James: James Schramko here. I’m chatting with Kory Basaraba from GrowFastMarketing.com. Hey, Kory.
Kory: Hey, James.
James: Kory, we have wonderful business chats about growing your business and getting great results, making more profit. You’ve been working behind the scenes with lots of businesses, building their machines, making it all work smoothly. But you’ve discovered an advantage that some customers have over other customers that really makes a big difference sometimes. I think you mentioned to me it can actually get you up to three times more output. And it’s probably something that’s not as obvious from the surface. And there’s a wild variance between every business that I speak to in this department. Want to share with us what that is?
Kory: Sure. One of the things that a lot of people don’t realize is your marketing, if you’re going to grow and you’re going to be investing in ads and funnels, that there’s a team required to get that result from start to finish. And so you’re coordinating, as an entrepreneur, several people who each fill their role, they have a job to do. And if you can improve the performance of the team as a whole, you can dramatically increase the quality of your marketing and the results you’re getting. And sometimes that’s tricky for us because maybe we’ve got a contractor who writes our copy and then we’ve got an agency who runs our Facebook ads. And then we’ve got someone else maybe who’s looking at our data, and you’ve got all these individual pieces. And when you look at any other team effort, team sports are obviously the most obvious one, right? A team that works together has high communication, that really knows how to work with each other can get so much more accomplished than a team that, let’s say, is brand new or that only talks to each other once a week. Concept of looking at your marketing team and finding ways to improve the performance of the team overall can really have a huge impact on how fast you grow.
James: So what sort of tips would you have for someone who’s trying to assemble that kind of team? And they probably have some of those pieces in place and, of course, there will occasionally be some resistance to a consultant coming in with some great ideas and challenging the status quo, or in some cases pointing out the obvious that the person who’s installed in the business has been overlooking. It’s somewhat embarrassing to their pride, I imagine, as well. So you’re going to have a bit of politics to fight occasionally.
Kory: Yeah, we’ve all been on the receiving end of some good advice that hurt. And one of the first pieces of advice I give is to map out your process in a diagram. So most of my clients are buying traffic at some level. They’re investing in Facebook ads, they’re driving people to a funnel, and they’re converting. And I say, Well, do you have a diagram of how that all works? And nine times out of 10, they don’t.
And so once you have a picture that you can look at, then you start connecting, Okay, well, who on your team is doing which piece? And you start to get a sense of, well, how effective is that working from this flow to this flow? So let’s say you’ve got a copywriter and you ask, think about a diagram as you can point to it and say, what about this? And instead of trying to verbally describe things, it’s incredible, like looking at the blueprint for your house and saying, This is the bathroom. This is where the door is going to go. How are we going to do that? And everyone can agree and they know what you’re talking about. So you have a diagram of your funnel and you point to it, you say, Okay, well, how is it working now with the copy getting converted into design? And you’ll find out, well, it takes a week. Okay. What if we could get that turned around 30% faster? How’s it going with the designer passing it off to the web developers?
You see, it’s a production line and people in the creative fields, they don’t think of themselves as may be building a production line, but it’s what it is. And so if you can take some of the manufacturing theory, and look at how do we eliminate the back and forth? Let’s move everything down in one direction as much as possible, right? Let’s make sure that there’s communication between the copywriter and the designer and the developer and everyone knows what’s happening, then you just get a lot more efficiency.
And if your competitor is getting out five campaigns a month and you’re getting out three campaigns a month, your competitor is going to win, right? It’s like the person who could put out more great marketing, all else being equal, is going to have an advantage.
And so just looking at how does your team function, taking some time to just sketch it out on the napkin and say, where are we hitting those roadblocks? Where are things slowing down? And you’ll quickly see, there’s always a place to improve whether that’s hiring another copywriter or plugging someone else in. But if you don’t have that big picture, it’s very hard to troubleshoot and improve.
James: So the most important thing is to map out the whole process, every part of the funnel onto one central point, and then have everyone meet and agree on what that looks like and what their responsibilities within that. And then to talk about things like time frames and realistic expectations.
Kory: Yeah, and how they can improve it and your team will come up with good ideas.
James: And some of these people might be internal and some of them might be external. How do you communicate with them? Is there a preferred platform?
Kory: Well, there’s nothing better than face-to-face. So having Zoom really works well. We can get everyone on, you can see their faces and then you can pull up your diagram on the screen and start talking about it and pointing it out. So when you’re going to have a focused meeting where the goal is to improve how we get things done, having a screen with the diagram and having everyone on that meeting interacting is probably the best way to do that.
James: Great. Recently, I noticed Slack introduced a feature where you can pull in external contractors to your team, which is great. So, you don’t have to join their Slack or toggle between them. And we created a channel for our Facebook marketing person and for our API programmer, and for our funnel developer, and it’s made a huge difference being able to have everyone in just one place so, it’s a good feature. And I love this whole concept of team.
I mean, team is the strength of my business, the amount of content we publish. And it’s really important that several people in the team are able to cover for each other because everything can come on stuck when someone’s away or sick or something unexpected happens. And if there’s one thing we know about life, unexpected things are going to crop up. We should expect them.
And it’s also good if the visionary founder can communicate what they’re trying to do in the clearest possible terms, right? Sometimes it’s a bit vague or they tend to throw new ideas on the pile every few days after they get back from their latest mastermind. And they got this new change in direction or they want to scope creep the original projects so often that the core of it just gets completely transformed whilst no one really realized that. And I think that happens on buildings as well and websites.
Kory: When you watch a seasoned entrepreneur do their work, right, it can be a thing of beauty. They step into a situation and they’re immediately, Okay, what are we trying to accomplish here? What’s the goal? Who’s doing what? And they know how to look at the big picture, identify the pieces and help fix the problem, right? Someone who’s brand new, they’re more easily distracted and more easily influenced. And it’s about just developing that knowledge that the right thing to do is make sure that we have a clear vision, right? Then make sure everyone’s working on the same thing. And you’re the Godfather of internet teams, you know? You’ve been doing this for a long time.
And you see the results of it when you get a team that works well. So there’s a lot of conversation on how do I hire, how do I train? This is really recognizing that your team as a whole can outperform any individual. There is a quote in a book that I love called Scrum. And Scrum is well known. But the book, he talks about, you can improve performance, you can coach someone to get maybe a 10% to 30% improvement in individual performance.
But if you look at a team, he’s seen 200% to 300% improvements in how a team can perform over time, right? Because you’re multiplying those improvements across everyone on the team. So if everyone improves 5% and there are 10 people on your team, you get that compound effect. So it’s an interesting mindset to realize that if you have a team of people, and you learn how to tune that team, you end up with a bigger output than if you just coach one or two superstars.
James: Totally agree. I mean, with my team coming up to 10 years now, I have always factored that they’re going to improve at 10% each year. So in 10 years, they’re going to at least double their performance. But I actually think, in my case, the team’s gone well beyond that.
The other technique that I deployed quite often is if I tasked someone in my team up with a new project, I will then not give them another project until they complete the first one. It’s very tempting as a business owner when I get a new idea or whatever, to just dump it onto the team. But if they’ve already got stuff, that’s kind of like sending them into a Japanese restaurant to have a feast, and then as they’re halfway through the entrees, you pull them out say, hey, let’s go to the Mexican over there. And then they order some burritos, and then you say, hey, Oh, hang on! The French has got some great pastries. They’re not going to get a good meal happening in that scenario. So just leave them be until they’ve completed the first one and then give them the next one.
So I’m very conscious, as the business owner, not to overload them. And one thing I do ask them to report on, at the end of each day, is just give me a color. Is it green, yellow or red? And from green, yellow or red, I can get a sense of if they’re maxed out or they’ve got infinite capacity. If they’re on the yellow or red, I’m not going to go near them with any new stuff. Let them just get through what they’ve got. In fact, maybe we should even hire someone to help them out or load balance so that the next day we’ll be talking about who can help out this team member because they’re maxed out, you know? I look for someone who’s green and see if we can pair them up. But then over time, what happens is they automatically do that. They become like a load balance server, and they share their tasks around. They sort of level out the overwhelm amongst the team according to their abilities as well.
And the other tip that I’ll give on this topic is to let people lean into the things they particularly enjoy. If you’ve got someone in your team who just loves building the web pages or just loves writing the copy or just loves running ads, like, lean into that. Don’t force people to do things they hate, because they’re probably going to do a crappy job of it. And we’ve all worked in a job we didn’t absolutely love. For me, I could list too many. One that really comes to mind is when I was digging out an inground pool in the back of a house that was in a very hilly area. They couldn’t put a backhoe or crane into there. So I had to dig it out with it with a shovel. And it took a long time. So I didn’t love that job. And I don’t know if I’m even that good at it, but it was tough. So put people in roles they love and communicate well with them and be respectful of their limits. And you should have a great team.
This is a good topic. Hey, if you have a team and you want to get someone to come in and help out, get more traffic and tune up your funnel, and look at all the data and see what’s going on, get in touch with Kory, GrowFastMarketing.com.
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