

Yeah, totally. So if you want, Mike, I can kind of go through the process of determining it, which is actually harder than sort of one single piece of advice. But I can give you like the. I smashed my face into the wall to try to break seven figures and kind of figured out how to distill the right numbers process.

Yeah. Lay it on me.

Nice. I'll whip it out there. So.

Oh, Jesus, no. For God's sake. Hold on one second. Okay, now whip it out. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The mood. I know.

I like the meme reference. People don't know that tune. People don't know that.

Yeah, yeah, it was pretty quick, right?

You Guys are nimble and a little too suggestive. But you know what?

I'm just let it be known that was the two ladies who first said, oh, my God, don't do it.

Okay, yeah, we have no boundaries here.

I'll run with it. No, no, I'll have to bear that in mind. I'll watch my language around you folks. But yeah, so I'll kind of go into it. Our business, Mike, Science of Skill, which was my last e commerce company, was really based around and predicated on email marketing and marketing automation. So. So marketing automation is kind of my thing. Being able to sort of tie metrics and dashboards to email and marketing automation for e commerce sales and particularly subscription sales, which is the reason we were able to get 90% cash down on the company. Those are sort of the things I need to track. Now, when you first get going, the tendency is to say like, okay, well, you know, let's just kind of look at revenue every week. Or, you know, let's just kind of look at how many people we have on the email list. Or let's just kind of look at. And you sort of want to take whatever first comes to mind as things that maybe you feel like you should be tracking.

Right?

Because everybody says, Mike, I mean, you've read enough business books and probably written enough business books like, oh, you have to kind of know your key numbers. You should be tracking stuff. So you sort of feel like, okay, I should be tracking things, but it ends up being kind of a back of a napkin exercise that isn't really strategic. So you're sort of. I know for me, off the bat, it was, okay, well, how many people are on the email list and what was our revenue and what was our total refunds and how many current active subscribers do we have? And, you know, maybe that was about it. Right. And the issue is that if this process isn't done strategically, those numbers end up not being all that useful. So I can kind of walk you through kind of the bigger brainstorm on coming down to the right ones and being able to kind of test them and make sure that they work.

That'd be great. So, but first step is, it sounds like it's somewhat arbitrary. Make your best guesstimate of what the metrics are and start tracking that. Is that step one.

You're totally right. Here's kind of what I would advise to go a little bit farther than that. So you're right. It is completely arbitrary off the bat, or not completely, but it is somewhat rough to get a firm estimate of sort of what are the exact things you should track? The way that I did it, when I started doing it right, is I took the folks and if you're listening to this and it's just you or just you and one other person, then it's a pretty small meeting. But for me, you know, I maybe only had three other core team members at the time, so it was just me and three guys. But the process was to have everybody come together and say, hey, you know, what are the absolutely mission critical metrics within sort of your department, Marcus? And let's say at that time Marcus was focusing on customer service. And let's say Tim, who is my right hand man in science of skill, let's say Tim was focused on our email marketing, both internal and our external paid media, and let's say maybe Dylan was focused on, you know, handling our refund processes and merchant accounts and things like that. So we would sit down for maybe half an hour, 45 minutes and really map out what do we think would be the critical handful, limiting ourselves as much as possible, what are the critical handful and why? And make arguments for them and then sort of go around person to person and sort of test and poke and prod those. Say, are those really the customer service metrics we should track? Or do you think we should look at a rolling four weeks so that we're not getting spooked out by week over week numbers? Because those could just be kind of misleading. Or hey, do you think that we should look at this version of sort of our subscription revenue or should we also include these things? So kind of test and poke and prod and do that upfront thinking? Because what happens otherwise, Mike, is you do that strategic thinking when you look at the numbers. So you come around to Monday metrics meeting day and you look at the numbers, you say, you know, should we be tracking something different? And that's not. You don't really want to be second guessing your car's dashboard every time you drive. You sort of want to build as good of a car as you can. So the process is to really think strategically about those critical numbers and then stick with them and run with them. And the one other caveat with that, Mike, and actually there's kind of two other caveats, is to know your source of truth. So interestingly enough, I'm sure you might see plenty of folks who define revenue in a way that's different than the way you would define revenue.

Right? I agree.

Or would define anything in their business different than you would define anything. Right? Maybe, maybe when it comes to customer service requests, they're not counting chat, they're only counting email. Maybe when it comes to, you know, website visitors, they're using Google Analytics instead of, you know, the, you know, the mix panel metrics that they also have plugged in. And if, and if we don't know what the coherent source of truth is for each one of these data points, then we're a little bit in trouble. So for us, we would not only have kind of what's the metric, but what's the exact source of truth there. And that's kind of the first swing and there is a step after that, but I'm happy to clarify kind of this initial strategic setup step if there's anything you want to dive into.

Yeah, let's summarize what we learned here and you two step in if you have a thought. But so what I heard is you start off with your almost the best guess, but you refine it down, work with your team, determine what their critical performance metric is basically their primary job, and that maybe will help us find the metric for them in the different capacities they're serving your business. Then run with those numbers. So you come with a compilation now of numbers. I'd love to know from you how many. But then once you have this compilation of numbers, then know what those numbers mean. Meaning revenue can be defined by different companies different ways. So it has to be your definition of the truth, as you put it. But how many numbers do I is that accurate what I shared and then how many numbers are the right amount of numbers?

Yes. So it is accurate what you shared. And the right amount of numbers I think will vary. I tended to look at a bunch. So each individual section of our business, whether it be from marketing or let's say broadcast emails internally or external emails that we would purchase, we would maybe even have upwards of a dozen. And we had somebody in the Far east who would enter these in every week because Infusionsoft didn't have APIs at the time. And it was kind of a long story, but regardless. But we would ultimately be able to boil down those numbers into just two, that maybe each major sort of department, so to speak. And this was a pretty lean company. It was a $2 million business, but we didn't have that many full time employees to just two. That sort of each individual kind of segment of the business would ultimately be responsible for. And I can even go through some of those examples, what that looks like. Customer service. Cool. So one thing I'll throw on, on Top of this, Mike, is that I would be remiss to say that I'm so smart, I knew exactly what these two were off the bat. That would be sort of misleading your audience into thinking that I have some kind of premonition ability that I certainly do not have, Mike, so wouldn't mislead anybody there. The process, how this works, you come up with as good of a guess as you can based on the people who handle and manage those areas of the business, what they think, and then juggling the idea with your team. The other thing that this does, Mike, and you're as aware of this as I am, is you really want to be able to have folks on your team kind of have some degree of ownership in what they're doing. If you kind of hand down on the golden tablets, what are the numbers you're responsible for, it sort of feels a little bit, you know, more begrudging to be held accountable to those than if it's your own brain power. That said, hey, I'm a team member, too, and I believe that this is what the business should be contributing to. So that whole exercise of pulling in everybody's brain, I think is useful across the board for a team. But once you do that, Mike, what's going to happen is you're going to show up on your first week where you look at those metrics, and you're going to. You know, you have to be having at least one metrics meeting every week with your team, and you can determine who needs to be there. But you're going to run into those metrics, you're going to read through them, you're going to read through them a second week, you're going to read through them a third week, and you're going to have a couple questions. You're going to say, oh, man, is that even the right. Should we be using Mixpanel all along because it correlates to our conversion data? Should we be using this other way of calculating revenues that also includes previous subscription stuff that we refunded, because this is kind of inaccurate. So you're going to bump into those. And the best thing to do, and I made this mistake early on, is not try to dig through your numbers for three hours with the whole team and fix it on the spot, but to jot it down somewhere so that you can go in the back and maybe have a meeting with two or three core team members and see if you need to refine those metrics, but have everybody on a level of understanding that this is a living breathing process. When we come up with an area that would tangibly be better to improve and to tweak and to modulate our metrics, then go ahead and get a cluster of the folks involved in that metric area together and we can go ahead and decide if we want to add something new or tweak our source of truth or adjust the metrics that we're looking at. But that ironing out process that I just articulated, Mike, might be a three or six month process from your initial dashboard, but once you've ironed it out and figured out all the kinks, then you get to a mode of really cruising where all of those odometers, as you so tactfully put it, are really tying to things that actually matter in the business. So when I do go over these metrics that really matter for us, I want you to know that this is something that our whole team was putting their heads together. And every single Monday for three months, somebody would have a little idea of how to make it a bit better. And I think your audience will have the same experience if they do it right.

Now let me ask you a question before you go into those metrics, please. Do you track and compare meaning or track and analyze? You report a number once a week or whatever it is? Are you putting this into a spreadsheet or something so you can look at the historical performance of that metric or is it just you show the number, you make a decision based upon it and then there's a fresh slate each time.

Totally, totally spreadsheet. Now there's all kinds of awesome software that can turn spreadsheets into really pretty graphs. And I'm doing that with my current business now, but with science of scale with the E Commerce company, which we were able to grow pretty quickly and do what I needed to do with it, which is sell it for cash. It was really just spreadsheets. It was actually Google sheets, Mike. So primarily we were looking at stacked week over week. If we were looking at email deliverability for a certain segment, for example, stacked week over week, how well has this been performing? And we could hypothetically scroll back a year, but we would hide those cells. So we would generally only be looking at about the last three or four months. But yes, we would look at the full blown historical for almost every single metric that we track to give you an answer there.

Gotcha. Okay, now I'm really interested in what metrics you use because I'm thinking the ones we use here are not necessarily the best ones. We're just doing because we have the habit of doing it. What are the ones you're using? What do you recommend?

Sure. And again, Mike, I think it's really important to note that that process in the beginning that I mentioned, of taking the core processes of your business and then distilling that into metrics, our business was really kind of email marketing, marketing automation heavy. That's kind of what I specialize in, what I write about, do interviews about and the rest of the stuff. Your business is going to be a bit different. I know you guys have your professional wing and that's, you know, but I'll give you a representative set of what they look like for our business. And I'll also tie those while I'm explaining to Mike and the gang. Mike and the gang. I'll call you guys.

Nicely done.

It fits with the whiz bang attitude that you guys should step in with already, which is just a beautiful thing. So, yeah, I'll also explain, in addition to the metrics, I'll talk about its relevance to my business because I very much wouldn't want to say, hey, this is one that you need. But I will say, hey, here's how we had to think through this, given what's important to us. So here's a few, Mike and I'll just be able to kind of go through these and rock and roll with you for customer service, for example. So I'll give you some numbers for customer service that are important for us. We had a lot of customer service inquiries. I think we had maybe 400 or so a week that would come in via a combination of email and voicemail to our customer service team. The critical metrics that we sort of boiled down there were twofold, one of which, Mike, was time to reply. So first time to reply, that is to say when someone leaves a message or when someone sends in an email, how long does it take for them to get a response? And our objective, Mike, and it took us about four months to get there, is to get that to under 12 hours. So basically, it wasn't a we'll get back to you in 24 hours. It was sort of like, we'll get back to you in that same waking day or like, as soon as you're up the next morning, that kind of thing. So time to reply was one critical metric that helped to reduce chargebacks. It helped to get have actually a lot of gratitude from the people who emailed in. It was like, hey, thank you so much for being able to reply so quickly and, you know, making this a priority. The other Metric was customer satisfaction. So we use Zendesk at the time. I think since I've sold the business, I'm pretty sure they're still with Zendesk. And Zendesk has the ability to have people score a support ticket after it's been solved. So our sort of satisfaction rating that we would have wanted is 80% or higher. So when people email in, even if it's, you know, sometimes it's just a question about a product, in which case it's very easy to make people satisfied. Sometimes, you know, their husband ordered something on their credit card, if it's a wife or something like that, and they want a refund. But regardless of the mix of customer support, what we'd want to see is what's the actual satisfaction score. And the one other thing for customer service for us, Mike, was looking at the mix of ticket types. So we would determine when a ticket was solved. What type of ticket was this? I'll give you some examples of what our categories were, one of which is clarification on a product or a page, someone who didn't understand something on our site. Another category was just a refund. Another category was an unknown charge. So people saying, hey, you know, there was this thing for this price, but I don't remember buying it for that price, or I don't recognize the company on the credit card or whatever the case may be. Another category could have been a purchase request. People who say, hey, are you still selling this? Are you still selling that? So we would look at this mix of maybe six or seven core ticket types. And Mike, if we saw, let's say a delivery inquiry, if we saw delivery inquiry spike maybe 50% higher than the norm within a week, guess what that would do? It would trigger us to go talk to our fulfillment house and see if maybe there's an issue with stocking or something along those lines. So those, those three things, response time and support satisfaction, 80% or higher, and the average mix, the rolling mix of ticket types would allow us to diagnose how we could consistently better and better and better serve the darn customers and get their stuff solved asap. So those are just three for customer service. And that's for an E commerce based, high volume sales, E commerce sort of company. You can dive into this one.

Great insight, but let me ask you some questions around this. The customer satisfaction rating, but you were also tracking the ticket types. Did you dig deeper and did you categorize the customer satisfaction for refunds?

You did, totally. Totally, yeah. So when you go far enough down this channel. Mike, what ended up happening with us, and I'm sure this is the case with larger businesses as well, is we had kind of an entire dashboard that was quite robust, let's say, just for customer support. And then we would have maybe four or five metrics that would show up in the weekly thing that the whole team would look at. So the whole team would look at four or five numbers, but the customer support fellow himself would have access to the full gamut of what is the mix of tickets? What's the satisfaction per ticket type? What's even the response time per ticket type? Is it for some reason, people, you know, our support team is having a hard time finding the right reply for certain delivery issues, and it's kind of holding them up from making a quick response, and that's something we need to fix. So all of those things were in sort of an entirely separate dashboard for the customer service folks and for every area of the business that mattered a ton. Mike we did have sort of a separate dashboard that boiled down to the key metrics the whole team needed to see. But generally the whole team did not need to see 20, 30 different metrics for each subsection of the business.

As the owner of the business, did you kind of have a dashboard for the dashboards where you weren't kind of drilling down as deeply? Because I'm afraid you're going to get overwhelmed. It's a million numbers.

You're totally right. Well, so my answer to the dashboard of the dashboards was that I wanted to ensure that all of our weekly metrics meetings were 45 minutes or less. So we covered everything, soup to nuts, from revenues to customer service and satisfaction to product development and all the different metrics, subscription revenue and everything. We were tracking that top to bottom. That took us. But by the time I sold the thing, we wanted to get it down to, like, 40 minutes. So it used to take us when we were, like, correcting as we were going. Sometimes we'd have an hour and a half metrics meeting, and I'd really want to kick myself. But we tried to get it down to 40 minutes. So my dashboard of the dashboards was, I want a dashboard that's short enough where I can talk out loud about it with the whole team, top to bottom each week, and It'll only take 40 minutes and something. That's really cool. Mike. That actually might be a fun idea for some of the folks in your is. Each week we would have a different team member read the metrics top to bottom and kind of Explain them as we were going. So one week it would be Marcus. One week it'd be Dylan. One week it'd be Timothy. So what this did is it made them all have to get some understanding of all the metrics, right? So if Marcus was reading revenue, even though that's not what he does, he would still be able to see an anomaly and say an anomaly with his own voice. And then he would be the one to sort of jot down. Okay, well, why did that happen? Okay, I'll have to diagnose that later on this evening. So everybody was forced to get a sense, Mike, of the pulse of the business. So it wasn't just like, well, the owner knows what everything should be. It's sort of everybody knew the patterns of normal. Everybody knew what an abnormality that was bad for the business were like, and we could all take action. So even if I. And this was actually quite common, even if I was, let's say, you know, giving a TEDx or speaking at a university about AI or something crazy like that, and I was gone for five days, if these guys had a Monday meeting, they didn't, you know, they didn't need the father figure there. They could read their own darn metrics, diagnose their own darn problems and take action. Because they've all taken turns reading through it and saying, ooh, that's a weird number for open rates. Here's what we're going to do. Here's what we're going to test, and by the time Dan's back on next Monday, we're going to have results for them.

Now, we only have a couple minutes left before we got to go, but I got to ask you this. It sounds like you've started to empower your employees. You're away, Daddy's away, and the business is still running. Were your employees once they had this dashboard, were they making decisions themselves? Meaning were they acting upon the numbers they saw?

Yeah. So that is the entire point. So each week, Mike, on Friday, we would all explain what we got done in the week and what maybe we didn't get done and why in the week and what goals we wanted to do in the next week, given the quarterly objectives and annual objectives of the company. So everybody has access to quarterly and annual objectives. We set those together as a team. So everybody would set their own darn goals every Friday now on Monday, sometimes we take a look at the metrics. And you know what, Mike? Those priorities would change all of a sudden. Diagnosing a certain customer service issue or calling up or restocking a certain product would become a more preeminent concern. And the employees were more than capable of being able to move and shuffle around their own asana tasks to be able to calibrate to that. And I think that's really what makes metrics a proper dashboard, if you will, Mike. That's what makes them valuable. So yes, certainly that was the goal and we had a team that was more than capable of doing that.

And then the last question I got for you is just the presentation of these dashboards. Is this something you're pulling from Google Sheets and you're putting on a piece of paper? Is this something that you put on a screen? You get a special application to do it and I'm curious what you used. And then how do people get started with this to drive their product?

Definitely. So I'll tackle both of those for us within Science of Skill. Mike, as I mentioned, Google Sheets was sort of the totality of our interface. So we had a Google Sheet tab that everybody on the team had access to and the people who needed edit access had edit access to. And we could all pull it up and look at it at any time. And so that's sort of where the metrics live. For Science of Skill, which is the e commerce business for my artificial intelligence kind of media business, we're sort of moving now into Gecko Boards. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but just gecko boards.com is sort of a way of basically merging a lot of this spreadsheet data, this analytics data, this data from other sources and APIs and turning it into nice visuals so you get to see kind of charts and graphs and simple representations of things in real time instead of updated on a weekly. So that's one way of kind of taking things a bit further. But for us, Mike, to be honest with science and skill, spreadsheets were the game. And we were able to use those spreadsheets to 2.2 our revenue and profit every year for four years and get ourselves a seven figure sale. So it's kind of good enough to get some functional stuff done.

Yeah, that's awesome. So everyone listening? You can get started right away. Daniel, where can people learn more about you and maybe connect with you?

Yeah, totally. You know, there's probably not that many folks that are ardently interested in artificial intelligence. Specifically. TechEmergence.com is the name of that business. It's pretty easy to find, but I actually do a lot of writing still about marketing automation and about business metrics and growth@clvboost.com. so CLV is like customer lifetime value. Clvboost.com, which is kind of my personal blog on more of the marketing and business growth side of things. And sort of all the email marketing and marketing automation stuff that I had mentioned was sort of critical to us getting to seven figures and selling. We actually have kind of a core white paper on that stuff@clvboost.com so in terms of sort of business growth related stuff, clvboost.com would be the place to be. Otherwise, just holler at me at Twitter and let me know you found me through Mike. I guess that would be it for me.

Lose him. I think we lost you too.

They lost us.

Yep.

Can you hear me okay, guys?

Yeah, we cut it. Yeah, we cut out there. Brian, do we still have you? Okay, well, we're gonna do.

Oh, did I, did I cut out right while I was talking there, Mike?

Yes. Yeah, you did. I'm just gonna.

Okay, you want me to riff and rock with you? I give one second.

Can you hear me? We lost our producer too. Okay.

I don't, I don't think this would be my connection here.

No, no, it's not. It's our producer. All right, I'm going to do a clap and then come back in. And then the question is, where can people learn more about you? Why don't you just go through the full thing again? I'll ask you the question. So just wait for a clap.

Awesome.

So where can people learn more about you, Daniel?

Yeah, so for folks that have a keen interest in artificial intelligence, techemergence.com for sure. But I imag most the business folks. It's more interesting to learn about kind of the business growth and marketing automation stuff we were talking about. I have a blog@clvboost.com that stands for customer lifetime value. Clvboost.com is sort of the blog where I write about marketing metrics, marketing automation and kind of building a business online. And so clvboost.com would be the place to go there. We have a white paper on the homepage that sort of features the main marketing automation strategies that we used to build my last company. So clvboost.com would be the best place to find me. Or just hit me on Twitter and let me know you found me through Mike.

Awesome. You are awesome. We'll have that all in the show. Notes. One thing people don't know about Daniel is he is also very interested in informing the global policy about the ethical implications of AI. And maybe, Daniel, we can have you back because AI is going to have a radical impact on how businesses generate profitability. And it sounds like you're the guy who's in the know.

Definitely. Yeah. I'd be way more than happy to do so, Mike. That'd be way more than interesting to me. I think if that's a. If that's a curiosity point for your audience, that's something I'm more than capable of talking about. I actually, I get a TedX in like 11 days on that topic. And I'm speaking a lot here. I'm speaking a lot here in the Bay Area and to sort of university audiences on that exact topic. So that's actually one of the main things that we knuckle down to. So, yeah, feel free to stay in touch on that front. Otherwise clvboost.com would be the business side. But yeah, for AI, Mike, I mean, I had no idea you had a background in neural nets. So that was a fun fact that I learned today. And I would be eager to riff and rock. You guys are an absolute blast to hang with, so more than happy to do so.

Sounds good, brother. All right, take care.

Thanks, Dan.

We'll catch you later.

Cool, guys. Yep. All the best.

All right. Punch me, Christina. Oh, God. That was fast.

Me too.

Applied. Yeah, you were just. You're quite. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna recap what we learned from Daniel today. We got a little listener mail.

Yes, we do.

And I got answers for those questions. And we. And then we'll talk about first professionals. But I want to thank our corporate partners today. So, Fundera. No. Is there anything there?

Fundbox.

Fundbox. Who is Fundera? I never even heard of them. All right. Fundbox, It's a cash flow accelerator. If you've deposits due to you from clients but they're not paying in a timely manner, Fundbox will actually release the funds to you in its entirety on the spot. Then when you get the check in from your client, you can return it to Fundbox. It's a great way to address that short term cash flow need. Nextiva is our voice over IP phone system. We love them. We think you will too. Very affordable, high end phone system have that large corporate presence. Professionalism, I should say. But in a small business, that's what nextiva does. And Receipt bank is a receipt scanning system. It will allow you to scan in all those piled up receipts you have into your system and put it right into QuickBooks or whatever platform you use. All right, that's our sponsors. I want to thank them for supporting us. Christina, I want to know what you learned today.

So two things I took away. The first thing is the importance of really narrowing down what specific things you need to track in your business to stay true to your mission or your truth. And that reminded me so much of two different exercises. One actually, the post it exercise that we've done in one of our quarterly meetings is you. You immediately think of, like, five or six things are important. Then you have to keep literally narrowing down until you're left with the core of your being, which I think is awesome. And then the second takeaway is actually something that you mentioned at the end of involving your whole team and each department and having them pick what is most important for that has to boost, like, productivity. Productivity. Oh, my God.

She corrected herself. I didn't have to.

I wonder what Tierney would say about this.

Tyrion.

Tyrion would be like, that's fine.

Oh, God. But anyway, yeah, productivity in your business. And just like you said, empowering your employees and making them feel like they're actually a part of what you're doing as opposed to just a worker bee.

Love that. Love that. Kelsey, can you top that one? That was pretty darn good.

That was pretty much mine. Although I really like gecko boards. I want to play with that. I think that's super cool to be able to take a spreadsheet and then make graphs out of it, which is a great visualization. But I really like the empowerment, like you said, for employees to have their own metrics that they go by so they can sort of contextualize the impact of the tasks that they are individually doing. I think is more effective than having a group, you know, metric that we follow. That doesn't really affect me or I don't really have any kind of impact on that, you know?

Exactly.

And I really like, you know, thinking about ours in terms of our podcast. Like, we look at the metrics for the downloads, but is that really what we're looking for, or are we looking for the impact that we're having with our podcast and how do we get a better metric that reflects that, you know?

Yeah, Very intellectual. So that was great. Why don't we look into gecko boards for our own company? If you're interested in exploring it, maybe we can get that set up up. The only additional thing you guys highlighted, all the great stuff. I thought it was the. It was interesting to have a recorded history of your metrics. You know, I've always saw them as a. You see the metric and you address in the moment but don't have a history. Kind of like a heartbeat. Like, you know, you look at that heartbeat pulse thing, it goes off the screen and you don't look at the history. You just look is a heart out of. But actually now I see is oh, that comparative is very important to see if you have a healthy heart in the long term term. Okay, that was our takeaways. We. We want to know your takeaways too. So post them on our, you know, the itunes stitch wherever you're listening or.

On our profit first podcast.

Profit first podcast. But we do have one more special segment we've added. It's our listener mail. Yeah, Mail pattern ball. Still kind of funny. So what was the mail that came in today?

So this is kind of like a rapid fire 6 question from who for you? This is from Troy Devine.

Troy Devine.

Question number one. Why does Mike answer random emails? What does hope the person at the other end will become?

Oh, wow, these are great questions. So why do I answer random emails? I get dozens a day, every single day.

I'd say more than dozens.

And I do answer them. I do it myself. It keeps me on the pulse of the folks that are reading Profit first and all of my other books, what challenges they're facing. And I really, I really feel called to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. Like, if I see an entrepreneur struggling, it hurts me and I want to help them. And when I hear the successes emboldens me to do more. So that's why I respond to him, because I love you guys. Awesome.

Question number two. How do you remain quirky, your amazing, weird self, without feeling judged all the time?

Yeah. So I am judged, right? Because I'm weird. I totally get it. Like, not the regular author guy. Like, not this professor type guy. And I do get judged. Like, people will send some scathing comments to me or post some stuff, but I feel that's their problem. Like, they're not seeking to understand. They see something different than themselves and. And they attack. Yeah. So I feel bad for them, actually. So when I get attacked, I'm like, oh, man, I feel bad. I get, I may not resonate with you and I'm not your guy. I totally get that.

But I think authenticity resonates, and I think that being your quirky self resonates with a lot of other quirky selves. You know, I like that.

The quirkers. Yeah, the quirkers unite. Let's do two more because we're running tight on time.

One more, one more, one more. But they're such good questions.

Yeah, they are. We'll do the other ones. The next question.

Okay.

How.

How could one simple change in all our lives impact the next generation?

How could one simple change all our lives impact the next generation? Well, geez, that's.

She picked a hard one.

Yeah, yeah. So, Mike, when will the planet earth be departing?

Let's think of the most philosophical I know.

The one simple change.

You have 30 seconds.

Go. Authenticity. Now. It is it. The biggest change is to be yourself. I have a saying above my desk at my home office that says, do not seek what the world needs. Instead seek what you are called to do. Because what the world needs is what people are called to do. I bastardize that. But that's basically it. Just live into yourself fully and it's. That has the most radical impact. Even if what you're doing doesn't serve others. I think you nailed it, Kelsey. If they see. If others see yourself being authentic to other, like, I'm safe to do the same thing and empowers the world. What do you guys think about that one? But you're. Do you agree or is something different?

Yeah. Whoop, there it is.

You can never put Kelsey on spot. Too bad. Yeah, Kelsey, what time you heading out? Say, oh, my God. Don't ask this question. Like, she'll sit there, like, give me like 20 minutes to think about this. God, I don't know. I don't know. All right, let's get out of here. Is that cool?

Yeah. Yeah, we're good.

There was a weird pause there. Yeah. So what can I do? What can everyone do?

You know, you can go to proffersprofessionals.com. are we not there yet?

No.

Itunes, dun radio, Google play, and of course profitfirstpodcast.com. leave us your comments and then when you're done, go to profit first professionals.

There you go. And please do subscribe. Give us a rating. We'd love that. And please, please do share. We love your support. And yes, visit profitfirstprofessionals.com what is profitfirstprofessionals.com you ask? We are an organization dedicated to driving the profitability in every entrepreneurial business throughout the world. It's 128 million small businesses we need to get to. We want to help you too. How do we do it? We have an army of profit first professionals. These are accountants, bookkeepers, and coaches who are specialize in profit first. They've been taught the methodology by our team. They've become certified, and now they're ready to bring profitability to you. How do you get their help? Go to profitfirstprofessionals.com, click on the find button, and we'll hook you up with someone that will drive profit in your business. It's that easy. All right, guys, we'll see you next week.

Bye.

It.