Service Based Business Society Podcast

Season: 2
Episode:6
Title: It's Time to Scale Success

Hello, and welcome to the service based business society podcast. I'm your host Tiffany-Ann-Bottcher. At our weekly episodes, we will jump into everything you need to know about scaling your service based business without losing sleep. With my experience, including over seven figures per month, and a passion for marketing, finance and automation, this show provides tangible tips and techniques for scaling your business. Let's get started.

Welcome back to another episode, guys, we are finally back in the studio. It has been a couple of weeks since I have recorded a podcast episode because I have had no voice. So we left off with me headed to Dallas to speak at a business expo. And basically I ended up super sick on the way home. And it's been a rough coaster. So I finally have an invoice to actually record the episode, please don't mind the, you know, nasally sound, this is an improvement. But you know what it is so nice to be back recording. And there's so much that has been going on business wise, and really just the time of year, it takes, you know, just that moment to take a deep breath. So headed to Dallas for the small business expo. And just to kind of touch on, you know, everything that goes into going away to an event like that it was the big rollout, first presentation for our new ebook that just came out called the data driven method. And so we launched that in Dallas. And basically it is now also available to the public. And so you can you can actually download that ebook. It's totally complimentary at data driven method.io, you can head on over download the eBook.

And so in Dallas at this expo, I was doing a workshop on what is the data driven method? Why is it important and going through some of the metrics and from there, you know, connecting with other entrepreneurs and business owners and whatnot. So super fun time in Dallas, it happened to also be a different conference. And I took the opportunity to jump in the Uber and head on into, like downtown Dallas to hang out at one of a different conference for the evening and just connect with other entrepreneurs. And it is not even entrepreneurs. I mean, they are entrepreneurs but other business vendors that I work with on a regular basis. And I also while I was in Dallas connected with a client that I have been working with for just over a year. And it is in those moments, I was actually thinking about it.

First, when I got to the airport, my client that I have been working with for quite some time was kind enough to pick me up at the airport and take me for dinner. And you know, we were able to talk business in person and whatnot instead of zoom. And then, you know, working with some of these other vendors for a long time. And I kind of just took the moment to reflect on just personal growth in that I truly look forward to connecting with these people in person that I work with online. It is such a different experience to be able to sit, share a meal with someone sit across the table, share a laugh, talk business. And you know, at one time in my life, I would not have looked forward to things like like that meeting people that I didn't really know. And so as much as I still claim, truly to be an introvert and sometimes that surprises people. I do also really look forward to getting together and working with the right people.

I have over you know, the last 18 months or so done a few VIP style weekends, usually three days or so with someone where we get together often I will travel to their location, we will either rent like Airbnb or something like that. And we really can dive in for a few days. And as someone who you know, worked in corporate for so long and always in person, and then there was the shift to everything being online. I really do enjoy the in person working with someone it is an entirely different experience than zoom. And if you are ever on the fence about you know taking that step and going and meeting people that you don't really know, but connecting with people that you have a great deal of respect for or admire or client like Go for it, do it. You know, it's always every time it has been a truly rewarding experience and so I highly recommend and then of course I came back and I was really not well And so fell into the low energy and long task list, which is never an ideal situation. But, you know, everyone goes through it at a time, one time or another. And so here, we are happy to have my voice back enough that I can be recording this episode.

And, you know, today I wanted to talk a little bit about data and analytics, obviously, we just released the data driven method ebook, you know, I often and I really noticed it in Dallas, while I was there, we talked about data, and people kind of get like the eye glaze over like, this doesn't really apply to me and my business. And I really want to take this moment to highlight that it does apply to everyone's business. And you know, we were doing this workshop in Dallas, and we had a real variety of different people. You know, some were ecommerce, some are service based, and we're online summer, in person. And, and truly this data framework works for all of those businesses, because it's not saying that this is what it should be, it is saying, let's look at these data points for your business and identify what they're telling us, you know, to really kind of talk about leaning into what you don't know, often when we talk about data analytics, SEO, bookkeeping, like there's certain things, certain parts of business, and if you don't have a business background, so often times, especially in service based businesses, you get, you know, the entrepreneur who is really good at what they do really, really good. And then they turn it into a business, which is incredible. But oftentimes, it's that same group of people that are like, Hey, I don't actually know anything about marketing, I don't know anything about business or accounting, I know how to do you know, this service and know how to make the client super happy. And and that's the part I know. And so there's these new pieces. And the question that always comes up is, am I supposed to learn all of these things? Am I supposed to hire a professional? Am I supposed to, you know, do this mix of both, and when and why. And so, I thought I would take this opportunity as we're releasing the book, because a lot of times people think, you know, I don't worry about analytics, I don't worry about data, I just run my business. And so now is the perfect time to talk about why you need to lean in, in certain times, and why you need to hire the professional in other times, and sometimes it's a mix of both.

So let's dive in and talk about this a little bit. So, you know, often times when we're trying to decide to hire, or should I learn, there is number one, you know, the budget piece. And so I want to, you know, highlight this came up recently, and on a call I was on whether or not you pay for a formal education, or whether you learn it through the school of hard knocks, you're still paying, because when you pay for someone to teach you, it is often the significantly more efficient than trying to figure it out for yourself. We've all you know, at one time or another been doing something that we were learning and gotten something to, you know, like 99.9% complete, and you have, you know, that one last thing to do, and suddenly you realize that it won't work because, you know, step number one, which was forever ago was done incorrectly. And we have to, you know, either take it all apart or do again, that is right there the school of hard knocks in a nutshell. And so, you know, yes, when budget is a factor, oftentimes people want to you know, learn how to do something on their own. And it's often a great option. You know, there's so many different articles, tutorials, YouTube videos, I mean, we are in the information generation, but you can't expect to be as efficient and you can't be frustrated with yourself when something doesn't quite go according to plan. And so, you know, when we're trying to learn something, sometimes we need to, you know, get started enough to know that we need more help, sometimes we need to, you know, learn enough to get ourselves into trouble realistically. And at the end of the day, we really want to make sure that we have a clear objective and we understand what resources we're working with, because it really comes back to this triangle of money, quality and speed. And so, you know, I want you to think about you know, like chicken wings at the pub. And you know, when you go for five cent chicken wings, you know, on wing night, you know that the quality of the chicken wing is probably not going to be the best you know, you're probably going to get like the small chicken wings, hopefully fast because they're they're pumping those chicken wings out at a quick rate because it's one night they're going to be cheap, but the quality is not going to be incredible and you're okay with it, because you know that you're going for cheap chicken wings. But you know, if you are spending lots of money, so now you're not at five cent chicken wings, now you're at the fancy steakhouse, you know that you're going to get quality, you're going to pay a little more, and chances are, you're going to be okay with it when it takes a little longer, because you know that, hey, this is the gourmet Steakhouse, and, you know, quality takes time. And so it's the same thing, when you're learning something in your business, or even when you're offering a service, you very rarely, really never can get all three.

So you know, either you're going for quality and speed, that you're gonna pay more for it. And you know, this, like, there's, you know, you know that if you want something done right now, it's gonna cost more. And if you're in less of a hurry, you can probably save a little money. So this really is this triangle that we come back to. And so as we are making decisions in our business on whether we should learn things, or whether we should be hiring a professional, and sometimes it's hiring a professional to teach us versus, you know, going all in on learning something on your own. So there's lots of different options there. But when you should make the decision to bring the in the professional and just get it done is typically on things that are one and done. So if you have no website experience, you're starting your business off, and you're like, I have no idea how to create a website, chances are, you're only going to need one website, this is not something that you know, every month, you're gonna be like, hey, I need a new website. So for something like that, if budget allows and you're trying to meet a certain timeline, then hey, hire the professional, get the website done, and call it like call it time. But then there are certain things that are ongoing. And having someone do that one time does not benefit you in the long run. So say learning how to read your financial statements. Sure, you can have your accountant at the end of each year, when they file your tax returns, they can give you the information about your financial statements once a year, but every single month, that information is evolving and changing. And if you don't know how to read that information, and you're waiting until the following year for that information, again, that it's no longer timely, it's no longer accurate information, you can't make those minor adjustments in your business because you're waiting all the way around until next year, and then you know, you're looking at past data. And ultimately, you have very little ability to influence the outcome. So something like that, where you truly need this ongoing skill. This is when you know that that expression Teach a man to fish or give the man a fish. You know, we want to teach to fish. And so whether that is to learn, you know, by going online, the school of hard knocks, if you will, or whether you want to hire a professional to teach you how to go about this, you know, the real question there then becomes what is the budget? And what is the timeline? Because yes, you can learn all sorts of things, if you are trying to do so with a shoestring budget, then chances are it's going to take a little bit of a you know, a longer time to get there.

So when it comes to things like you know, hiring specific people in your business, and you know, bookkeeping and SEO are two that come to mind, really because, you know, in our agency, we offer both of these services. And these are also you know, their ongoing services. These are not something that you need once and then it's over. Both bookkeeping and SEO services are something that really should just be a part of your ongoing business plan, ongoing business budget, but you need to know enough as a business owner to really understand the objective. And even if you don't understand the process, where you need to lean in and learn every single time is when you are paying for an outcome, you must understand what outcome you're trying to achieve. So let's break that down a little bit. Recently, we had someone come onto our agency who had been previously paying a bookkeeper. So this person had been paid for many months for the bookkeeping to be caught, you know, can be brought current always, you know, it was through the process of us bringing this client on during the onboarding and reviewing what was done, it became very clear that only about a third of the bookkeeping had actually been done.

So here you have someone a business owner who says hey, I don't really understand the bookkeeping, I know that I need some help. This is an area that I want to invest in my business great step one fantastic you identify that this is not something you know a lot about, and that this is not something that you want to learn Perfect. Now you hire said professional, but at this point, there is a lack of clarity on what is the actual outcome to just say I want bookkeeping or, you know, SEO is the other example. I just want an SEO service, we still are unclear on what the actual objective is, what is it that you're paying for. So in that instance, it's super important to get clear on what it is, you know, you're currently at point A, you're going to point B, we need to know what is point B. And how do we know when we get there? Because in this bookkeeping instance, this new client of ours, she's been paying this bookkeeper, the bookkeeper has been sending her an invoice for bookkeeping services. But the part that is missing is the clarity on what is the like, what are we achieving with that, because, you know, we want to say something to the effect that we want monthly financial statements that include revenue and expenses. This may seem obvious, but let's be very clear, because it's not as obvious as you would think we want to reconcile all of the accounts at the end of every month. And we want to financial statement by a set date, the following month, typically, what guides the date that this is available to your business is by your credit card statement date. Now, if you are on a credit card statement, and the statement does not come out until the 12th of the following month, you absolutely cannot have your financial statement before the 12th it's just not going to work. Whereas if you are an in credit card that your statement comes out on the third of the month, well, your date can be a little sooner.

So this is why it's super important to get clear on the objectives. What is included? What are we what are we working to achieve? And so you know, where do you lean in, you need to lean into the ongoing pieces that will affect the management of your business, and that you need to know enough about the outcome, how you get to the outcome, or how the professional gets to the outcome is more about vetting and having the correct professional, you don't need to understand every single piece that goes into getting there. That's why you're hiring the professional. But you do need to know where are you going? What are you trying to achieve? And don't you know, don't shy away from the things that you don't know, the number of business owners that get taken advantage of? Because they Oh, I don't know anything about that. Okay, well, now is the time to learn about something new. So, you know, our eBook that has just come out the data driven method really looks at 36 data points. So it's four key areas of your business visibility, scalability, profitability, and sustainability. Each of those has nine data points. So far, a total of 36 points, you're going to, you know, track these every single month, because one data point does not tell you anything, it is tracking data over time that allows you to understand what is the story that the data is telling us, because what you know, is an excellent data metric for one business is not for another, but you won't know that until you've set your baseline. So tracking that data. And sometimes we can go back into you know, historical data. And sometimes we can't, it really depends on your systems, whether they are set up to track specific things, or if they're not so, you know, sometimes we can go back, but oftentimes, you know, it's, it's going through the process of calculating the data, the first time to identify, hey, I don't actually have an a way to calculate this, I don't track that. I don't know that I don't know how many or, you know, I've never looked at that number before or, you know, I didn't turn that tracking on or, or something like that. And so you want to, you know, collect these data points, you know, and then 30 days later, or the end of the following month, you want to be collecting that information again, and you want to be able to track trends decide, you know, what are some of the anomalies, what are the objectives? How can influencing the data support, achieving the business objectives. So, if you're looking to, you know, make a certain amount of money next year, you know, we need to know what metrics support that goal, and then we need to make sure that each month as we're tracking these metrics, that we are on track for hitting our end objective, and if we're not, that is the time to create small adjustments and create that difference.

I was working through recently, you know, a conversion optimization with a client. So you know, they were they have clients, prospective clients going through a sequence of events, and we were looking at, you know, how many people get to page one on the website, and then how many people click through to the next page of the website and how many people in the end go on to book a consult call and it you know, so realistically, this is not any kind of, you know, people think data and analytics. And you know, all of a sudden we're thinking about like intensive Excel spreadsheets and graphs and charts and formulas, that's, it doesn't have to be overly complicated. It just needs to tell the story. So in this particular instance, you know, we were looking at the number of people that went from page one to page two. And we are now looking to improve that we want more people to get from page one and decide, you know, I want to carry on my journey and go to page two. So by tracking how many out what is the percentage of people that go from page one to page two, and whether that, you know, now over time, as we're making small changes, we can say, oh, that change worked that went up, you know, rather than 8%. Oh, now we're at 10%. Oh, that's good. Oh, now we're at 12%. These are the small things that we can change that can influence our business, because realistically, if we need just for argument's sake, if we need to book 20 jobs every month, you know, you do one job each day, 20 working days in a month, typically, and we need 20 jobs, then we can actually reverse engineer to say, Okay, well, we know that every time 100 people click on the website, 20 people go to the second page, and then five people of those go on to book a job, you can start to then say, well, how many people do we need to have originally get to the second page in order to have enough jobs to fill those 20 days of work? And that is where data truly supports the story.

You know, I definitely have a very, you know, data analytical type brain. But I don't believe data takes the place of intuition, I would say, you know, I would feel comfortable saying I lean on intuition more than most data focused business. However, the reason I feel comfortable following my intuition is that I always have the data to back it up. So while I might say I have this idea, I want to try this, I want to go there, I also think can go to the data and say, Oh, yes, that data supports that this could be a good idea, or there is opportunity there, or there's room for improvement in this small area that can help me achieve my goals. And so it's not, it's not intuition, or data, it's intuition with data that truly leads to a very confident place. You know, no one ever wants to miss out on an opportunity, because they simply didn't make a decision fast enough, there is an element of speed when it comes to entrepreneurship. Because no matter how great an idea is, if you don't actually get that idea to market, no one can purchase it from you, you will never have success from a shelf of amazing opportunities and ideas, you need to actually take an idea, and sometimes you have so many ideas. So it's taking the right idea, which one do you work on? First? How do you get it to market fastest. So there is this element of speed. Because if you and three other people around the globe are working on something similar, you are not ever going to realize the most opportunity, the most success from this idea if everyone beats you to my tech.

So there is this element of speed. And so sometimes we have to make decisions, strategic decisions quickly. And how do we do that? How do we know that we're making the right decision? Well, do we ever really know without just jumping in and doing it? Yes, I know, you want to use the data that you have to make an informed decision. It's never going to give you the exact answer, especially when you're working on new ideas and whatnot. But that is where your intuition in combination with data telling you the story telling you what's working, looking for small improvements can truly give you the most success possible.

Head on over to the data driven method.io. It's also linked on our agency, web page Bottcher.io, download the ebook and have these 36 data points. You know, it may take you know, if you're not accustomed to tracking data points, it may take you an afternoon the first time, especially if you're not quite sure where to get the information. But over time, it will take you a very small amount of time, once you know where that data is located in your business or you make some small modifications to make sure that you're keeping track of things that maybe you were just weren't tracking before. You could get all of your tracking done in an hour a month. And then you have this data this bank of data the thing about data is the longer time period you track for it, the more story it can tell you. So you want to just start tracking even if you don't do anything with that information right away. You may start tracking it And that may be, you know, for the first three months of your data driven direction, you might just track you know, so you might say, Okay, I'm gonna take an afternoon the first time and we're gonna get all these data points. And then the following month, you're going to take, you know, a little bit less time, and you're just going to round up that data by month three, now you're down to about an hour, the following month, you now have four months of data, you have the story, and what it's trying to tell you, if you want to speed up that process. That's the question entrepreneurs, I want to go I want it faster. I want to know more. Here's where I caution. Number one, a one data point doesn't tell you much unless you have the experience and other business data to to reflect upon. And so there is definitely some additional, you know, information knowledge that comes with just knowing data points from different businesses. So where can you get that information, you can join the service based business society, Facebook community, I'm actually going to be hosting a three day complimentary workshop right inside the Facebook group, where we're going to go through and we're going to track and calculate some of these data points. And then we're going to talk about what do they mean for you in your business? And where should you be creating that difference, that influence in your business creating that impact.

So that's all going down inside the Facebook community. So head on over to Facebook search, service based business society, join the events that you get all the notifications, and it will be a three video sequence. You can join live, you can also grab the recordings. But ultimately we want to go through those metrics and we want to talk about what do they mean in your business because to each business, depending on your industry, how long you've been in business, where your leads come from, there's so many different factors, but it truly becomes the starting place of knowing your business and being able to make confident business decisions which are so key to scaling your business without the stress.

Well, we are all out of time for today. If you guys have not joined the service based business society Facebook community, make sure you head on over to Facebook and we can continue the conversation. Be sure to also follow the show by going to any podcast app and searching surface based business society. Click subscribe, click the fifth star and leave us a written review.

Have a great week and we will see you soon