Steps You Need To Make To Build A Credible Business

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today's guest I'm excited to speak to because she has a really unique entrepreneur journey. And we're really going to learn a lot about the things that entrepreneurs always kind of suffer with but we don't really talk about. So we're going to kind of dig deep into that. But before we talk to our guest, I have to properly introduce my co host, Scott Todd from Scott Todd.net landmodo.com and today's podcast is sponsored by posting domination. Postingdomination.com thelandgeek if you're not automating your Craigslist postings, I don't know why you're not. You can always make more money, but you can't get more time. Scott Todd.

How are you, Mark? I'm awesome. How are you?

Pulse is still normal. Respiration is fine. You ready to talk to Renee?

I am. Let's do it.

All right, so Renee is the owner of onboardly.com and Renee, kind of give us your background.

I've been holding in a giggle this whole time. I love your energy, guys. So my background is. I don't want to say it's that interesting, but When I was 17 years old, my mom told me to go out and get a job because all my other friends had a job at 17. It was probably about time. And so I did. And I put out my resume to a few places, got some callbacks, but something about the whole idea of working for somebody else didn't fit. Well, one thing led to another, and I actually started a restaurant with my sister that we operated for four years. And in that four years, we saved up enough money that we paid for college. And that was kind of the seed to my entrepreneurial life.

Wow.

They say that running a restaurant, there's nothing tougher. Is that. What do you think about that?

Well, my story gets even more interesting, so I would hedge a bet that that was actually the easy part. But, yeah, no, running a restaurant is definitely interesting. And if anybody's in the food business, they'll know the two most important things about being a successful restaurateur is to be consistent with your menu and to what's the one consistency and be kind. I think that you can do that for any business, but especially when it comes to the food business. I mean, think about it like you go McDonald's, you go anywhere in the world, you can order pretty much fries in a Big Mac. The consistency is there. So I learned that at a very early age. And that model kind of brought through to my company where I stand today.

So how did you start onbordly and what was the sort of the thought process of that?

Well, so Onboardly is interesting. I actually, I'm from Canada. We're located on the east Coast. Most of, if not all of our clients are American, but at the time I was living in San Francisco and my boyfriend, now husband, but at the time he had a startup out there. And I was between just getting out of my last agency where my co founder bought me out, because I just, I didn't like the direction of the agency. And I just kind of spent some time floating around different startup offices in the Valley, providing them marketing advice essentially for free. Just get an idea of what was happening in this space. This was back in. Not that long ago, actually, 2010, 2011. And you know, I was doing such good work, I said, hey, maybe I should start charging these people for my time. And I did. And one thing led to another. There was a lot of people requesting PR services with for what I did. And I said, well, I actually don't do that. So I ended up being introduced to and partnering with my previous co founder who was heavy in the tech PR space. And we came together to form Onboardly and then we just kind of. It evolved over time. So it wasn't this thing that I started and launched hoping for clients. The clients were already there. So we created this company in order to service them.

So, Scott, you know what I like about that?

Yeah, the market's already been tested.

It's already been tested. She didn't think to herself, hey, I'm gonna start a PR agency and then put a whole bunch of money into an idea that hadn't been tested, that hadn't been proven. She started with customers, the most valuable part of any business. And you see so many entrepreneurs make that classic blunder of, hey, I've got a great idea and my friends think it's great too. And I'm going to, you know, start a website and I'm going to start, you know, all these things. They put all this money into it. It's like, there's no customers.

Mark, you know what my favorite is, is and I see this all the time. You see it on Facebook and you see it on, you know, any group is, hey, what do you guys think about this logo? You know, like, what do you think about this company name and the entrepreneur or the person starting out, they spend so much time Piecing this stuff that doesn't really matter together as opposed to it doesn't matter what I think about your logo or your name or your message. What matters is, does it resonate with your potential customers? Can you get customers from that logo? Oh, my gosh.

Nothing makes me more upset. Like, Renee, what do you think about this? Hey, I want to have. I want to look professional, you know, before I go out and get customers. I want to look, like, credible. What do you think of that?

Well, there's an element of importance there when it comes to authenticity, credibility, and brand recognition. But with my company, onborle, our largest brand, bulk of our clients come from the tech startup space. And so we see a lot of people that have an excellent website, great branding, and the product's not even really developed yet. And so it's good. It's a good way of building that brand awareness and building an email list and getting people to understand what your product is. And so it's kind of like this catch 22. Do you build it and then they'll come, or do you see the idea and test it and iterate and test and iterate and see if anybody actually wants it, even though it's ugly? Most people would go for the former when they should go for the latter. You think about, like, any food, any service, any product, any app or technology, you really need to test the ugliness and the viability of the product before you actually throw more money at it. And what we're seeing more and more these days, especially with the media, is media won't cover tech startups unless they have an active user base. Now there's just the barriers to entry to get into starting a business is so low, which is great. It's great for the entrepreneurship space, but it also means that there are less credible businesses that are being started and credibility, in a sense, that is actually solving a problem that people are going to pay for. That's the most important thing you made. You need to make a dollar.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when you started your companies, did you make any classic blenders?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest things, the two biggest things for me when going into business is not understanding and not thinking. I really needed to know these two things really well is probably because I hated it. But one was people management and finances. And I thought those two things would be the easiest because, you know, getting a sale must be a lot harder than managing people. As soon as you hire your first employee, you are essentially opening up an entirely new relationship that you have to manage, you have to manage their emotions, their productivity, their happiness. And for somebody who's not good at that, which is me, and I'll openly admit that it was really, really hard and draining. The other one was the finances, which I learned through losing money month over month, what I needed to do and when I needed to stop doing, which I've learned now. And we're in a great position. Yeah, the, the poor decisions I made in those two things, I, I, I don't regret. I didn't lose a lot of time and a lot of money. I think every entrepreneur goes through them. But yeah, the failures are now kind of funny.

So, Scott, when you hired your first VA and then your first acquisition manager, did you have a similar experience as Renee or you kind of come into the background where like, like Scott managed like 150 people? Maybe you didn't.

Well, I mean, in terms of VAs, I did. You know, I think the important thing about hiring anybody on your team is really thinking about, okay, I'm going to make an investment in this person and I'm going to hire a skill set that I want. And as long as they have that skill set, then everything else is okay. You know, like, as long as they have this, it's okay. But I also go into it expecting that they're going to fail. You know, I expect that they're going to let me down.

Yeah. Scott, tell, tell Renee your training rule. I love this, I love this math.

Well, it's a, it's the 30, it's the 30x rule. Okay. So this is really good, really for onboarding anybody, not just for, it's not mine, it's somebody else's. It's just rehashed stuff. But, but basically the way that it works is let's say that you, you do a task that takes you five minutes a day, well, then you should be willing to spend up to 30 times that amount of time to train them and to onboard them for that one task. So if something takes me, let's say five minutes a day to do, then I should be prepared to invest up to 150 minutes, not one time, but over a period of time so that I can onboard them, tweak the process, build the process, tweak it, fine, tweak it better, train them, refine it, you know, guide them before I expect them to really stand on their own. And, you know, it's kind of like this. In the beginning, I'm going to give you more time. And then as it goes on, it's going to get less. But in doing so, you're building a process. You're building, you know, you're building a strategy, and you're building training material that if this one va or this one person does not work out well, then you don't necessarily need to spend another 150 minutes to do this. It's onboarding them again so that they feel that human connection. But you've already invested time in the training piece, and here, watch this video. This is why we're doing it, and this is how you do it.

What do you think, Renee?

I like that. I never thought of it that way. When we train people, we have some. So my team's pretty small, and the people that have been with us since day one help with this training manual. And essentially, it's the first two weeks of onboarding, where they get slowly integrated and situated. By this point, we hope that a. That we've hired the right person, not just based on the skill level, but based on the cultural fit. I know that's a huge thing, especially for the millennial generation, but it's pretty big. And that's where I made my mistakes. But when it comes to the training, the entrepreneurs that fail are ones that fail to delegate. And I never looked at it. The 30x principle, which now it makes total sense to me, and I appreciate what we've implemented within my company, is called the onboardly playbook. Each person writes their own job in detail with the idea that they're going to be training the next person to take over their role. And. And so this playbook, which is essentially the business operations manual, is a living, breathing entity that we contribute to on a weekly basis, and we have our Tuesday morning team standups. We actually talk about a certain element or new thing that was added to the playbook. And I know this is a terrible way of describing it, but we call it the hit by the bus syndrome. Or a better way to do it is, I want a million dollars. I'm not showing up to work tomorrow. So if person X doesn't show up to work tomorrow, their role is documented in such detail that anybody can just swoop in and take over. And we have the luxury of doing that, given we're small teams. Everybody kind of knows who's doing what. But, you know, it is true that possibly the 30x principle applies to that.

Yeah. One of my favorite sayings, I should actually put it on my wall, is from Jocko Willink, this Navy seal, and he says, two is one, one is none.

Right.

And meaning that if you, if you are, if you don't have two of something, you're not duplicating, you're not backing up your data, for example, then when things happen, you know, badly, which they will, someone gets hit by the bus, you've got nothing. Right. And that's basically what you're doing is two is one, one is none. And what's interesting about that is the way you're. You're framing it to the. The team member is that, hey, you could. This could happen. It's not like you're. You're training your replacement. That's like, we're not getting ready to replace you. It's that things happen. Right. You could leave, but we need to. We need to collect that. That intelligence that, that you're creating or whatever it is. Right?

Yeah. And it's also a way of documenting kind of the progression of our industry because we're in the PR space and, you know, even since just three years ago, things have shifted and changed so much. You look at how we approached getting PR for our clients three years ago compared to now, it's so different, and it's consistently evolving. And we have to look back at our lessons learned, too. So this playbook documents all of that stuff in detail.

What are some of the lessons learned?

Well, the biggest thing, especially in pr, is just because you have a buddy over at one of the top publications doesn't necessarily mean they're going to cover everything you pitch them. There once was a point where a lot of tech publications would pretty much cover everything we pitch them. We did a great job at betting who we worked with, too, in terms of technology companies. But just because you have a huge Rolodex of connections in the media doesn't mean it's going to work in your favor. It does sometimes, but nowadays it's just getting more tough. Journalists are overwhelmed. There are way too many new writers and new contributors to publications. It's really hard to kind of nail down who's the right person for the job these days.

I see, I see. So, Scott, as far as, like, the finances part, which Renee brought up, what do you see as far as entrepreneurs? Like, typical. I think. I think most entrepreneurs are more visionary than they are. Hey, analytical detail. I know how to read a P and L. I know how to do a balance sheet. I don't understand my cash flow. When you started your land business, what was the big challenge for you?

I think that for me, it was really more about the comp, like, confidence, you know, like, it was a. It was A self confidence thing. Because for me, my entire, you know, adult career, I've worked for somebody else. And so it doesn't mean that I didn't have a desire to be an entrepreneur or work for myself. It just meant that to actually go in, to do it, it was a far. You know, it's like this, this, this vision, if you will. It's like, okay, well, yeah, it's a nice dream, but is it really going to happen? I think once you start to develop a little bit of confidence in, okay, this is happening, I can do this, then all of a sudden some of those roadblocks get out of your way. And so I think it really becomes kind of like that vision thing. I think that a lot of entrepreneurs struggle because they lean on what they're good at and they don't, to steal your words, they don't embrace the suck of what they're bad at. And so then they kind of avoid it. You know, like, maybe they don't like to sell. So they'll do anything in the world not to have to sell. But you know what? You're not gonna, you're not gonna do anything in your business if you don't sell.

Yeah.

So Renee has an interesting way of getting through this and embracing the suck. So, Renee, you know, I know we talked about this before the podcast, but kind of share with Scott and everyone else how you've sort of embraced the suck of, of your numbers and understanding your numbers.

Yeah. So as any entrepreneur can relate, when things start going bad, sometimes we just turn a blind eye to it, thinking it'll just go away overnight. And I did that with my finances. And I didn't realize this. Maybe I did, but I was ignoring the fact that I was losing money for three months in a row. And it got to the point where I just, it was unacceptable. Obviously you can't grow a business when you're losing money. So I turned things around very quickly and I worked closely with my, my bookkeeper, who is an absolute goddess. I asked her to send me my balance sheet every single day, cash flow statement. And the rule was that I had to respond to that email with a question about something, one line item in the balance sheet for her so that she knows that I actually read the whole thing. She doesn't like plop in mistakes or any Easter eggs. It's all relevant, but I always have to know something, ask her a question about something within that balance sheet. And most entrepreneurs just, they might look at their bank accounts every other day or their numbers monthly, but I'm looking at it daily, and I'm seeing that things can start to slip very quickly if you're not looking at this stuff on a daily basis. For instance, I realized that we were being charged $700 a month on stupid little things, reoccurring subscriptions to social media things. And I was like, we don't even need this stuff we're not using. So all those little things that adds up to thousands of dollars every single month that you don't know you're just wasting money on, and it doesn't help you scale or grow that way. So I said, this is one thing I hate to look at, but now that I know my numbers backwards inside out, upside down, that I'm so much more confident with what we do, with our ability to be able to hire new people or using new technology or go out and make a sale. I also work with a gentleman named Greg Crabtree. He wrote the book Simple Numbers. Super awesome accountant. And he has this one thing that I love. It's called the labor efficiency ratio. Basically, it's a magical number each company has that tells you whether or not your employees are being overworked or under worked. And my magic number was four. So if anything was less than four, my team members were being overworked or, sorry, underworked. And if it was more than four, they were under work. So I was losing money. So profit margins were great when they're being overworked, but my team wasn't happy. And so it's like, okay, well, we have to come back to that awesome number four. And again, I would not have known this was an issue had I not looked at my numbers on a daily basis.

How did you calculate the 4? What is that number?

They. So they did it for me. Um, so they took just. I think they went back to. Actually they went back to the beginning of time for the company and they did my books for me, and I did a full day of training with them one on one. They understand my business. My numbers, where we were four years ago to where we are today. And they calculated this labor efficiency ratio. If you actually, if you Google it, I think Greg talks about. There's probably videos and it's in his book. So it's something you could probably calculate yourself. Again, I'm not good with numbers. I don't like numbers. So I hired him to do it for me. And I keep really close pace on that specific thing because that was the one thing that fluctuated so much for me that caused me to lose money.

I Have that book, but I still haven't finished it. I need to get to the labor efficiency.

Crack it open.

Yeah, for sure. Scott, do you have that book?

I do not have that book.

You don't need that book because you're a numbers guy.

Yeah, I don't have the book. I just, I did just Google it and be interested to see what this, what this 4 represents because, well, the.

Number could be different for your company.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, like, you know.

I've worked in companies before where, you know, we evaluated, we evaluated employees in many different ways, you know, to determine overworked or under worked. And I do agree that that's, that's really a metric that doesn't get mentioned a lot is kind of employee utilization. Because when, like in my team that, my larger team that we manage, we actually, we actually did calculate or create a number called employee utilization. And it was a percentage of 100. And so when you, when you say, okay, look, if they're fully busy, then that's going to be 100%, right? You know, like, but then you've got to back out vacation time and you got to back out VTO time, time off, PTO time. So, you know, by the time you look at it, okay, well, maybe, maybe if they were at 90% utilized, that would be the equivalent of 100%, you know, and what's funny is when you start to measure this and you start to measure it on a, on a given, on a monthly basis, it was really amazing because employees would sit there and say, I'm overworked, I'm working too much. And then when you went back and you looked at their key metrics, which is like, you know, in my case, it was our trouble tickets and the projects and the time that they allotted to all that stuff, guess what? No one was ever above like 85, 90%. Even in the busiest times where I know they were busy. And you ask them, okay, well, I don't see it, you know, like, you're not even reporting that many hours what's going on. And these were all salaried employees. Well, you know, and it was always a reason why, but we could never, we could never get to the point where they could say, hey, look, I'm, I really am, you know, I'm producing 120%. And then other people in the company that you could see where they were producing 120% or 125% of like a standard metric. But I think that's a key thing is, you know, employee utilization.

So Renee, how do you keep managing that as you keep building and you're adding more people and you know, you got knowledge workers. I mean, you know, how do you measure the social media person versus the bookkeeper versus the salesperson?

Yeah. So for my team, it's like there's busyness or there's productivity. And what I noticed is that people that are just coming out of college, I'm employing them. So people new to their careers, they're so eager to learn more and to be busy that they're not productive. And I said it's all based on output. It's like anybody who hires any sort of marketing agency, they don't care if they're paying them a million dollars, as long as they get at least a million dollars worth of sales. In the end, they want that return. So for me, it starts with the first month of micromanaging. And it's not a scare tactic. It's just this is what your day is supposed to look like. And it's like literally putting tasks in their to do list on 15 to 20 minute intervals. And over time it kind of, it pans out. They get it. Okay, they have 30 minute blocks for certain tasks. But we do a morning standup every single day. We talk about our three big things for the day and you might have 10 things to do, but realistically there's only three main priorities for the day. And the rule is you put them in priority sequence of one to three, you cannot move on to number two until you are no longer the bottleneck for number one, and so on and so forth, and they report back at the end of the day. For me, it doesn't take a lot of management because it's like just a quick touch point every single day. We do, we use a product called 15 5, which is an employee feedback tool, and we do that monthly. So instead of having quarterly or annual employee reviews, we do it every month at the end of the month. And that's opened up huge insight into people who don't like their tasks or love their tasks, or find there might be something sketchy about a client that I have to look into it. But keeping a pulse on somebody's happiness is almost directly in relation to their productivity because they know if you've built this culture around providing results for your clients or your customers, they'll know and they'll be happy when they're getting wins for them. So that's kind of how I measure it.

So is 15:5, is that really just a platform that allows you to do like these Pulse surveys for your team.

Yeah, Yep. It's exactly that. I know that they've evolved, of course, over the last couple years too, and now they're adding management and company goals too, so people understand what they're working towards. Because it's so easy to throw a task list at somebody, but to actually give them the idea of what they're working towards, they've implemented that recently. We started working with them. They were actually a client of ours to begin with, but we loved their products so much, we're still using them today.

Yeah, I mean, like in my last job, we actually did on a quarterly basis, we did Pulse scores. And it's where, you know, an employee could go to a web platform kind of like this. There were some questions that were asked every single time. I think it was like 10 questions that were asked every single time. And it gave you a snapshot. It was a two week window. It gave you a snapshot of this is what the employees are feeling on a 1 to 5 scale. And your goal was to get a 4.0 or higher because that's world class or best in class. So if you could get to that 4.0 and sustain it, that was really the goal. But really what it allowed you to do is anonymously, they would give their feedback and then you could drill back down in to see like, okay, well, they don't feel like they're getting the training that they need. So let's, let's figure out how to get them training or they, you know, they feel like we're not serving our customers the best. And then that allowed for, you know, discussion points. Okay, well, this is, this is how the group spoke. And okay, well, what can we do to fix that? Where are we going wrong? And it was really kind of like the basis for the talking points. We always focus on the lowest three. Okay, here's the lowest three. Let's work on action plans around fixing those pieces. Because the employees really are the most important part of the organization. I mean, customers pay the bills, but if the employees can't impact the customer in a meaningful way and add value, then there's no customer.

So, Renee, we're at that point now, the podcast, where we're going to put you on the spot and we're going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable where the art of passive income listeners can go right now, Improve their businesses, improve their lives. We've appreciated your mentorship up to this point, but now what do you Got.

Well, actually, you know what? I'm going to go on the theme of numbers and I will say Greg Crabtree, simple numbers. He has a lot of free tools on his website. A fantastic book. If you have the opportunity to work with him, even better. But one thing you definitely need to consider and look at from the very first day you earn a penny is your numbers on a daily basis. And he's your guy.

All right, fantastic. Scott, Todd, what's your tip of the week?

All right, Mark, you know, I know you like to use simply postcard.com I think is what it is, right, to send postcards to people.

No, no, the simple postcard.

Simple postcard. Yeah, that's it. Well, check out this app. This, this one's going to cost you a dollar more because I think postcards $2. It's called the felt app. Feltapp.com alright, hold on, let me see.

The Felt app. Yeah.

What's cool is you download this app to your phone or iPad, whatever, and basically it allows you to send a card, but you can use your finger to write on your phone. Your hand signature. So you could like sign your name with your finger. It's a dollar to send a card. It's in an envelope. Not necessarily a postcard. You could use a custom picture. Now one of the cool things too is that you can have it set up to where let's say that you wanted to send someone some money, $2, $20, $50, $100. They'll actually slip the money in the card for you too.

Oh, that's really, that's really cool. You know, the only problem for me is that my, my handwriting so bad.

Well, you know, there's, they also have fonts so you don't have to use that. So they actually have some fonts that look like handwritten that doesn't necessarily need to be yours. Check it out, you know, personalized letter or you know, a little note or something.

Try it out.

I'm in, I'm in. I love it. All right, well, my tip of the week is. Learn more about Renee Watkins@ onboardly.com and you know, I'm not sure for our audience, you know, the PR agency that she, that she owns is necessarily gonna be a great fit for you, but it could be because of the marketing. So it's definitely check out on boardly.com I also want to give another tip because I do think that the lost art of employee productivity is because of, you know, all the social media people are having a hard time today focusing and getting real deep work done. So I do want to mention Deep Work by Cal Newport as a great book that could definitely help you. So I just downloaded Felt app and I do have simple numbers, but great tips. Renee Ward, are we good?

That's amazing. Thank you.

Well, thank you. I want to thank all the listeners. And I want to remind you the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like Renee Warren from onboardly.com is if you do three things. You got to subscribe, you've got a rate, and you've got to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of your review. We're going to send you for free the $97 passive income launch kit. I've got a competition going right now with Kerry Lutz from Financial Survival Network, so you get to download all the podcasts. So because we got a download competition going, today's podcast is sponsored by posting domination.com forward/the landgeek. I want to thank everybody. And should we do it, Scott, or is Renee going to just going to shake your head?

No, let's skip it, right?

All right, I'll just say it. Let freedom ring. Thank you.

Let freedom ring.

See you next time.