I’ve recently reached a place where everything feels super busy. Even though we’re still in a pandemic and I’m not traveling like I used to because of that, there is a ton going on.
Business has grown substantially in the last year, and so we need to hire.
My daughter is a toddler and almost 2, so she needs more energy and attention that before.
My wife and I are at the tail end of having a new house designed and we’re preparing to break ground on that early summer once the snow melts off the property.
Things are busy, and that’s not a badge of honor for me anymore.
In this episode I talk about how things feel busy, why they’re busy for me right now, and then how I’m getting some sanity back in my life. I introduce the idea of a Time Audit, which is something an old coach of mine had me do and I’ve kept doing quarterly to every 6 months when I inevitably get to this “busy” phase.
I hope you enjoy, and subscribe.
Transcript
John:
Hey there everybody, and welcome to this episode of the Credo podcast. I’m John Doherty, the founder of getcredo.com. On this show, I interview smart marketers and entrepreneurs who can help you grow and scale your business through great digital marketing. Every now and then I do a shorter, me only episode, teaching you something that is on my mind specifically. This episode is, of course, sponsored by getcredo.com, my company, where we have a highly curated network of vetted digital marketing professionals who are best in class at what they do. We’ve interviewed them, we’ve seen their client metrics and we’ve accepted them into the network only after they’ve checked the necessary boxes. At Credo, we specialize in helping companies find and hire the best digital marketing firm or consultant for their specific needs. So, if that’s you, get in touch with us at getcredo.com. That’s G-E-T-C-R-E-D-O.com and click the Find a Marketer button in the top, right navigation.
John:
Yo, yo, yo, what is going on everybody? This is John Doherty. I’m back here in your ears. I’m actually recording this in my car. I’m driving my truck up to Breckenridge right now, couple hours, hour and a half, hour 45 outside of Denver. We have a ski lease up there, so heading up for the weekend. I’m driving by myself with the dog, of course, the wife and kiddo are coming separately.
John:
So, I wanted to hop on and record this for you and it’ll be released a couple of weeks after I record it, but I wanted to get this out while it’s fresh, because it might be something that you need to hear. I wanted to record it while it’s fresh, because it might be something that you need to hear that might help you unblock some things in your business.
John:
So, Credo’s been going for my business, if you’re not familiar, getcredo.com, has been going since early 2013 and I’ve been working on it since September 2015, the end of September 2015. And we’re five and a half years in, and it’s been a journey, as any entrepreneur will tell you with any business, it’s been a journey. You learn a ton, good times, interesting times. And you get the school of hard knocks, that’s what entrepreneurship is. And this is, obviously, no different for me. I’ve hired people, I’ve fired people, I’ve kept people around and people have quit. We’ve driven incredible results for a bunch of agencies. Other agencies didn’t see those results. It’s just been a thing. And I’m all about value. I’m all about the value that people are getting from it. But at the end of the day, I’m running a business, I’m not running a charity. It’s a for-profit business. And I’ll just come out and say that, it’s a for-profit business.
John:
The reality is that when I first started working on it, we went from basically no revenue, I think we did $80 in revenue the month before I started working on it. I think the month of September 2015, if I’m recalling it correctly, we did $80 in revenue. And we pretty quickly went to that December, we did $5,000 in revenue. I was doing some SEO consulting at this point, but pay myself out of that, but we’re not taking anything out of the business. But we did $5,000 in revenue, leads are increasing, and it wasn’t even that many leads per month coming in, 10, 12, 15, something like that. They’re increasing by a few every month, but revenue is going in the wrong direction. And so, I pivoted it into a subscription model and we went to, by the end of the year, we were at 18k or no, by the end of 2015, we were at about 18, 16, $18,000 a month in revenue.
John:
And then, I kind of hit a wall, hired a business coach. We reworked some things and we went to the next level. And then to be honest with you, we kind of mucked around. I brought on a business partner technology… On the technology side, we built, rebuilt all of our technology. We pivoted the business model to a marketplace/escrow model. And then mid last year, middle of three, few months into the pandemic, we decided, hey, we need to trim back the product and make this thing self-sustaining.
John:
And to be 100% transparent with you, we flat-lined revenue for two and a half years. Actually revenue went down a little bit. We were still profitable-ish, but revenue went down and then we did actually get to a point where we weren’t profitable, I was overspending. I was investing heavily. And we ended up about two months of cash in the bank, maybe, something like that. And everyone, if all of our customers had left, I basically could have paid the bills for two months. Trimmed the company back, had to let someone go, cut back my own salary.
John:
Long story short, now that mid to end of February, as I’m recording this, it’s going to be released early March. We are up about 70… about 60 some percent year on year and we’re up 70% since July. So, we’ve turned the business around and it feels good. We’ve got big cash buffer in the bank, which is awesome. But recently, what I’ve been feeling is that things are busy. I was actually, last night, my wife and I ate dinner with our kiddo, I put kiddo to bed because my wife wasn’t feeling well.
John:
And I came downstairs and did the dishes. And then I was like, “Okay, I got to go do some more work. I have some more things to work on.” I remarked too, I was like, “Things feel really busy right now.” And I used to crush work time. I honestly haven’t for the last few years, 30, 35 hours a week, it’s been nice. It’s been really nice, that the business has grown over the last eight months. And business has felt more sane than it did for the previous year, year and a half. So, that’s really, really nice, but I was like, “Man, things feel really busy right now.” And then I was looking at revenue and talking to my business partner, our CTO, who’s one of my best friends. And he and I were just kind of talking through some things and I was a little bit grumpy, a little bit short recently about some things and said some things that I definitely don’t regret, but I said them in a way that could have been interpreted in… I said them, and it could have been interpreted in other ways.
John:
Ali is very gracious to me and knows me and puts what I say in the context of all of our conversations and our partnership. And so he didn’t, but if it had been someone else, they may have taken it the wrong way. And I was trying to think through why. Why does this feel hard? Why do things feel hard right now? Why do things feel busy? I was looking at it, and I was like, “Holy crap.” We have grown so much that there’s just more required at this point. And the things that we’ve been doing that got us here, that got us through the shift and got us the gains that we’ve seen, that have helped us build back up the cash buffer so we have a defensible business, and we can invest into things that we can invest in to learning faster, invest cash in to learning faster and not have to spend more of our time. We can hire people to help us learn faster.
John:
The things that got us to this point are not going to get us to the next level. And so, we’ve kind of come to a decision and we basically say, “Okay, do we put in more time? Or do we… Can we hire people,” which we are, we are hiring people. But then also there’s some of these bigger things going on in the business, like we need to redo all of our internal reporting to drive sales and to drive our visibility into the business and how well every customer is getting value. And how do we get agencies closing better? To should we even bring people into our top level so that… if we don’t know what their close rates are? All these sorts of things.
John:
And then also, Ali and I were on Slack today, and I said something, I forget even what I said. And he goes, he laughs and texts… And like, “Ha ha, sounds like teenager problems.” I’m like, “You mean teenager product problems?” He’s like, “Yeah.” But he’s not like… he wasn’t calling me a teenager. And that’s me giving him the benefit of the doubt and asking for clarification. But recognizing that we’ve grown from a, I don’t know, a nine year old, 10 year old, something like that, where she’ll need a lot of parental supervision, et cetera, to yo, we’re a teenager now. Credo is a teenager. And it’s maybe even driving. Ali said, “At least they have their learner’s permit.” And the way you parent a teenager, so I hear, I don’t have a teenager, I have an almost two year old, but the way you parent a teenager is very different from how you parent a 10 year old. How you parent a 16 year old is very different from how you parent a 10 year old.
John:
And so, we’re having to learn how to do that. And so, I gave the analogy that right now, we’re a teenager that needs more food because it’s growing. We need to give it that. We need to invest. And by the way, we’re profitable, we’re adding money, multiple thousands of dollars, low five figures some months, to the bank account. That’s after everything else, after taxes, after payroll, after other expenses, everything else. We’re adding that to the bank account every month. I’m like, “Wow, we can invest.” We can invest and still be profitable.
John:
We need to feed this teenager so that it can continue to grow, but we need to feed this teenager, it needs to new shoes, it needs braces. It’s at that stage right now where we need to invest in a little bit, because it’s telling us that it wants to, and it needs to. So, we need to go back, we need to clean house a little bit and we need to adjust some things internally that are pretty easy to adjust, to help us see what it is that we need to do.
John:
And the reason I’m being transparent about this and recording this and talking about it and publishing it, is because I think there’s a lot of entrepreneurs out there, maybe some of you listening to do this, that you feel like things are really busy right now and there’s a lack of like, “Why aren’t things working the way that they were?” Or, “Wow, we’ve grown.” And all of a sudden, “Holy crap, I can’t do all of this anymore. I need to get processes in place.” There’s just all these thoughts going on. Or maybe you just don’t know, maybe you don’t know that you need processes in place. Maybe you don’t know that the marketing, the channels that you’ve been using to generate leads aren’t working. Maybe you aren’t working as well anymore. Maybe you don’t know that your close rates have gone down and your average project size has gone up, but you’re still spending the same amount of time with every client, and not less on the smaller ones and more on the bigger ones. And figuring out that, hey, I actually like working on these bigger projects so we can spend more time with them and drive more value and do more things.
John:
All that said, if you’re feeling like things are really busy right now, go back and look at what may have changed. Maybe your revenue grew. I know a lot of agents, their revenue grew a ton in 2020 through the pandemic because internal company… because companies cutting back their internal marketing teams, realizing they can hire a whole marketing team for the price of one junior, mid-level marketing manager in, I don’t know, Kansas city. They can hire a whole team for that at an agency. And so maybe your agency has grown really well, but you haven’t stocked up because you’re afraid. Or maybe you’re staffing up, and that’s leading to a whole new host of problems. You’re having to learn how to manage, you having to learn how to lead leaders.
John:
But what I want you to do is I actually want you to sit back, maybe take a day, take a morning, I don’t know what you have, where you can carve out, the time you can make, but I encourage you to make at least half a day where you can sit back. Maybe you, rent an Airbnb for a night and get some awesome takeout. We are still in a pandemic. So, you get takeout and get an evening to yourself and think about the business and look at your metrics and look at all the things that you’re doing. Look at your calendar. Do a time audit where you look back and say, “What are all the things I did every 30 minutes for the last week and which of those are driving the business and which of those aren’t?” And then stop doing the things that aren’t driving the business and do more of the things that are and figure out how you delegate better.
John:
I really encourage you. I’m going to challenge you, actually, to do a half day and to go and to get that kind of clarity. You owe it to yourself. We’re still pretty close to the beginning of the year. I mean, you’re listening to this beginning of March. We’re only two months in. We’re not even through Q1 yet, there’s a lot of the year left. Who knows what’s going to happen from here on out in this year? I think the world is going to open up a bit. Vaccines are rolling out from COVID-19. In person meet ups are going to start happening again. Things are only going to get busier from here, if we let them get busier. But I think that we can actually reset and go into it in a good way and realize what has happened and what do we need to change moving forward.
John:
So, anyways, I hope that’s helpful to you. It’s been helpful for me to realize it and to say, “Hey, we actually need to be the same.” We need more developer time. We need to put more money into marketing. We need to hire a person to support sales. I need an admin assistant, we need an admin in the business that’s supporting me, as an exec and also leading the business, and also personally with busy things going on. I’m having a house built this year and into the winter. So, I’ve realized all of that and all of that I’m building towards all that… getting that help because I realized that like, “Hey, this business has grown. It’s bigger than it’s ever been. I’ve never run a business of this size before, because the previous size is the biggest size of business I’ve ever run before that ever worked out, but it never run.”
John:
And so, I’m learning and I’m growing and I want you to think about that as well. How is your business growing? What are you learning? And what do you need to stop doing? What do you need to start doing? What do you need to do more of because you’ve stopped doing those things that you shouldn’t be doing? Now, you have time to focus on the things that are going to move the business forward. And how do you continue to level up in your learning? In your business? Working on the right things, not working on the wrong things, maybe becoming a leader of leaders.
John:
So, yeah, that’s what I got. I don’t really know how to end this, except to say, if this was helpful to you, I would love for you to share this. Share it on social media and tag me, take a screenshot with your phone and tag me on Instagram @DohertyJF. Tag me @DohertyJF on Twitter, wherever it is you share these things, tag me. I’d love to see it. give you a high five, a virtual high five, maybe even reshare it. So, share it with your friends, subscribe to the podcast. And with that, I’ll leave you to your week. I hope you have a good one and I’ll be back in your ear soon. Peace.