MBA1256 Should You Do Things That Don’t Scale?

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA. Show your daily dose of business goodness every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn should you do things that don't scale in your business. In today's modern business we're always looking for ways to scale, to do things at Mass, to automate, to save ourselves time and energy as much as possible. But other things in your business that you should do that don't scale very well. I'm here to say yes, there are things that you have to do in order if you want to grow and improve that you simply just cannot automate. And that's why they're so valuable. In today's lesson we actually explore these things. We explore the types of actions and the types of tasks that I encourage you to do that are not scalable that will take you a bit more time, a bit more effort. But what I found is that these things that don't scale but are effective in your business are great for your business for the long haul. They're like investments for the future. The key though is to know what to do that does not scale. That will give you the maximum amount of value for not only your business, but your brand as well. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. When I started to explore entrepreneurship back in 2001, I was obsessed with trying to maximize my time and energy and do things that only scale. I used to ask myself constantly, how do I automate this? How do I get somebody else to do this? How do I make sure that I'm not involved and that's okay and all, but I realize that there are certain things that I have to do if I want to take things to the next level, if I really want to learn about my customers, if I really want to serve them, if I really want to differentiate myself from my competition. And this is something that we do now regularly with our business with the $100 MBA and webinar ninja. And I want to share with you these practices that do not scale well, but they're essential to being a world class leader in your business. And the first thing is pretty simple and it's speaking to your customers. You have to actually speak, have a conversation with your customers, even if it's just a one on one email to learn more about their needs, their difficulties, their wants, their challenges so you can build the solution for them. You can't build things in a vacuum. You have to know who your audience is and how to serve them. I made that mistake in the past and it's a huge mistake. And it's sort of like a protective mechanism that we do. We want to protect ourselves. We don't want to hear the feedback from customers, we don't want to confront our customers. We're afraid what they're going to say about us. What I found is that that fear is unfounded. When you actually speak to your customers, they're so happy to speak to you, the founder of the company, they feel like it's a privilege. And 99% of the time it's an absolute joy. And when it's not a joy, it's actually not that painful. People just are going to be honest about how you can improve. Now one of the easiest way to start with this is to reach out to customers. You already have customers that are maybe your high paying customers on higher plans or have bough bigger ticket items. They're willing to speak to you, they've invested in you, so you can send them an email and say, hey, do you mind jumping on a quick 15 minute call? I'd love to learn about why you chose my product. My service and how we can help you further. Number one, you're gonna do some major R and D on that call. You're gonna learn so much about how to serve your ideal customer, because these people are your ideal customers. They're paying you money, right? They're paying you big bucks. But not only that, this is going to be something that many customers do not experience. Somebody from the company, somebody high up, somebody like the founder, is actually reaching out to them personally, not with an automated email and saying, hey, I'd love to jump on a call. They're going to make time to speak to you. This is what I found. And often on those calls, you learn a treasure trove of information. And sometimes you're not going to learn a lot, but they're going to learn a lot. They're going to realize, oh, your product does this. I didn't know that. And then what you can learn from that is that, hey, how can I communicate that better on the onboarding, in my sales pages, in my features page, all that kind of stuff? Speak to your customers. Even if you dedicate, let's say, a few hours a week, and you have a calendar app like Calendly, and you just allow people to, you know, schedule some time in your calendar to speak to you. When you reach out to these customers, four or five phone calls a week is not going to kill you, but it's going to make all the difference in, in your business. Those people every week are gonna remember that call. They're gonna tell a friend about it. Somewhere along the line, they're gonna share how their day was, what they did, and they're gonna say, hey, somebody from this company, Webinar Ninja, or your company reached out to me and we had a call about my experience using their product. It was really cool. And they're gonna, you know, spread the message about how cool your company is. Word of mouth is so powerful in today's day and age, and it's the ultimate social proof. What else can you do in your business? As an entrepreneur that doesn't scale, that has a profound effect. I believe at the start, when you're building your business, you should definitely answer a good number of support tickets, if not all. We answered all our support tickets for the first 12 months at webinar Ninja. When I say we, it's just me, Nicole, my co founder, and we just went and we answered every single support ticket. This is not really, you know, quote unquote smart. Yes, we can hire agents and we could have done that. But at the beginning we really want to know what people are struggling with, and we want to be able to know the language they're using, so we can use the same language in not only the product, but also in our marketing materials. So even once you start hiring people, it's good to jump into tickets once in a while, once a month, to learn more about your customers. It's not super scalable. In fact, we're planning to do this in our team retreat, where everybody on the team, from our audio engineer, this podcast, Carl, to our developers, to our designers, to everybody on the team, myself, Nicole, are going to be answering support tickets. This is really important to know who our audience is and who we actually speak to and who we work for. Doesn't scale really well, but it's really effective. What else doesn't scale? That's really, really a great investment. I really believe getting on stage and speaking at conferences in your niche is a really good investment for the long term. At the time, it doesn't feel like it because, hey, I'm only speaking to maybe 200 people, 300 people, maybe a thousand people. If it's a big conference, I can run a webinar or two and speak to just as many people in the comfort of my home. True. And it has its benefit. And you could do that, and you should do that. But you should also go to conferences so you can meet people in person and build relationships. And I recommend improving your speaking skills so you can get on stage so you can meet other speakers, other leaders in your business that, that you're sharing the stage with. These can be partners. These could be people that can help you and you can help them. You can't put a number or price tag to that. So the investment of going to a conference, traveling, all that stuff is going to be worth it. With the relationships you're going to build. These relationships, if you maintain them, are there for life. Also the deeper impact you make. So if you deliver an amazing speech on stage where you really impact the crowd, and let's say that crowd is 500 people, every single person is going to talk about that speech when they go home, when they talk about it on social, when they talk about it to other people in their community, to their customers, all that kind of stuff. So it does scale, but slowly. So I highly recommend going to events, conferences, and investing in that, even though on the surface it doesn't seem like it scales. Next, I'm going to tread softly on this one because I don't want you to get the wrong idea. I really believe if you're going to be social on social media, if you're going to be on social media and you're going to communicate, it should be you, somebody else. You should communicate on social, answer questions, help people, offer advice, ask questions, that type of thing. You should really confine how much time you spend on that because that can be quite addictive. You know, you can spend all day on social, but I think it should be a lot of people, they try to, you know, farm that out to somebody else, and often it just loses its luster because you don't really are, again, not on the pulse. You're not really with your customers and your audience. Some of the biggest and busiest people in the business world do this. People like Elon Musk and Gary Vaynerchuk. These people are on social and they're the ones that communicate with their audience. If you're going to be on social, socialize, be productive. Limit the time you're going to spend on that because you got other things to do in your business that are far more important. But don't farm it out. Make sure that you have some sort of presence if you're on the platform. Now, I talked about going to conferences and building relationships, but that's just kind of the start. You need to maintain relationships throughout your career, throughout your life as an entrepreneur and as a person. You want to make sure that you're staying in touch with the people that you've built a relationship with throughout these conferences, throughout these events, throughout these, you know, partnerships in business. So you should have a regular way to contact people personally. And this could be as simple as an Excel sheet where you have a list of all the people you want to stay in touch with. Let's say it's a hundred people. And every day you send three people a personal email just saying, hey, checking up on you, how you doing? Within every three months, you'll have contacted everybody on that list at least once. So every quarter, you're at least in touch. Your insight and mind. This doesn't scale. And automating, this could be a disaster. If you try to do automated emails, that's just not personal, that's not you, and that's gonna hurt your relationship. So this doesn't scale, but it's worth it. If you just spend a, you know, five to 10 minutes a day emailing three people on your list of contacts just saying, hey, what's up? How can I help you out? What's going on? Just staying in touch. I learned that hack from Jordan Harbinger from the Jordan Harbinger Show. Love that tip.

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Your time is valuable. I believe time is your biggest asset, so I wouldn't be recommending these things if I don't believe that they are a good use of your time. There are little things that we can do on a regular basis that really will benefit us in the long run. They don't scale, they're labor intensive, they're time intensive. But they work. And that's why I recommend them. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 OMBIE Show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now on whatever you use to listen to podcasts. We're on every platform. Apple Podcast, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, Overcast, Himalaya. We're on them all. Just hit subscribe right now. That way when our next episode is available, it's on your device automatically ready for you to listen. Also, by hitting subscribe you get access to all our archive episodes in our feed. Over 1200 lessons for you by hitting subscribe. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Some of these things will be hard for some of us. Whether it's interacting with customers and listening to feedback that is going to bruise our ego a little bit, or trying to be a bit social and building relationships at conferences. You might be a bit introverted and that comes hard for you. That's okay. You're just stretching yourself a little bit. You're pushing yourself a little bit and that's how you grow. I'm the first one to say that. You know, I love socializing with people, but I'm tired at the end of a conference. I'm ready for like a three day break to recover. But it's a great investment. Same thing goes with the other things I've mentioned. They're all great investments. Thanks again for listening and I'll check you in. Tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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