Sam Anderson, founder of Order Fulfilment Experts, is rebuilding his company after running it as a lifestyle business for a decade. He hired three new people, including an AI engineer, to automate scorecards and invoicing so he can focus on sales. He's following a nine-step scaling plan and on step five.
I'm having to rebuild my team after 10 years, and I think it's going to be nothing short of transformational. Hi, my name's Sam Anderson, and I'm the founder of Order Fulfillment Experts, and I've been going through this process with my business, and it's a specific process called Master Plan, which is rolled out by the Entrepreneur's Circle, and it's effectively a 9 step process to effectively, it's a blueprint to scale your business properly. And I think it's no secret that in the early days I treated this business very much like a lifestyle business, and I was very hands-on with my kids when they were very little, and it allowed me to do that, which was fantastic. And they're now reaching an age whereby they're sort of getting to the end of primary school, and I'm very ready to roll my sleeves up, pop the bonnet, all the analogies you want under the sun, and really get things going. And so I started this Master Plan 9-step process to scale my business, and I'm currently on step 5, although step 4 I'm feeling the aftermath of now, because step 4 is getting the right team on board. And a really interesting transformation has happened in the business because one of the exercises we go through is 'What does 100% look like for you in your role?' So every one of us, including myself, did this, and actually it was really good for me to do because I realized there were a lot of things that I was guilty of that we tell our customers not to do, and that was I was working in the business instead of on it. So, and what really happened from there is that I only have a small team of 6 at the moment, but one, one of them decided to go off traveling, and then another recently has moved on to a new role as well. So we've had this sort of transition phase, and initially obviously there's that uncertainty, that doubt about how it's all going to work out. But thanks to the previous sessions as well, or steps I should call them, we'd also worked out what our vision, our purpose, and our values were, which I knew innately, but I hadn't really sort of communicated them or actually included them in any of our marketing, sales, or customer communications or anything like that. So it's really helped us to sort of approach it in a much more sort of thought-through and strategic manner, so it actually envelopes the whole business in terms of what we do in our outreach. And so when I did the job advert that went out for our operations manager, that was a very critical part to the actual advert, which was very much speaking about our values. And it's attracted exactly the right kind of people, which is fantastic. And we were deluged, like hundreds of applications, which was lovely, rather exhausting going through them all, but very worthwhile exercise and talk to some incredible people along the way. And I'm very pleased to tell you that Terry Steer is joining us in the next 3 weeks as our operations manager, and he actually turned down a role with a blue-chip company to come to us. So actually really an exciting stage for us as a company and a business. This recruitment will be able to let me do more of this, focus on the sales and marketing, focus on really driving the business forward board from that perspective and allow Terry to run the, the operational side of, of everything in the warehouse. So in addition to that, we've also got an AI engineer, AI prompt engineer, who started— Chaitanya. He, my goodness, his brain is quite incredible, and it's an absolute pleasure working with him as well and bouncing ideas off of each other in terms of how this could really make a massive impact the business and streamline so many aspects of it. From our scorecard, where we're recording maybe how many leads are coming in, right through to our purchasing processes, helping with our invoicing side of things, working out how many staff are required, hands on deck in the run-up to Christmas automatically for the number of, for the workload. It can automate a lot of sales and marketing as we know with regards to sort of like being able to convert leads on the website through to calls in my calendar. So, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. We really have decided to go in for this in quite a big way, so it's exciting. Now, it means though that we're also sort of going through that sort of re-establishing the roles, and we've got another chap who's joined us called David who's helping us in the warehouse, and the energy now in the business is changing. And if I'm really honest, actually, I know that there have been days, and I'm sure you guys might have felt this too when you go into work, where you just go, "Ugh!" And that's completely changing for me. I'm actually now immensely excited about the business. And I've realised it's about the people you work with on a day-to-day basis that, you know, are such a critical part of making the job enjoyable and just a challenge and exciting. I've still of course got my staff that have been with me for more than 10 years, namely Emily and James, and so I will be sharing, you know, the new structure of the team with you, and so that you can see who's doing what. And yeah, I'll leave a link in the description below, so if you are interested in this blueprint for scaling your business, then obviously check it out because I'm, I, I'm only a little bit of the way through and I can really see the changes happening, and I can't recommend it highly enough so far. So, um, but I will keep you informed as to what's happening in the businesses, the challenges, the, you know, the successes and everything in between, so that you can come on this journey with us, and I'll share what is how it's happening and how it rolls out. So enjoy this, and I'll be back very shortly. Bye for now.
