Every B2B Firm Needs THESE 3 People to Succeed in 2024

All right. I've been thinking more along the lines of a CEO lately instead of a sales guy or a content guy, or a marketer. And I've kind of realized there's three main types of people that a service business needs. And obviously if you're not a service business, this probably actually isn't going to apply or like be that helpful. But I own a service based business. That's my marketing agency. I've been building service businesses my entire career. The clients we work with in my agency are service businesses. So you know that's what I'm talking about. So I want to go through who these people are, what pieces of the pie I think belong on their plate, and what kind of character qualities I'm looking for in each of these people. Something super important to understand before we get into it though is like the difference between a service business and a product business or a digital product business. I mean, that's even a whole nother world. I'm a CEO. I'm assuming you watching this video probably are too. And just understanding the business model that we're in is so crucial for hiring and firing and just building your team overall. I see so many founders get confused because they watch some video, but it's put out by a guy who runs a physical products business or it's put out by someone who owns an info products business and they fail to recognize the differences between those business models and our business model here in the service industries. So like take an info business for example, right? If you're selling an online course, let's say, and that course probably has a shelf life of like two, maybe three years, depending on what the topic is. And so your job is to make that course once. And now that you've got the product, you just need to sell it on repeat for the entirety of the shelf life of this product. The countdown's going. You just gotta sell like crazy to get as many sales as possible before the course is obsolete. Like Whether you get 10 customers or 1,000 customers tomorrow, it doesn't impact your systems in your backend. All you need to do is focus on sales. Building a sales and marketing machine that's going to just crank out as many sales dollars as humanly possible. But in a service business, you've got a very narrow window of how many clients you can take on this month or next month. Right? If you're used to onboarding five new clients a week and suddenly you're onboarding 20, well, that's gonna break the entire backend of your business. You're gonna have clients who are super pissed off at you. Now all these new clients aren't gonna get that great experience that you've kind of built your reputation on. And so obviously we don't wanna do that. We also don't want to be so conservative and so scared that we actually onboard less clients. And we have you know, way excess capacity as far as like what our team can take on. And so there's this very narrow window in the middle which is like the perfect number of clients to take on per week or per month. And so in that case it's really equal parts like people, systems automations and sales and marketing. And to confound it even more, to build the right systems and to hire the right people in, you need money, right? And so it's just kind of this like climbing two separate ladders and jumping across and then jumping back to the other one and just like two steps forward, one step back. That's what building a service business feels like. So anyway, this is just a rough outline of the three types of people I think I'm gonna need as the CEO of a service business. And that's gonna scale and get me out of the day to day and doing just CEO work. Alright. So the first person is what I call the rainmaker. And right now the that is what I'm doing 100% right. I'm getting eyeballs and I'm turning those eyeballs into cash. That's basically the idea here. They're in charge of content creation, ads, sales funnels, basically your entire marketing and sales process. Now this is a little bit tough because marketing and sales are realistically two separate departments. This is why like a Fortune 500 company will have a chief operations officer who probably is over sales and a chief marketing officer who, who's over marketing. And so these are fundamentally two different departments. But when we're talking small time service businesses, usually people are going to have to wear multiple hats. And so your ideal scenario is if you can find one person who's an absolute genius in both of these things, or you can potentially find two people who are, you know, kind of a little bit lower level than that one person would be. But each one of them specializes in sales or marketing. Now in my opinion this type of person needs to be about 70, 30, so split between creative and systems, right? Like we need somebody who can think in a straight line, but we don't need somebody who is like has to have a straight line in order to even operate. Like we've all met kind of that like ocd, like administrative, like systems person. And while they're great in their lane, this is not the place for that. This rainmaker person is someone who's good at talking the talk. They need to be somebody who can get a client started on the path to solving their problem, but they're not necessarily gifted at getting them all the way through the finish line. And that's totally fine because we don't expect them to. This is also not a just true creative or a young person who supposedly understands social media because they're 19. I've seen far too many businesses do that as well. Oh, our marketing department is this 19 year old college intern that we paid like 12 bucks an hour. Awful idea. Sales comes first and then an understanding of the individual platforms. And a great example of this is if you read any of Russell Brunson's books in the Secrets trilogy. I've actually got them all on my desk today. For some reason, these books, he really doesn't talk about specific platforms, he doesn't give advice on specific platforms. He talks principles. Because that's what makes these books like completely evergreen. And they've lasted for this long already in a world that's changed so much since he started writing them. If your rainmaker understands the principles of sales and marketing that work that are timeless, then you can watch a YouTube video and figure out the specific tactics that are working in 2024. Now how does this rainmaker person get you better into the CEO seat? So if you're anything like me, then as the CEO, you're constantly screwing around with your sales and marketing. Like you see a new strategy and you're like, oh, we should try this. And you start working on it and maybe it doesn't get like instant amazing results. You get distracted cause there's a got to put out and so you kind of move on to the next thing, right? So this rainmaker is going to handle sales, marketing, content creation, copywriting, all of those things that can tend to be just like a shiny object for US CEOs that we can't give 100% attention to. And so we can't do it really well, but we know we need to work on it, right? And so their job is to put you in a position where all you have to do is show up in front of the camera, read whatever's on the teleprompter, and then head to the next meeting or the next thing. Now the second person that I'm going to be looking for as I scale my service business is What I call the client success manager. So I believe the number one marketing tool most service businesses need to leverage better is their actual client results. Dan Kennedy's got a great quote. I'm going to butcher it. But it's something along the lines of most businesses are underutilizing 90% of the proof they've got that they're good at what they do. But obviously you can't market this thing if you don't get good results on the back end. And that's where the client success manager comes in. If you've got kick ass client results to point to, then it makes your rainmaker's job super easy. It's very straightforward and very obvious to be able to tell a prospective client that if you solved a similar problem for a similar type of person, then you could probably solve their problem too. And the chances of success are relatively high. So what this client success manager does is they're gonna make sure all of your clients are on track for success. They're gonna manage the team members who are directly involved with client work. They're gonna track client results and kind of save them for the rainmaker to be able to leverage in your sales. And, and they're gonna perform research and development on your services. So what, like what can we do to improve the client experience? Basically? Now this person, I would say is about the exact opposite of the rainmaker. Okay. They're probably 70, 30 systems versus creative. Okay. So on the creative side, they need to be able to solve unique problems for unique clients. And they need to never really be satisfied with just good client results. Right. Like we need to always be kind of like developing our service offerings to be better and better and better. But on the system side, we need to make sure every client is getting a very consistent experience. And so having someone who can think in a straight line, they can stick with a system and just see it all the way to the end. That's going to be really, really important here. And the way this gets you better into the CEO seat is very straightforward, right? You're never involved in client work ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again. Now the third person I believe I'm going to need in order to scale myself out of the day to day operations of my business is the integrator. Now, integrator is probably not the best word here actually, because you probably think of the visionary slash integrator, like partnership model. But that's not really what I'm going for. I'm thinking more connector, somebody who fills in all the gaps and handles tech and automations and finance and all those kind of like little things that aren't necessarily an entire job by themselves. This is probably like a coo, chief operations officer type person. Every business has to have someone who handles the operational burden. Systems are great and all, but they're going to break from time to time and you have to have someone keeping a high level view on everything. Now oftentimes this is kind of the last thing that comes off of the CEO's plate. And that can be done with relatively little pain as long as you have kind of the dashboards to be able to track everything properly and keep on top of client success and marketing, sales and all the high level view kind of stuff. This is especially true if you've already got good technicians on your team, right? If you've got a really talented video editing team and you've got a tech VA who's really great with zapier and go high level and your website management and all that kind of stuff. If you've got the right people in the right place, it's not that difficult to manage them. You just have to be able to dedicate a day or two a week to being a manager. You just gotta like check in with each person, make sure they're on the right track, just kind of point them to the right tasks and point them in the right direction and usually you'll be pretty good. But obviously we do eventually want to get this off of your plate. And that's why I put it on this list as something that's actually pretty important to me. So what this person is going to do is number one, they're going to make sure all the departments are playing nicely together. Okay? So marketing and sales are playing nicely, Sales and client success are playing nicely. Finance is playing nicely with marketing, when marketing wants to spend more money, all that kind of stuff. Right? Number two that's really important and vastly underutilized with a lot of businesses is tech and automations. Okay? There are so many tasks that you're probably doing manually right now that just you don't need to be doing manually. And this is going to continue to grow as your business grows. And so having somebody who can think high level on that, not just somebody who can like build a zapier automation or a web hook when you're like, hey, do you think we could automate this? Like that would be pretty cool, but somebody who can actually come up with the ideas, look into your systems and processes and figure out what needs automating. That's what this integrator connector operations person needs to be doing and then the final thing that I'd put under their purview is like your finance, right? So like doing your books, obviously as a CEO, like the buck ends with you when it comes to finance. But somebody who can do your books, somebody who can make sure you're paying your quarterlies on time and your taxes are good to go, making sure your people are getting paid every week or every two weeks or whatever. Now what type of person does this need to be? Well, in my opinion this is probably a very detail oriented role. You should probably be looking like 70, 30 systems and creative, similar to your client success manager, maybe a little bit more on the creative side. And I would consider them to be a jack of all trades and a master of at least a few, not a master of none, because that's actually the. There's an addition to that old proverb that's like a jack of all trades is a master of none of, but still better off than a master of one. That's kind of the old proverb. I would say this like systems integrator person needs to be a master of at least a few. Now the way this gets you better into the CEO seat is pretty straightforward actually. We're all used to wearing like 30 different hats, right? And so this integrator is going to handle 28 of those 30 hats that you're used to wearing individually. These are all probably small things for a lot of us. It's kind of hard to actually delegate a lot of this stuff because we don't see it as being a big time suck. But you add it up and it stacks into a whole other C suite job. Doing your books, coming up with automations for your systems, hiring like ground level employees, like it's a lot. But this brings me to the secret fourth person, which is you. The CEO, slash founder, slash owner. Now I believe you should be able to get great profits out of your business, work as little or as much as you want, and be only dedicated to tasks that are within your zone of genius. If you're awesome at content, great, that's your job. If you're better at systems and client success, then that's going to be your job. Maybe your client success manager and your integrate are C suite level hires and you really like the sales and marketing stuff. You just hire managers there and you do all the high level in that department. But the guiding principle here is that your only contribution to the business should be your absolute best and highest. And so you'll probably find that you need to hire at least two out of the three, if not all three of these roles that I kind of outlined in the video. Now, I'll be perfectly honest and transparent with you. I'm not there yet. I've never been there with any business that I've run previously. But my business right now specializes in helping people scale to the next level. We handle their marketing and sales systems. And so, you know, we're basically being the fractional rainmaker for people. And I'm seeing in real time how business owners are hiring their client success, they're hiring integrators, they're hiring rainmakers like my company, and it's really transforming the way they're able to operate. As a CEO, I also am fully confident that my current business right now is, is the vehicle that's going to get me to this level. I'm working with a ton of clients who are way past my level, and I'm seeing in real time what happens at the next 2, 3, 4, 5 steps in front of me. And it seems to me this is the trajectory for going from a million to 5 million plus per year.