2023 Lessons Learned and Goals for 2024

0:00But my one of my single biggest takeaways when I was looking back at the things that got done versus the things that didn't get done is the importance of a forcing function function. like having something out there that forces you to get something done. And so the stuff that got done were things that were leading up to events and, you know, things that where we had a launch, if something is on a calendar, it has a way of getting done. If it wasn't on my calendar, the number of things that went on my to-do list at the start of last year that are still on my freaking to-do list, I can pinpoint all of those down to there was no forcing function.

0:34How much more successful would you be if you had lunch once a week with insanely successful entrepreneurs who share their biggest secrets on how they think and achieve success. Grab your seat at the table because this is Business Lunch with Roland Frazier and Ryan Dice.

0:52Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch and today's a snackable episode with Roland where he's going to get into some more tactical strategies that you can start using to live a rich and happy life. If this is the first snackable episode you're hearing I'd encourage you to go back and listen to some of the other episodes that Roland has put out. And if you want to get notified every time we release a new episode, go to the new businesslunchpodcast.com website, and we'll send you detailed notes along with every episode. That's businesslunchpodcast.com, www.businesslunchpodcast.com. And you can sign up for the free email newsletter where you'll be able to get all the highlights and resources from the episodes.

1:27Hey, everybody, Roland Frazier and Ryan Deist here with the wrap-up of 2023, welcome to 2024 episode of Business Lunch Podcast. Ryan, how are you doing today? I'm doing fantabulous. It was a great holiday with the family, getting a little bit of rest as we often do, kind of taking off between Christmas and New Year's like we talked about on the previous episode. This is kind of when I turn into my navel-gazing whininess, but because we did an episode on it. I didn't this year. For the first time ever. That's actually cool. I'm just generally processing stuff without getting emotional about it.

2:06I think it's good. You're being nicer to yourself. Yeah, being a little bit nicer. Being down at the beach house. I like that. I like that. Yeah, I know. You can't think about what a failure you are in life when you're sitting at your beach house with your family, having a wonderful time away from your other wonderful house. And everything is pretty good. Well, I had every other year though. So I know, I know. Yeah. In my defense, I've managed to pull that off. I've managed to be that pathetic in that, that much to where like, yes, I've managed in spite of all the, of all the blessings and all the gifts to still be a whiny little Wimphic.

2:42But this year, this year, not that. How about you? I, I generally am disappointed in the things that I didn't do and excited by the things I am. as we talked about last time, I continue to be more excited about the things that are coming than I am disappointed about the things. But what I wanted to do today that I thought would be fun is to talk about what did we learn from 2023? If we take a productive things that we can take away from 2023, obviously the biggest one for you is going to be to have a conversation about being a navel-gazing whiny person at the end of the year, because then you won't be.

3:23But let's start. What's one of your biggest, let's just go back and forth a couple and see what we come up with. But what would you say your biggest or one of your biggest takeaways from 2023 are? Yes. I mean, no particular order. And I think that this is important. But one of my single biggest takeaways when I was looking back at the things that got done versus the things that that didn't get done is the importance of a forcing function, like having something out there that forces you to get something done. And so the stuff that got done were things that were leading up to events and, you know, things that where we had a launch, if something is on a calendar, it has a way of getting done.

4:03If it wasn't on my calendar, the number of things that went on my to-do list at the start of last year that are still on my freaking to-do list, I can pinpoint all of those down to there was no forcing function. and so that was kind of one big thing for me and so what I'll take into next year is making sure that anything that is a big enough kind of to do that's a project I need to build an event around it for me there's got to be some whether that is a physical event or some kind of a virtual event but there there needs to be some kind of event where even when it comes to personal stuff like you know I lost like I lost a bunch of weight leading up to this holiday function that Emily and I were, my wife and I were going to.

4:44And, um, and it's cause I, my tuxedo didn't fit. Like literally I had to wear a freaking tux. I hadn't worn a tux since COVID. Um, and I went to put it on. I was like, this doesn't fit. There was an event where I had to wear it. It's like, I guess I need to lose. What do you know? Lo and behold, like, so forcing functions, AKA events was a big lesson for me. What's one for you. That's really good. I, I, I think you and I talked about it, it did not work in my first try at it, but I know that that's because I didn't find the right people. But I've always, you and I, you know, I'm very, very frustrated frequently about the inability to go faster.

5:24And we have lots of ideas, lots of products. We've, in gratefulness and just kind of looking this year at numbers, two of the companies that we just recently started are seven and eight figure companies. That's kind of cool. So I'm grateful for that. They could be a lot bigger, but they didn't have, they had multiple products and not separate marketing teams. And so I felt like a breakthrough was saying, each value ladder needs a marketing team, needs its own marketing team. And to try to make that happen. We invested heavily right around July when things started to slow down. We decided to add about$100 ,000 a month in spend.

6:14And I guess I'll even expand on it a little bit more because it was like, okay, so we had in that company in Epic, we have the thing for buying businesses. We have a thing for selling your businesses called Exit Ready. It's got its whole value ladder and everything. We've got an AI product that's basically monetizing through AI and doing a bunch of those kinds of things. And we've got consulting for equity, which is how to get equity in companies that you consult with instead of just getting paid one time as a consultant. And all of them were being promoted kind of by the same team. The team didn't have enough resources.

6:50I was like, we need a separate marketing team for each of these. It's really unrealistic to expect that the one marketing team could do all of that. And not because like, you could sell multiple products, but when you have a whole product lines, it just doesn't make sense. I think it's so that was like, an insight for me to be more reasonable in my expectations of the people that are in marketing, as well as just like how to be a better business person. So investing the 100K a month was around getting everybody who was the best at each thing beyond marketing, even which I'll talk about as a separate breakthrough, but in marketing.

7:34So we hired really, really advanced, skilled, proven marketing team. And it just didn't take, it didn't take probably because we didn't have the right focus on it and we didn't have a sales team to support. But I really think they were just too busy probably more than anything. I mean, I want to own part of it, but I think some of it was that they just took on more than they could handle. And then we hired another marketing team that basically just never started. They kept putting us off and putting us off. And finally, we're just like, this doesn't work. So what we're left with is we brought in a fractional CMO who's helping us with different things.

8:19And we're building marketing teams around each of those products. But I think that was a big deal for me. And I think it's going to help us. I think we're, by the end of first quarter, we'll probably have that worked out. And that was a big help. Yeah, and I think along those lines, a similar kind of tangential lesson to that is when it comes to core critical business functions, whether it's marketing, whether it's sales, whether it's a critical aspect of your fulfillment side, you can leverage outsource teams. You can leverage contractors, and you should, but you shouldn't wholesale rely upon them to deliver upon a critical business function like that.

8:58At some point, you need to have a plan to bring that in-house for that same reason that we found. If they're not 100 % in-house, that means that they're not dedicated. They're not singularly focused and dedicated to you either. They have other clients. And so I think that you can leverage these folks to buy additional capacity, to get some redundancies, even to help you get started. But at some point, you've got to have a plan to bring it in-house. That was another big lesson. And I think we tried to shortcut certain things through the quote unquote hiring of freelancers and outsourcers without having a clear plan of how is this ultimately going to be brought into play.

9:35Another thing that was a big lesson for me this year is just, you know, every year it's relearning the same lessons, which is a little bit frustrating, but I think, you know, it is what it is. It is just the absolute essential nature of the offer. the number of businesses that we tried to scale because they were pretty close, right? They were pretty close. Like we knew that the offer was pretty good. And so we were trying to do all these things to increase sales when at the end of the day, we had an offer problem. And so just going back to the well and saying, you know what, like this, we're throwing everything we got at this.

10:13It's not moving. It's probably an offer problem. You know, if you're finding that what you're doing just isn't working, it's an offer problem. And ultimately, I think a big lesson that we learned this year that relates to offer is that what the market is buying right now, and this kind of speaks into, I know we're going to cover this later, like what I think is going to be a big theme into next year, but people want to buy certainty of outcome. More than anything else, they want to buy certainty of outcome. They're still investing, they're still spending, but they want to buy certainty of outcome.

10:40And so many of the offers that we had were big kitchen sink offers. You get this and you get this and you get this and it's gonna be all this amazing stuff, but we relied too much upon the prospect, the customer, the client, to connect the dots between the investment and the outcome that they were gonna get. If we just say, you will have this certainty of outcome, even if the promise is smaller than what we were promising, even if the promise is smaller, conversion rates go up and then ultimately once you've demonstrated value, they'll invest more with you. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense.

11:15The other thing that, another one that we had that I think I noticed that a lot of our most successful consulting clients and companies that were doing 100 million plus all have a sales team, all have an in-house outbound sales team, not just inbound. And so two big things. I think one is we've had for a few years inbound sales so that we're driving leads and we've got salespeople that talk to them. But we didn't really have it set up as a separate function with a separate sales director and all that. So building sales teams within the company was a big thing for a lot of our companies. I I know for you and for me in 23.

12:04And then beyond that, having the sales team do outbound is also big so that when a lead comes in, they're actually reaching out. We sell a book, somebody makes a call. We get a lead magnet download, somebody makes a call. It's outbound sales is a huge important thing. And in a lot of those bigger businesses, it's 60, 70, 80 % of all the sales are coming from outbound, not inbound. And definitely not from marketing and send straight to a cart. So I think that was a, like, we for a few years in all of our companies had somebody that was talking to people, but not like a dedicated team with setters and closers and, you know, and they all have, I know it's SDR is sales development rep, which is basically appointment setting for the initial call.

12:59And then is it MDR that the... Yeah, SDR is typically your outbound folks. They're the ones that are going out and developing sales for the salespeople. And MDRs are the inbound people. And what does MDR stand for? Marketing development rep. So the inbound... So they're not closers. They're just outbound versus inbound. Correct. And then SDR and MDR are both. And then do we have a sales closer type title? Yeah. Account executive. Account executive. Okay. So that's been a big, big deal for us. And it's taken time to get that up. So if you go into this, know that you're going to spend$20 ,000,$30 ,000 of tech getting it set up, like getting HubSpot and getting the HubSpot experts to set that up and migrate you over and all of that kind of stuff.

13:47and then it's going to take maybe six months to see meaningful progress. And so like in expectations, don't start this and then say, well, I'm going to throw 20 grand at it, 10 grand a month for two months. And if it doesn't work, then no, I mean, no, you've got to be in to win. And it could take longer. I know I've heard Alex from Osi say, I think it took like a year for them to really get it dialed in and you'll start to see sales, but it's not maybe going to break even for a while and then it's going to break even and then it's going to start, but it does really compound. And so we've seen that as a, I think that's a big thing that I'd recommend that anybody spend the time to have that dedication to that and that commitment to making it go.

14:32Yeah. The, the, and that is going to kind of pick you, you were sort of picking up on something that I had mentioned before when I was talking about the offer, you find out when you start doing outbound sales motions to people who don't already know, like, and trust you, you find out how good your offer is then. There were lots of things that we thought, oh, we got a solid offer here. But when it's inbound, when it's largely referral-based, when it's driven by, you know, leads and prospects who already know, like, and trust you, that will cover a lot of offer wrongs. You know, a lot of the flaws and shortcomings in your offer get covered through trust.

15:07But trust can be really, really difficult to scale. I mean, trust is typically built up slowly. It's lost quickly, it's built up very slowly. And so once you've kind of tapped into that audience who already knows, likes, and trusts you, when you want to scale, you got to go outbound. You want to go outbound, you better have a good offer. And I think that was another reason that, that to your point that you need to really invest in, in that process, because it's going to make your offer better. And you're going to find out that maybe your offer is as good as you think it is. Another like big lesson that we had, that is more kind of broad on the people front, you know, Folks talk about hire slow, fire fast.

15:45I think depending on the role, it should be fire. It should be hire fast than fire fast. And so there were plenty of roles where we just took too dang long to make a decision on a role that was fundamentally like not entry level, but it's not like you're hiring a C-level. I mean, if you're hiring a C-level person, yeah, you're going to take your time on that. But so many of these roles are roles where people should come in. They should be able to make an impact pretty quickly. Or you haven't defined the role well enough and you don't need it badly enough. And so we took too long to hire for, in some cases, fairly entry level roles, because we were trying to follow up, you know, process, which is fine.

16:21But the biggest mistake that we made, man, and is just waiting way too long to let people go and it obviously wasn't working out. And there's so many reasons to pause and delay. You'll always come up with another reason to do it. Every time when we finally just bit the bullet and we're like, look, we're going to let the chips fall where they may. This person isn't a fit. Let's treat them respectfully, but let's exit them from this role. Yep, it created a little bit more work in the interim, but it was always, always, always a net positive, both for the company and for them. So the big thing that I've been talking to all of our leaders about is when you know that somebody is not a fit, that is when the clock starts on their exit.

16:58You need to have a conversation with them right then and there. They need to know it's not a fit. And that is going to begin the process of either their exit or them becoming a fit within 30 to 60 days. And if it doesn't happen super quickly, then got to go, got to go. I love it. Another thing that I kind of touched on earlier as well was, and it's funny, a lot of this stuff is teams and people that we're talking about. But I was looking at some of the most successful people in terms of social media and organic growth. And I love paid media, but I really have doubled down on organic and particularly social, this podcast, YouTube, Instagram being kind of the YouTube, Instagram and the podcast, I'd say, are the biggest focuses.

17:48And we've had huge, huge success in growing them. They're not growing nearly as fast, none of them, as I would like, partially due to our ability to create content. I hired all of the best people that were running some of the most successful campaigns for some of the biggest names that you guys would know. And I had kind of a mixed bag of results. I'll say on YouTube, it was the team that I hired. I hired two teams. One was long form content. One was short form, the short form content, people, fantastic, amazing. We were able to get lots and lots of views on shorts. It doesn't particularly seem to drive.

18:33It's like good for brand, but it doesn't seem to drive much actual subscribership or, you know, or money. And but YouTube is definitely it's it's YouTube paid and organic is generally 50 percent of our lead flow. So, but to do the shorts took so much time. It was creating, we were doing 60 videos a month and we were shooting, you know, ideating on 30, 30 was repurposed stuff. And it was just so much work. I did not have the time to do that and do everything else I was doing. So we've dialed back on that to basically just repurposing for shorts. And now we've replaced the long form people we had with a new long form.

19:20I'm happy with the investments we made. So that's a one for one. One was a win, one was not. We replaced the one that was not. On the podcast, we got rid of a team that actually abandoned almost a million downloads that we had on one platform when they moved to another platform. Our new team was able to go and recapture all of those plus do wonderful new things. And so we've been very happy on the podcast. growth format, got us in the top business podcasts consistently on Apple and such. On Instagram, we had a team that was doing that full time. We ended up going from outsourced to in-house on that and haven't seen really any change and have saved maybe$8 ,000 a month.

20:06And then on LinkedIn, we've tried a couple of times with that, but we haven't had anybody that that can consistently do it without violating terms of service. So we just put our Instagram people on releasing the Instagram content on LinkedIn, and that seems to be doing well. And then TikTok, same thing. Any of that short form content now is going across most of those platforms. And it's not like crazy good growth or anything. We definitely do better with a dedicated TikTok person, I think. But that's been interesting. We also tried influencer marketing and have had pretty good success with that where we're picking Instagram influencers and paying for shout outs, you know, three, 400 bucks a time.

20:49I think the most we spent was maybe a thousand and that's been good for helping growth there. So I'd say we're going to continue to that, to refine that and double down. I'm very optimistic about that. I feel like it's a strong area of growth. I know lots of people that are generating 50 % plus of their revenue from just influencer marketing. So I know there's a lot more that we can do there. And I'd say that's kind of a broad overview of the takeaway though is hiring the experts. Don't expect your social media manager to be an expert in YouTube, TikTok, Snap, threads, everything. They can't do it.

21:29And so you're gonna have to have different people who are really good at those platforms, who live in those platforms if you want to grow them. Newsletter too, which I'm going to keep newsletter as a separate one. But what else you got? So a big lesson for us on the advertising side from a marketing perspective was just the power of speaking to people in their own words. And so we tested a lot of different ad formats, obviously, over the years, and we do a lot of paid advertising and things like that. This year, we said, you know, what would happen if we just kind of brainstorm problem statements?

22:05And if we use, you know, chat GBT, hey, you know, you, you are this person, you know, act as you know, you are a business owner, who's been running a business for seven years doing seven, you know,$6 million in revenue in this, like, what are some of your problem statements, you know, so talking to your customers talking to your prospects, talking to chat GBT, doing that market research, brainstorming a list of 30 problem statements, and then running ads to test which of these problem statements are going to get the most clicks to them, like very simple ads, no images, just the problem statement, you know, in, you know, black and white, basically on an ugly, you know, in a very simple color blocked, ugly ad.

22:48We, that was some of the biggest breakthroughs that we have in terms of messaging, it informed landing page copy, it informed lead magnets, it informed so many things. And it just goes back to the dang five levels of awareness that Eugene Schwartz talked about in breakthrough advertising, right? This idea that people start out as being unaware, then they are problem aware. And we are so quick to talk about our solution and what we can do and this big breakthrough that we can have. And I think that in times when everything is up and to the right and the government is printing money and giving it out for free, then people are happy to hear about solutions to their problems.

23:28When things get a little scarier, I think people just want somebody to speak to them in terms of the problems they're already having. They want to feel that sense of empathy that they're being seen, that they're being heard. And so problem statement ads, simple, tactical, huge lesson, huge learning, and something that still is working well to this day. Nice. I like that. So we've got unaware, problem aware. yeah so you got unaware uh problem where after that people are so problem where is i know i've got a problem but i'm not yet aware of the solutions available to solve this problem or haven't settled on it yep solution whereas i've generally settled on you know a solution um and so using analogy that everybody would understand you think about you know weight loss so unaware is fit fat doesn't matter i don't care right i don't perceive any issue here um problem where is I need to lose some weight.

24:22Solution aware is, you know, maybe I should go to a gym. You know, maybe I should try that new, you know, shop that everybody's getting, right? They haven't quite settled on a solution. Then there's product aware. And product aware is I have generally settled on a solution category and I've pretty much have settled. I'm aware of the top products and I'm trying to choose between them. And then you have most aware. And most aware is I've pretty much settled on a particular product service. I've pretty much settled on brand. I'm looking for a reason to buy now. And so those are the things, unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, most aware.

24:58Nice. I like that. I mentioned newsletters. I think newsletters, if you're not doing one and you've got any kind of audience, you're crazy. There are lots of people, Ryan and myself included, who really like getting information from newsletters. And it's actually kind of funny because I like YouTube. I'm a musician. I've got a studio that I'm sitting in here. I watch all kinds of music videos. I don't like watching business videos. I find them super boring. So I like getting my business information from newsletters, like strategy and things like that. So I subscribe to a whole bunch of newsletters, probably a hundred.

25:39And I read them generally in the morning. And I scan through, I don't read that. I just read what, what catches my eye, but it's really, really helpful to me. And I can go through a ton of information really fast. So we started a newsletter in one of our businesses and we've got about 40 ,000 subscribers in, you know, in just, you know, let's call it eight, eight or nine months. And, um, we just started another one in the AI space for experiments that we're doing. And we only opened it, uh, a couple of days ago to the public, we had it just for a small group of people that were running the experiments.

26:12And we got like 500 signups over the last couple of days. It's just like crazy watching it hit the inbox. But we have found that the people that are newsletter subscribers, like podcast people and YouTube subscribers are very valuable. They buy a lot. So we, you know, we share offers from time to time. It's primary content, primarily content, but there's a soft offer here and there. And, and they convert really, really well. So I think not having a newsletter, you would lose me in most of the business things. And then there are things that I, like with AI, I'm so hungry for the content right now.