Overview:

The podcast discusses how they grew their coaching business from a small team to over 20 employees. They had a detailed plan in place from the beginning with clear values, vision, and systems. Recruiting new team members was done very carefully through a rigorous process to find the best candidates. They focused on growing specific core teams like marketing, sales, and coaches. Communicating well between teams was important, such as through weekly update meetings and recaps. Finding the right operations manager was also key to support the business owners as it continued expanding. An interesting point was how they used subtle errors in job postings to test applicants' attention to detail.

Takeaways:

• The business provides holistic business coaching to builders, helping with marketing, sales, and financial knowledge.
• They had strong fundamentals and systems in place before growing the team, including clear values, vision, procedures, and software.
• They created a detailed strategic growth plan, breaking the company into core teams and establishing capacity and growth goals.
• Recruiting focused on finding the best people, not just hiring anyone. They screened applicants rigorously and looked for people outside of Australia as well.
• An operations manager was hired to help scale as the owners couldn't do everything. Regular team meetings and communication helped coordinate the growing teams.
• Referrals and social media were used to market job openings and showcase the company culture to attract top talent.
• Remote work was allowed but with clear expectations on hours and availability to filter out uncommitted applicants.
• Automation software and tools like Hubspot and Gusto helped manage the larger team's workload and administrative tasks.
• Commission and salary were used to compensate salespeople to ensure administrative work got done.
• An Indeed sponsorship allowed paid advertising of job postings on the platform.

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

Okay, so we've uh, we started, we've started So welcome to the, to the September issue of, or September edition of Lead Marketers.

And yeah, one of the, one of the beautiful things that I think makes this unique is often I'll get the presenters to join us based on just my discussions and finding out what's working now and what's really working real time.

And yeah, that's how we've got our two presenters today.

One is Sky, who Will Be First up and I was speaking with with Russ, I don't know, a couple of months back and he is, oh yeah, we've gone from three to 23 people, 23 staff in the past 12 months.

I'm like, oh that's, that's quite an achievement.

And I'm like, why don't you come and explain how you do it?

'cause I thought it'd be, it'd be very valuable to everyone here.

And then, and then Jace, I was hearing about from someone else actually how he was able to get, you know, appointments with really quite high level people and his sales process for doing that was really was also quite unique for getting things without Facebook ads or pay per click or going very old, an old school sort of approach.

Jace will be up second to walk us through that process.

Yeah, so let, let's move on to the first presentation.

So Sky, I think I've, I met Russ and Sky, it was probably 10 to 15 years ago and I've been following my email list, you know, my email list.

And then we first met and they had a small consultancy with builders and now they've got quite a large consultancy with, you know, with builders doing masterminds and all that sort of thing.

And they grew from, you know, three to 23 staff.

So Sky's gonna really take us through the journey of exactly how they did that.

Without further ado, I'll hand the reins over to to Sky.

Oh thanks Scott.

That's a great introduction.

I, I've made slides so if you're able to enable me to share my screen, that'd be awesome because I'm a visual person.

Yep.

Perfect.

Cool.

So just let me know that everyone, you guys can actually see the screen.

Okay.

Yeah, perfect.

Yeah, so what I'll go through is basically how we went from three team members to 23 in 12 months.

It's a lot of growth, that's for sure.

So I basically just walk you through how we did it and I suppose like how we kept the culture the way we did it.

Scott didn't intro so I don't really need to go through that too much.

It's probably worth pointing out just about a p b, like the, the business we're in and our model.

'cause it's gonna differ obviously depending what your market is going to be.

So obviously I'm Skye, one of the co-founders of a P b.

Russ is also on the meeting.

He's the other co-founder.

So father daughter, we had a marketing agency prior to us launching a p b, the Association of Professional Builders.

So we were, we were already working with builders, we're super niched so we only work with custom home builders and we had a marketing agency for a few years.

We sold some software as well.

And basically over those years we saw a gap in the market without going into the full long story we could improve builders say that we could improve their marketing and then there was a gap in their sales.

We walked through some sales training and then there was a gap in their financial knowledge and it grew into this solution that we could offer, which really was like very holistic business coaching.

And that's when we launched the Association of Professional Builders back in 2014 and our business model and if you wanna compare it to what you guys are doing, we have a membership base, it's like a membership site, it's not a static site by any means.

People pay to join a p b an annual fee every single year that gets renewed and it's Netflix for builders if anyone's seeing masterclass, it's like that.

It's a whole bunch of small step-by-step action plans and it's not static, it gets added to every single month.

So there's constant value there.

But then in the backend and what, what we really operate in is private mentoring, which is what Scott mentioned one-on-one mentoring with our builder clients.

So that's the model that we are in.

And so my role while I'm going through the growth of the team is I focus mainly on the piece.

So all of the people, the product and the processes.

So essentially the operations side of the company.

So growing the team was such a massive component in the last year, um, of what we did.

So our growth very obviously it it's come from a very detailed plan that's not gonna be anything new to anybody.

But I'd wanna get really clear on what was already in place because it didn't just grow.

We spent years and years putting a lot of the fundamentals in place.

We already had really specific detailed core values and mission for the company of very clear vision of where we were headed for the entire company.

We had very detailed systems and procedures already in place.

So just gotta remember that people run systems.

So before we even tried adding a whole heap more people, we gotta have the systems in place first.

So we've got 150 page sales manual including a glossary of every single term anyone could have thrown at you.

Sales scripts, detailed procedures for prospecting, how to do anything in our database, anything ditto.

That's our sales manual.

We've got that as a coaching manual as well.

And we have a marketing manual as well.

So they're all very detailed.

We've also got top of the range of software to automate as much as possible 'cause we didn't wanna waste any money employing people to do things that really could have just automated if you hooked up Zapier to a few of your different bits of software.

And then also we had KPIs and a very good understanding of all of our company metrics.

So as far as how long it takes somebody to buy the conversion rates when someone opts in the cost per marketing qualified lead, our cost per sale.

Like we were very aware of all of those numbers at the beginning as well.

We knew these numbers, we weren't figuring it out as we were trying to grow.

And then we have or had we very solid core team at the beginning as well.

Three to 23 wasn't because we didn't like the team we had, we wanted to replace them.

We knew we needed to grow with those guys.

So everyone at the beginning they were solid, they knew how we worked.

If you haven't guessed it already, Russ and I have very detailed people so everyone at the beginning they could keep up.

They knew what we expected of everyone.

They knew what we'd look at, they could keep up with our expectations but they also lived and breathed our core values as well.

So the culture was really good.

So it was a very good solid starting point.

And I suppose strategic planning is nothing new to anybody here.

My goal isn't to teach any of you guys how to suck eggs.

I'm just trying to explain it from the very beginning.

So just bear with me.

So we did a strategic plan just like we do every 90 days.

So a very standard exercise, if you guys haven't read this book yet, do yourself a favor and pick it up.

It's called Scaling Up by Vern Harnish.

It's wonderful if you have read it and if you haven't just read it.

Um, we've gone through it a couple times at this point and if you're doing a strategic plan, you start with a basic SWOT analysis and then you move on to your three-year planning.

We thought about what we wanted in three years, then one year and then in 90 days.

And I'd seriously recommend just work out exactly what does that look like, like in excruciating detail.

So I'm talking X amount of clients equals X amount of coaches for us, we knew every like what the capacity would be if we had a coach, what was the limit of how many people they could work with, what that was the absolute like limit they were getting pushed at what was their optimal.

And then we did that for how many, how big does the database have to be because we knew how much we could convert of it.

So how many salespeople did that mean we needed?

And we worked all the way back even like to grow our database, how much was that gonna cost in advertising?

'cause we knew how many or how much it would cost to generate a new marketing qualified lead.

So we started adding all of that up.

So how much did that mean we had to spend in advertising when the question begged was that possible on our current channels?

So that was Facebook and Google and at the end of the day it wasn't possible to spend that much on those platforms.

So we had to ask was it possible to spend that much money elsewhere?

And that become a really big focus for that year as well.

So buying sponsorships and partnerships with other big associations in the US live events, exhibitions, we had to think about where all that money had to go and think ahead so that we weren't caught out and our growth was limited 'cause we didn't really factor in all those other gotchas.

And I'd probably also recommend just finding your inspiration.

We actually made a plan to 10 x the company in a year that that's our goal.

That was our whole goal.

It wasn't a pie in the sky crap little goal that you hear a lot of other people say like the whole 10 x mantra.

We're talking actual growth.

And we got pretty inspired when we saw Sam Ovens do exactly that consulting.com.

I watched a video and he walked through how he actually 10 xd his company in one year and he did it with just him.

So it almost killed him.

And we figured we have the team behind us, we could probably sustain it if we do it, we could probably keep going.

So I'd also highly recommend finding some inspiration or proof because I think that's what's actually kept us going and actually been so bulletproof in thinking yeah of course we can do this if he can and he's one person then we definitely can.

So that's where that's come from.

Strategic plan and excruciating detail really helped.

But one thing that was obvious was this little team was gonna get a lot bigger.

We weren't going to add any more products, I might just add there was no way we were gonna start adding more products.

We were gonna 10 x the products we already have.

So looking at how many members we signed up in a month, if we signed up 15 new members in November, 2020, we knew we needed to sign up 150 new members.

New members in November, 2021.

That's where our 10 x was heading.

So we broke the company up into what we saw as being the core teams.

So put very simply our core teams were going to be marketing, sales and coaching.

They're really what were driving the business.

Marketing, sales and coaching.

And then there was operations.

And a lot of people end up saying this, not everyone caress as much as you because you are the business owner or because you are the business owner.

You are so invested, you're so good at what you do, you probably end up feeling like you just want another one of yourself on the team to be like that.

Good.

We were very lucky because on our marketing teams like that year prior like the the 12 months leading up to this point, we found a gun.

Her name is Kayla, she is amazing.

The kind of person that you can literally throw a project to on a Monday morning.

Here's what we need done, here's all the reasons why they're totally on board.

She totally got it, understood it.

Meet with her the next day for a little bit of a progress report and I get the update.

Okay, so I went through this.

It wasn't as simple as we first thought, here are all the roadblocks figured we could get through it all these didn't work.

I went through this, that, that got this help, watched a YouTube video, did all of this, managed to overcome it, it broke, I fixed it.

Now it's robust and here it worked.

I did that yesterday afternoon.

She could just do anything that you give her and it was more so it was the energy that Russ and I have obviously as the owners.

Let's just get it done.

Let's do it well and keep going.

She was just the person that we could trust to do anything.

And it's very worth pointing out actually that everyone else on the team was like we could trust them to do anything.

I said we had a very core team but everyone else loved the area that we were in that they were in.

So our coach was amazing, wanted to stay as a coach, obviously ditto in the other areas.

So we do six monthly appraisals with all of the staff.

And her 12 month appraisal had or her review, performance review had just come around.

And it was really interesting because in that 12 month review it came out that she actually doesn't love marketing.

She just said she was like, I applied 'cause I know I'm just good at it but I don't love it.

I don't see myself doing this long term.

She shouldn't, she couldn't quite put her finger on what it was she could do long term but she knew like organization was her thing.

She was really good at just getting things done, checking everything.

She's an all rounder but you're just really good.

And there was an opportunity, right?

Because at the end of the day knowing our growth goals operationally I knew we were going to be cracking at some point.

So relying on just Russ and I to come through operation-wise, it's gonna be pretty tough.

Obviously as most partnerships Russ and I divided and conquered.

So Russ was taking on JVs, the marketing and advertising spend while I was creating those teams, recruiting, systemizing those roles, training and onboarding those people and managing each person in that company.

So we know we just can't do it all And that in itself, just recruiting that many people was going to be an absolute nightmare After that appraisal and knowing, you know, where she actually wanted to go after interviewing, Kayla was offered and she accepted a position of being an executive assistant and basically coming into an ops manager in training.

She is basically acting as my right hand.

So every single thing I was doing in operations, she was there learning and doing at the exact same time.

Um, recruitment, putting systems in place and creating procedures, training materials, onboarding and offboarding procedures, literally everything.

Um, she's in training to be an ops manager, um, especially because Russ and I have taken on a role as speakers at live events, so many different interviews, all these different online events as well.

Our time is just gonna get smaller and smaller.

So finding that gun and putting them basically as your right hand in operations so as it grows you have help at keeping everything else at bay was so important.

So we just knew we needed to plan our way out of the day to day.

So what I'm doing here with Kayla basically is training her on every single thing about the company 'cause and she can know and spot any error and coordinate all three of those main teams together, which is basically what we are doing.

So that's gonna be my biggest tip.

I think getting someone to actually help you operations wise, it's often very much left to just the business owners or a lot of people employ like an office manager but they don't have the authority or aptitude to really understand each and every single team.

So find your double and basically get them in training to be your new ops manager.

So growing the teams, obviously it came down to recruitment and this is where it gets really interesting.

We've all heard that saying hire slowly and fire fast but you still gotta do it with a 10 x plan.

We knew we wanted to grow and we wanted to grow really quickly but we weren't gonna just hire anyone because that's where things like really start cracking.

So hire slowly, fire fast.

We also knew that for our plan to work we couldn't just have staff in Australia.

We had a like all of our original staff who were in Australia but if we needed to properly grow the US and I said North America is such a big market for us, we couldn't rely on just servicing them for a few hours a day 'cause couple team members would just start at 6:00 AM to get that little window and it wouldn't have actually worked long-term.

So we knew we needed people not just in Australia but we needed to recruit over in North America as well.

And really as we were like spacing all of that out, we noted down every single position that we needed and the required order as well.

Obviously the objective number one was to actually replace Kayla.

'cause if Kayla was moving from marketing into an operations role, suddenly we were without a digital marketer again.

Um, and it was all about managing expectations as well 'cause she was very aware that was priority number one, finding your replacement and until you do, you've got two jobs to do until that's found.

She helped recruit her replacement and train them while she still had to do all of that digital marketing which was exciting to someone like her.

These are the people you're trying to go for.

That was so exciting to her to be a part of that like it was a little bit of short-term pain but she could see like the future of where we were heading.

We planned out the most urgent positions.

Obviously number one was gonna be a digital marketer.

The second one was to have salespeople and the next one was to get our next coach on board.

They were all in the order of importance.

It's worth pointing out And throughout as I go through all this example of what we did, it wasn't an amazing three to 23.

There were so many things that happened in this period and I'm actually gonna share them as well.

So you can just see like how difficult it started getting because this process was anything but smooth at the start of this process We had, we had one salesperson and as soon as we got onto this plan we lost them.

Covid mocked up so many people's lives and our one salesperson left 'cause they had to take care of their family.

So during this process we went from one to none on the sales end.

So it was pretty tough to trust the process that we had in place but we knew where we were heading and we knew it was important.

We were advertising for all of these at the same time but these are just order of priority of what we needed to fill.

And by the way it's worth pointing out that we could do that and actually trust that process because we are really big on holding the right reserves for the company so that we don't make super emotional decisions.

Because if we were in a spot and in a jam and we needed someone now rather than the best person, you start taking on really subpar people and that cracks your culture and then it's in this horrible vicious cycle and it ended up just, yeah not being good.

So we're as tough as it was, we were able to stay calm because we knew the long-term plan and we just wanted to find the right people to slot into those positions.

And digital marketer was first because we could still sell automatically because get by why we waited for the right salesperson.

We didn't wanna lose all of the momentum on our marketing 'cause we're also spending a ton of money as well.

So that's why marketing was still first up.

The recruitment process, it's pretty lengthy but again it's, it was all documented, it was all detailed so we always knew where we were going.

Having it so rigid as well lets us be really non-emotional.

So if you really liked someone but they did not score on the criteria you go, we wouldn't progress people if they were below a 20 out of 25 literally on everything.

Like it was so strict so that it was just super non-emotional and it was just like a sorry, no thanks.

Every single thing is graded and there's a lot of friction in this process.

I'll walk you through as well.

But it's on purpose because really for every position we start recruiting for, you're gonna get about a hundred applicants and you wanna wage your way through them so you can get only the best people.

So every single thing is graded from their email manner, literally to the background of what you can see in their application videos, even what they're wearing.

And obviously that's customized.

It depends on the role that they're actually applying for.

But we essentially have an advert that's written a particular way to appeal to a particular type of person.

And then there's the application process.

We don't look at people who just apply through seeker indeed or wherever we're advertising.

There are specific instructions at the bottom of what we need them to do for us to even look at them.

If they pass that and they get over a certain score, we'll then do a phone interview.

If they get higher than a certain score, we move on to a skills test to see if they're actually good.

People can talk but let's see if they're actually good at what they do.

If they pass a certain score on the skills test then we do a zoom interview.

Worth noting actually by the way, we're completely remote so our team members are all over Australia and the US so we don't have an office.

So it's all done online.

Then after the Zoom interview, if they pass a certain score, that's when we do a personality test.

We actually do the Briggs Meyer disc profile.

So we'll get them to complete that so we can just see where they fit along with the, the rest of the team members we'll do reference checking and actually call and marry things up with who they've put down as a reference.

This is new.

We've started adding in police checks as well just to get really thorough as the team is really building up.

Then of course there's a verbal offer that they can then accept.

Then there's that formal offer, then there's all of the onboarding, then you've gotta train them in their role and you've basically got 90 days from when they start the job in a probationary period and then you can do a probationary review and and see if we wanna keep 'em and and they wanna stay as well.

So I know I've gone 'em a little bit past recruitment, if you even just go up to the offer, there are a lot of steps there and it really elongated it and honestly it's, it would be so tempting to just be if you liked someone on paper just to hire them.

But this has saved us so many times from literally employing the wrong people by making it this difficult really for all these different people.

Um, but to customize it, I mentioned this very quickly, it's uh, a very detailed process but we look for different things depending on the roles we're hiring for.

So remembering our core teams, we add marketing and then sales and then coaching.

Marketing wise we want people on our team and our marketing team if they can spot every error possible.

Russ and I certainly are not copywriters, we're not professional proofreaders.

So if we put anything out there, there quite possibly is going to be a mistake.

So anyone on our marketing team has to be able to quality control.

So our entire advert for the job is littered with very subtle mistakes, typos, little grammar errors, little bit of inconsistency in the spacing, all the headers and right at the bottom it just says to apply, attach a markup of this entire advert and send it here along with your resume.

That's all we're looking for.

So spelling and grammar is a big one.

The skills test for a marketer, we get them to write an article for us in between the phone interview and a Zoom interview we get them to write an article, we give them a brief like we give them everything we want them to talk about but we get them to write an article and we've got a criteria on how we judge them.

We make sure, do they even check out our blog, look at our style.

Do they use the same like people who want the job, they reflect your current blog, they make a little call to action banner that's very similar to what you can already see or little things like that.

The sales roles, the application at the bottom there, they have to shoot a 62nd video and we make sure they mention something at the very start of it 'cause they can shoot us a video but if they don't mention what we're looking for, again they've got rubbish attention to detail.

We are a very systemized detailed procedure driven company.

If you can't follow the first one in an application process, they can go.

So we look for a 62nd intro video about themselves.

They have to mention something but then we score how their video is.

We've literally had some people do a video, they're in like a singlet and it's a mess behind them.

That's how, how they're representing their company and that's how they represent themselves in an application.

It's not good enough.

So next we wouldn't consider them either.

So it gets, it gets quite particular the skills test for a salesperson is we will give them um, three scripts and get them to read it out.

So we wanna see how natural they are at reading a script whether they can or they can't.

For coaches for example, this is for our one-on-one mentoring.

We need pretty elite high level business coaches to work on our team because if you're going to coach a builder, builder's financials are very different to anyone else's financials.

We wanna know that they actually know what they're talking about.

So part of the skills test for any of our coaches, we give them a detailed k p I sheet of an example builder that goes through every figure for all four quarters of last year and then their forecast for this year and just record.

All we ask them to do is record an analysis, use loom and we always just say loom and we link it so we can make sure they can figure out how to use software.

We use a lot of software, we don't want any technophobe and we ask what is the biggest problem in this part of the sheet?

What is the biggest problem in this part of the sheet?

And again it's grading them that they could actually follow that.

So it's making it really customized based on what we're hiring for so they can actually demonstrate that they're not only competent but they can excel at it.

Um, and it's not all rosy.

I do wanna like really point that out.

This is so, so much work, it's almost too much work that you wouldn't wanna do it but it's so worth it when you get the good people in the end.

But just know that it's gonna be a minute because there are a lot of average people out there.

There are only a few amazing people.

So it's not all rosy.

It took us four months to source that replacement digital marketer.

It took us employing 13 salespeople to stick with the seven we've got now.

Um, and it took us over six months to get Australian based coaches.

We got two in North America before we got any in Australia because just how strict this was.

And we still held our nerve because it was just protecting the integrity of the entire team because that's who interacts with all the members and clients as well.

So everyone knew that it really was just a really high caliber and a really high standard.

But you can also get really creative as well.

Certainly the market we're in.

That's why I mentioned that at the very start we only wanted great coaches.

Really great coaches often aren't employed a lot of the time they run their own consultancies.

So the first coach we got, we actually knew him for years and years.

It was a great connection we had made based in the US in the home building industry for so long.

It just made sense to bring him on board and and he was always excited.

The second coach we came about, we actually started looking at coaches and consultants in the industry and we weren't on a strategy like who could we acquire?

And so this was someone else who joined our team 'cause we acquired their coaching company to shut it down and bring them on board as a coach.

Which by the way was a wonderful PR opportunity for both us and them because it added so much authority to both.

Obviously you can get creative as well with the amount of referrals if you have exceptional people working for you already, what other exceptional people do they know.

So referrals is another wonderful way and obviously reach out to your own network is gonna be super important.

And obviously focusing on perpetual recruitment, this is a struggle.

I totally get this.

It's so much work to keep thinking about always wanting to employ people when you're set in your team.

But if you are constantly wanting to grow, thinking about how you can perpetually be making it look really good for potential employees.

For example, we completely redid our LinkedIn company page.

LinkedIn company was essentially just posting everything on Instagram was posting and our Facebook just as if it was to prospects like builders and future builders.

So we completely cleaned that up and changed our social strategy on LinkedIn as in the company page to post for prospective employees.

We were posting different reviews, we were welcoming new people to the team.

We were talking and sharing team member wins.

So we completely repurposed that content And then of course we also got behind and really focused on, okay we uh, marketing strategy for prospects, we need to roll that out as a marketing strategy for new people as well.

So we started really focusing on how many reviews can we get.

So obviously you've got an Australian site like Seek.

So we started getting reviews from all three core teams.

So marketing, sales and then coaches and also focusing on sites like Indeed in the US as well so that we could actually get that proof behind us.

Culture I think I'm taking up a bit of time so I'll try and speed up.

Firstly, I do wanna say I understand that a team of 23 is not big by any means.

There are companies with way bigger teams but we always wanted to preserve that small culture team and 23, it was the biggest we've ever seen.

So it was quite big for us.

So we knew that we wanted to and had to preserve that small team culture.

And so we'll chat about that and I'm also gonna touch on the core values real, real quick.

It's worth pointing out that the sales team did got it did get a little bit hairy when we hit about nine salespeople.

The culture did slip and in hindsight it was because that was too big.

Now it got cleaned up pretty quickly.

But a learn I would love to share in this group right now is that it was too big.

Really what it should have done is actually split it up into AU versus U S A, not versus but two separate teams so that they were two smaller teams there because then that culture would've actually remained.

So a team of five and AU so and four in C U s Canada and the US And then what we would do is get the sales team to come together as a whole once a week but on a daily basis we would just meet in smaller teams, smaller pods, the coaching and marketing, they're not there yet.

But again that's what we do when we have enough coaches we would split it up by countries just so it remains smaller pods.

And again, I'm not sure if I mentioned it but every single person is remote.

So I think that works very differently as opposed to an in-person team as well because there's a lot of chatter that goes on in the background.

You've got Zoom, you've got phone, you've got video call.

Smaller teams genuinely as a learn have worked a lot better.

So this was another big moment.

I was obviously running training and managing all the people in the company and when we started growing the coaching team we interviewed and promoted our current coach into a head coach role and it was really clear that he was in charge of managing and training new coaches.

Everyone else was on me but it got to the point where I was actually coordinating 15 people and that was really tough, especially across two continents.

So the time zones to hit everyone as well and make sure everyone got enough attention and training that that got really hard and it was never the plan to continue that it was just necessary for that moment in time.

And the biggest drain was obviously the biggest team.

So that was the sales team.

Everything was systemized.

The team like people they just needed driving, coordinating, coaching, mentoring and running.

So we spent a lot of time weighing up who had the ability to step up into the team leader for that sales team and and take o take over unfortunately just wasn't comfortable with anyone on the team to do that.

And to give a little bit more context, the oldest person on the team at the time was nine months into the role and even nine months into the entire industry, which construction's pretty different, especially even selling in coaching and information.

So it wasn't entirely confident in putting someone internally and moving them up.

So we had to look elsewhere and we did look elsewhere and we employed ahead of sales and we all know the risk here.

Bringing in someone new over and above your existing team, it can rougher ruffle a few feathers especially with any egomaniacs that you may have on the team.

Even with all the best positioning, we literally found the best person we could.

Someone who had been in the building industry for over 20 years.

He'd led all size teams in sales operations, post warranty literally had all the experience and medals he could have had.

We were very prepared for it because some men in particular could not handle that.

So we did shed a few people and we just replaced them to make it very clear that this is the way it was going to be.

This is the way the team is growing.

So the biggest way you can keep that small team culture though is going to be good communication.

And that does mean regular meetings.

So I'll walk you very quickly through our meeting rhythm as well.

We talk to everyone on a daily, weekly and monthly schedule I suppose you could say on a daily huddle as a good example.

They're basically one-on-one like Russ and I meet every single day.

We've got a 10 minute huddle, we've got a few things that we need to talk about every single day.

So we don't just like interrupt each other constantly throughout the day.

I will meet with our head coach every single day.

He meets with his coaching team every single day but it means I don't have to but I can talk to him every single day.

Marketing wise, they're actually all separate.

I meet with them one-on-one every single day.

And so you think that suddenly adds up.

They're only 10 minute meetings, they're not long but it's very worthwhile.

And I just wanna explain why rather than looping our entire marketing team together, they actually are quite separate.

We've got digital and social, someone who runs digital and social.

We've got product marketing which is a lot of rolling out every product every single month.

So slightly different.

We've got a full-time event coordinator if we were to lock them all together and do a meeting, all of them, half the stuff is relevant to everyone else.

So we actually do those daily huddles individually.

We get them together for a weekly meeting.

So I'll cover that in a second.

But it is sales that we do all together.

So that sub-team we'll do a daily huddle with the sales team so all of them in one go for that 10 minute headline meeting and getting them pumped for the day on a weekly basis.

We do that collective marketing team so we can make sure we're on track with our initiatives for the week.

Sales-wise, this is where it flips between marketing and sales.

We know we meet daily as a group with all of the sales team but we do one-on-ones with each person once a week.

So it's like that one-on-one sales coaching and mentoring and accountability.

Like we'll have listened to a call and we're here to discuss it.

We go through some pointers, how could we have done that better?

What's the plan for this client in particular or whatever.

And then on a weekly basis as well, we've got a 90 minute leadership meeting where head of coaching, head of sales, Russ and I all come together and it's basically a very top line overview for the leadership team and we can see what can be shared with everyone's respective teams.

But then on a monthly basis we do an entire team wide meeting and these are phenomenal.

They're honestly a lot of fun, love them, but they actually keep the communication really strong between every team.

'cause we talked about core teams.

Suddenly the sales team on the interact with the sales team, they're barely talking to marketing.

The coaches are only really interacting with the coaches.

Maybe a couple of the sales teams as some hot ones get fed through to them, they'll have a bit of chat but you still we're really big on it's team a P v not team me.

So you still need to see the entire team as a whole.

So real quick, this is just really helpful if you did wanna use, this is our agenda.

There's a very quick welcome, we'll welcome any new team members.

'cause every month we seem to have someone new joining the team.

So we'll let them introduce themselves, we'll give them a whole company wide welcome.

We go through last month's results.

Did we hit it, did we not?

Did we exceed target, did we not?

And here are all of the reasons why these are the KPIs as a whole.

Then the 12 month goal update, this was our 10 x update every single month we're talking about the progress.

Are we on track?

Are we off track?

When is it likely to hit?

What month and what year?

Then we take a moment and go through divisional updates.

So our head coach delivers an update on the coaching side for the entire team.

Something that is worthwhile for the entire team knowing.

Okay, so what trends are happening for our biggest clients in North America and Australia?

How many coaching sessions were delivered last month?

Who was top of the leaderboard for retention?

What can we share that's relevant to the entire team?

Ditto sales wise and then ditto marketing as well so that each division is really across what's happening so that there's no miscommunication and we all really feel like we're all working together towards the same goal.

Then we go through a couple client updates.

We share all the newest reviews.

If we get new reviews on Facebook, on Google, it's a nice little celebration.

You wanna know that what we're doing is actually making a difference.

Any new videos we get, we don't play them just so it doesn't waste any time.

But we do talk about client updates, then we go on to next month's KPIs, what are the minimums we need to hit in each and every area.

Then we talk about some upcoming important dates.

So these are, you know, Monday the 6th of September is Labor Day in the US and Canada pretty much the whole like North American team are gonna be away that day.

But any of us in Australia, let's make sure we don't schedule anything on our Tuesday morning, which is gonna be there Monday because no one's gonna be there.

Just you know, important dates um that everyone needs to know.

Then any other items, bit of an open floor.

And then we've started ending the meetings with a bit of good news.

We've just spent an hour covering the business and the company.

So we just wanna have an open forum.

There are over 20 people.

Let's all just get to know each other personally.

What's some good news we can all share?

And it can literally just be something like one of our team members was like, oh since being in lockdown there's not been much to do.

So literally in the last four weeks I went from not being able to run to, I ran 10 K last night and everyone was able to just celebrate with them and and move forward.

So it's become a nice little thing in those team meetings.

But hands down, the best thing we do about this is we do an email update straight away afterward that summarizes the entire team meeting because you don't wanna just sit there like taking notes the high whole time.

You wanna be super engaged and as soon as the meeting finishes you wanna have all of these updates ready to go in an email that you can send to everyone in the company.

And it literally has last month's results.

This month's KPIs, what updates from each division.

Were just a bit of a recap.

Here's the link to the newest video success story that's on YouTube.

And by the way, here's a link to the recording of today's meeting.

If you wanted to go back and re-watch anything, I'd highly recommend preparing it in advance.

It becomes quite a long email so that you have your team meeting that day.

And if anything new cropped up you can note it down, make the tweaks and then send it that day.

But that is so helpful as well to actually send that recap.

And I'm almost done, I promise.

Tools and systems we use, this might just be a really good opportunity to share it.

It's, I don't think anything groundbreaking.

We obviously use a lot more than just this list here, but these I would say are gonna be the core that actually allowed us to grow.

The first one top left is click up.

This probably isn't anything boo.

I've seen a few people mention this in the group.

We only started using it about 18 months ago and it's incredible.

This is what actually allowed us to, I've just changed it to the Fox Cup.

This is what allowed us to actually be able to grow because click up has a capacity planner.

So I was truly able to see how many hours people are spending each day and if the marketing team are overloaded and I'll just need Your laptop to sign some stuff which is right there When we need Put your handset on.

The next one.

Top right is HubSpot.

This we use an enterprise version of HubSpot Worth every single penny.

It's pretty expensive but you can do every single thing in there.

That's why we don't need a hundred other different bits of software.

HubSpot is amazing, the sales component, the marketing component.

We even use a little bit of service and it's really awesome.

The best level of HubSpot you can get.

Just go for it.

You can automate so much.

You don't have to employ at least two people if you get it Zoom, we all know what Zoom is but that's, we don't use Slack or anything like that.

We use Zoom chat, it's just trying to simplify it.

We do Zoom meetings all the time.

Everyone's remote G Suite, so many Google sheets, only Google Slides.

We only work in the cloud, none on this Microsoft.

And then finally bottom right, this is new.

We probably only got this in the last about four, five months I would say.

But couldn't recommend Bamboo HR enough.

Really love this platform.

Essentially found it 'cause it was looking for a software that could roll out training assignments to everybody.

But it turned out being so much more, it's even just launched a full integration with Xero and it's, it's just awesome like how you run payroll, it's got everyone's profile on there.

So they get to log into Bamboo hr, they're sick that day, they get to request sick, they can request holidays through that app.

So there's no more paperwork getting sent front and back like an application.

You can see whose birthday is coming up.

You can have whole team announcements.

And honestly since growing to the size of the team we have now over 20 it's so worthwhile.

So that was a new find.

Totally worthwhile sharing and it's probably worthwhile sharing 'cause I'm sure everyone's super interested.

Have we 10 x yet?

Not yet.

But in that period of time we've gone from 195 members to almost 500, 488 and we've gone from 22 private clients up to 104 as well, which is pretty cool.

So all these systems and processes that we've got here, that's how we did it.

And these are the results we've gotten so far.

So we're on track, not there yet, but stay tuned.

Just figured it'd be nice to to have an open floor and see if anyone had any questions.

Yeah, no.

Awesome.

Thanks Sky.

That was really good.

It was really a a modern day session on on, on how to scale your business to the next level.

So I'll throw it out to to everyone and see what questions, questions we've got.

Hey Sky, I might as well kick things off here.

How are you going?

I'm good.

How you doing Jonathan?

Thanks For that presentation.

Very insightful.

Learned lots.

Awesome.

I just wonder with your model, do you plan to go globally and create a licensing model just with obviously being so tight on your SOPs and having that infrastructure potentially there to scale that way.

Is that a consideration for you guys?

Right now our main focus is the main five countries.

So yeah we're in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US and the uk and we have the ability to scale it to such a big point doing what we're doing right now.

It's probably never say never, but it's not immediately on our horizon.

Okay cool.

Doubling down on your home territory first of all.

Yeah, yeah 'cause then you get into a lot of translations that you have to start doing that.

It's a whole other layer of complexity and a lot of as well a lot of our coaching obviously specifically to builders, it's very different in any other country past those five.

So it ends up like you actually have to develop the product a lot more as well.

Yeah, cool.

Thanks.

Any other questions?

Yeah, I had a question for you Sky.

Sorry Yuga, Jasmine.

Hey Jasmine Got a good session.

I know there is so much more that goes behind the scenes to scale a business to that level being well done.

Uh, when it comes to teams who are not in person, like with remote teams and working in.

And I wanted to understand how have you worked out the remuneration model given that now in current times it's also about flexibility.

It's not necessarily about nine to five or nine to six.

So is it all, is it retainer plus results or Yeah.

How have you worked that that contract arrangement with them?

It's actually a really good question because we are quite strict on working hours because it's remote because especially for our coaches and for our sales team and it's the easiest reason ever we send out calendars.

So if you leave a voicemail to someone, hey Jasmine just got your voicemail, I'll send you a calendar link so you can rebook a time.

We have to ensure that if they get booked at a time, you're not on flexi time, you're not taking the dog for a walk, you are there manning those hours.

So it's in everyone's contract and it differs.

Some people are on 6:00 AM to 3:00 PM some people are literally on 8:00 AM to also gonna be 5:00 PM and they've got that hour in the middle and we just make sure it's really clear and rigid in their own calendars when they're here and where they're not and it's gonna be blocked out as busy when their lunch break is gonna be.

And I think it's that mutual understanding of yeah you may be remote but this is still a business, you're still gonna act as if you're showing up to work every single day.

And we've not had a problem with it.

And I think if anything our recruitment process, it really does filter out the people that are just looking for an easy work from home job.

And actually it's worth pointing out to answer that question even more, we've always had a remote team.

So even pre covid we were very used to spying through who had and had not worked from home before.

And we would very easily be able to see, you know, and it was really clear this is a work from home position, tell me a little bit about your home office.

Have you worked from home before?

You'd hear these answers from people like no I haven't, but I'm really looking forward to working from home.

Having that balance and that lifestyle.

You're just like, why though?

You're still working that many hours.

So explain that to me.

And if they were thinking, oh I could just do my washing during the day or do all this random stuff, they weren't thinking it was still gonna be a full-time normal job.

The only thing we were really listening for is you're trying to dump the commute.

That's the only thing that changes.

So the working hours are super important in terms of remuneration.

Just your second question, it depends on the role you wanna pay.

Well obviously, so look up what's happening in your industry and what you're recruiting for sales wise.

We do like commission, obviously we pay a salary though, so that really, not salespeople alike, they don't wanna do any admin, but if you pay a salary that's why you do it.

You get paid to do a lot of stuff they need to.

So we basically just work on thresholds, we'll pay you for this amount minimum of sales each and every month.

And as you get past it you get paid commission.

So everyone's thresholds are basically at a point that they should always earn commission 'cause they should push past it.

That's good.

Yeah, thanks for clarifying out.

Yeah, that's a good distinction to have that it's work from home but it's not flexible anytime you Yeah, yeah like it's in their contract working hours and they just, they gotta agree to it as well.

Cool, thank you.

So we probably have time for one more question and then we'll go into a quick breakout.

Let's go Daniel one.

What platforms did you use to advertise for your staff and did you get enough volume?

And just a question on the, the acquisition of the coach, was that like a straight up deal or was that some kind of profit share or straight up buy?

So two questions.

The first one was where did we advertise?

Is that right?

Yes, thanks.

Yeah, so in Australia we did seek, we tried indeed, it was pretty rubbish.

It seemed all the subpar people for on Indeed are certainly what we found.

So Seek was way better.

It's definitely the number one job site.

We even did a lot of our own Facebook ads, couldn't really make that work.

Tried doing Link LinkedIn ads as well.

Couldn't make that work.

Seek truly was the only place that actually gave us what we were looking for.

But again, do remember I was saying like some of 'em took six months to fill like you're just renewing and renewing so it's just holding out.

I don't know if you want the US at all.

Sure, yeah.

Um, that's indeed and the good thing, the good thing about Indeed is you actually do have to pay to set up all of those different ads like on Seek.

But with Indeed you pay a sponsorship so per day how long you want it running.

But with Bamboo HR you get free Indeed listings.

So once we had Bamboo hr, we did a listing on Indeed in every major city in the US and Canada 'cause we could, so it beefed up how many people could apply as well.

Cool, thank you.

And it's not that expensive either, sorry, bamboo hr.

It's really reasonable for the time you save in a lot of aggro with hr.

Yeah, no that's, that's awesome.

Sky some really good questions.

And Daniel, did you have one like super quickly I think yeah I hope if it's not quick Sky, that's cool.

You mentioned you use uh, automation and click up.

Uh, I use click up as well.

It's awesome.

Can you gimme any examples of uh, ways you've used click up with automation?

Anything that you might do another app that automates it in click up or vice versa?

Oh we don't do too much of that actually.

So not automation for click up to do anything else.

So we use a lot of Zapier for like easy webinar to HubSpot to sending emails and like doing stuff like that click up wise, the honestly the best thing about click up is having capacity planners and seeing everyone's workload.

We do a lot of recurring tasks because the marketing team at month end have a lot to do data wise so that all those tasks and they can track their time, how long a task takes and it can upload it, it can update the estimated time so that you get a real accurate num like figure of how long it takes them to do certain tasks in month end.

So you can actually see this was happening quite a bit and this is why we got click up.

You assign the team a lot of work with the estimate hours and you look at their workload and suddenly you're getting them to do 80 hours of work and 40 hours in that week.

And so you're able to readjust.

Yeah.

Cool.

Good to know.

Thank you Luke.

Luke said as well, click up is our backbone.

So it's, yeah, that's good.