How to SAVE a Customer

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week Jay goz Jackie Russo and Jennifer Karen discussed some of the systems they've created that have made their businesses successful Jay established a process that helps employees diffuse conflicts with angry customers Jackie has a process that tracks the performance of her agency's lead generation efforts and has helped her Target clients more precisely and Jennifer recently created a process to deal with orders that makes it easier to walk that line between offending customers and forfeiting profits plus we follow up on some issues we've discussed in previous episodes Jay told us recently that he's cutting back on his advertising spend is that the best response to a softening Market Jennifer told us when she first joined the podcast about her Long March through what is often called the valley of death is she still in the valley of death and Jackie told us at the beginning of the year that she had two big clients that were ready to sign on did they in fact sign on even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations brought to you by our sponsor the great game of business will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges in fact that's the whole idea behind the 21 hats Community engaging with other owners to get the kinds of insights only another entrepreneur can offer if you're interested in learning more step one is to sign up for a free trial of the morning report which highlights the most important news of the day for business owners so you don't have to go looking for it step two is to get on our slack Channel where you can ask questions get vendor recommendations and tap the wisdom of a very impressive crowd just search the 21 hats Morning Report to subscribe joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Jay gos CEO of the gos group whose companies in Chicago include a picture frame business artist frame service and a home furnishing store Jason home Jennifer Karen who is CEO of SB Expos and events an events management business based near Baltimore and Jackie Russo CEO of brand Russo a marketing agency based in Lafayette Louisiana the episode is titled how to save a customer welcome Jay Jennifer and Jackie it's great to have you here I want to talk today about something that's come up a good bit of late on the podcast and that's the importance of having good processes it's come up here a few times in the context of how overdoing processes can be a problem you can't run every business like a widget Factory or McDonald's but I don't think anyone doubts that for any business to succeed it has to figure out the best ways of doing whatever it does and it has to figure out how to train people to do those things consistently so with that in mind I I'd like to ask each of you to describe a process that it took you a while to figure out but is now an important part of what has made your business successful so in my case one of the things I figured out years ago is everyone that works for you is not going to figure things out like you did that's why you're started the business and why you're successful you can easily train people so one of the things I had to deal with when I was growing fast especially uh picture framing is kind of complicated there's lots of things that can go wrong from oh that's not the matte color I picked to oh there's something under the last or whatever and I figured out how to train people to deal with customers that are disappointed or angry and I got to tell you it works 99% of the time and it works for any business so I came up with how to save a customer save so s is sympathy saying oh I can understand why you're upset just think of anytime you've been disappointed with anywhere wouldn't that make you feel better if the person just said oh I can see that you're right so you know that you're not fight with them so that's one a is act you know what let me call the supplier let me get my manager here let me do something about it Act V is vindicate which simply means you don't want to present to the customer that yeah we're screwed up and this happens all the time because it probably doesn't so Vindication would be something like you know what I'm really embarrassed that happen we usually catch things like that before they get out the door wow I mean if I'm the customer I feel great I'm not having to teach them that this was is bad they get it they're embarrassed and lastly if it really was a bad thing eat something you know what let me give you half off let me deliver it for free and I will tell you that and I don't have a lot of problems anymore but it definitely diffuses customers and this is a great tool that when we hire a new person I can wander down there after a few weeks and go hey what's save stand for and I can tell whether they've been trained properly whether they got it and it has been extremely valuable and as I say is a customer I wish that everybody did that because in my experience when something goes wrong it's usually could be handled better I love the mics isn't that what it's called the doctors do this all the time when they're in medal school in order to remember things they create a word with the initials isn't it called leonics right I think you're right I thought it was an acronym it's a way to remember like right I love it I love that it's so easy save that's a great idea I've been doing this for boy probably 25 years and um when I tell you 99% of the time it works it's it's more like 99.9% I I can't think of the last time we had a customer that this didn't just diffuse and fix the problem because at the end of the day I don't know that any company's perfect occasionally something does go wrong and you should be prepared and certainly we should be preparing our employees as to how to deal with it Jay you said that you use this when something goes wrong when when you've messed something up what if the customer thinks you've messed something up but you and the employee don't think so um I have a phrase uh the customer is not always right pause but we're going to pretend they are and I explain this to people and they the worst training thing I believe is telling employees the customer's always right they know they're not it doesn't make any sense it's frustrating but when I explain it to them the customer's not always right but we're going to pretend they are and do you know why because what happens on Friday you get paid yeah it's much better when we get their money and we can pay you on Friday and at the end of the day most customers are not doing something on purpose where they're just gonna keep doing like it's worth it if if the customer thinks they're they're right it's just not worth fighting with them and when I say that in 46 years of business I've stood the line twice with customers to where it was just no twice in 40 it's just it's just now I understand if you're putting $30,000 heating air conditioning systems into a house or a building and there's a problem it's not so easy to say well you're right but you know if you're in a business that's going to cost you a few hundred bucks or 500 or whatever or it's just not worth fighting with customers because if they think they're right perception's reality and it's it's just it's just not worth it usually I want to add to this real quick Lauren because I think it's an important thing not just the way that Jay handles it that he has a process for it that he trains on it that he tests for it but isn't this as entrepreneurs one of the biggest things people tell us about why our companies can't be sold is because it's so reliant on us Jay's found a series of ways to make it not so reliant on him because everybody's on the same page I think that training is invaluable which means to your point how often is someone calling me or coming to my Jay what should we do about oh my God I I I don't get that once maybe once every two I mean they got it they don't have to call and bother me or come up and go oh Jay what should we do with this customer it's like they're trained they can take care of it it's called empowering your people what's more impressive than when you're in a restaurant or anywhere and something goes wrong and they can say you know what let me take that off the bill instead of let me get the manager I always say like really do I really need to talk to the manager really they can't Empower well I think the cool part about your save is that what you've done with that is help your employees remember something but also possibly even more important is you showcase to them what they're allowed to do and they're empowered to do and what they're not and that's I mean I think that's critical for a lot of employees to understand what's okay from their boss am I allowed to do this and think of how impressive that is they can say to the customer you know what Mrs Jones I don't need to call the boss he's goingon to be very upset when he heard what a problem trust me he's gonna tell me that we should take care wow the reason more places don't do that obviously is cuz they're concerned that the uh employee is going to eat more than they would be comfortable having them eat how often has that happened to you how often has the employee given up more money or whatever than you would have wanted them to never how about that as an answer and I do mean never and and my answer to that would be what can you afford more to have someone give away 600 bucks worth of stuff that you would have said well I don't know if I would have given the whole 600 or having them piss off 50 customers over a matter of three years now like I said I understand there's some businesses that it would be difficult because the stuff is thousands of dollars and I I you'll have to make an adjustment for that I'm not saying this would work on every business to every level but no I have never had anybody that did something that I thought I would rather this is what I told them air on the side of the customer period and keep in mind I came up with this way before Yelp this was before there was an online present now oh my God they go home they could just kill you online and I'm not doing it for that reason I was doing it way before that ever existed but I would say it took this to the 10th power now that it's just not worth pissing off customers it just isn't and then and then I know people are G well some customers aren't worth doing business with you know what in my experience those customers go away on their own we don't need to push them out they they they they they go away on their own all right Jackie Jennifer how about your businesses I have tried to put in as many processes as possible possible um I don't think I'm great on the or as great as I want to be on the onboarding and training in the beginning but I feel like once we get them on board we are really good about teaching them the way and we put as many processes in place to make sure everybody's doing the same thing consistently because I don't want it to all rely on me I want them to be empowered to Jay's point and I want this to go on past me and so I've got to start thinking about how that's going to work when it's not me in charge anymore is there a particular process that you could walk us through that it took you a while to figure out that has been important to the development of the company oh sure uh I think you know our sales process is a big one because obviously that pipeline funnels the growth and so we are always improving it but it has a very solid core in terms of what we do to outwardly promote ourselves what we do to drive inbound opportunities how we utilize our techn Tech ology how we track our leads um how we do our retargeting ads all of that is very process driven I think that um it probably took the first 20 years uh but the way that we handle projects internally has become I mean to a point everybody's on the same page of exactly how to start a new project for a client how to communicate what is happening within the agency to every involved person what they need to to know to do that project so that we can be as efficient as possible I mean because you can imagine one project can bounce back and forth between the client and the agency a dozen two dozen times and then within the agency it's being touched by multiple people dozens of times and so you know we've really I think done a remarkable job especially in the past probably 12 months of integrating some AI efficiencies into that process it's a Well old machine now I'm very impressed with it and here's the best part I did not create those processes I did not develop those steps I have not been involved in improving it they tell me every once a while hey we're doing this new thing now look how great it is and I say awesome keep going could you give us a quick walk through the sales process how does it work uh sure we have a list of all of the um entities that we use or all the different avenues that we use to shap our content so whether that's you know our own blog our podcast LinkedIn other social media channels the way we use YouTube uh then we've got the more Hands-On direct things like the workshops that I teach and the conferences where I speak and the podcasts where I'm being interviewed present company included and so there's a pretty robust calendar of all this outward effort that we put forth because that drives inbound opportunities then we have a whole other Set uh where we will do email campaigns or straight up advertising and so all of that is tracked we put the effort out it drives to a landing page then how do we automate the process of communicating with the people after they've downloaded something that involves our ebooks our webinars all those different tools so each thing has a process so that we can monitor it to say is this working for us is it worth our time and effort and expense and are we getting a good r I or do we need to adjust it so here's my question unlike a lot of businesses whether it's getting your house painted or in your carfix you're selling an expected outcome and my question is even if you do everything right aren't there times where the customer is not happy with the results because you can't guarantee exactly the results so there are times I assume that the customer is not getting the results they want and they say something to your person is that not true that happens and if so what do they tell them absolutely you know we are going to start calling it save uh we have not named it before but we are absolutely gonna liberally borrow it from my good friend Jay because I think it's brilliant but what I will say that I think we've done a very good job with and especially with the the team we have right now in uh we call them brand developers because we don't just service customers so we don't think of them just account service but our brand developer team they're all empowered and we are so focused on being proactive on every little thing that we measure throughout the month and the reporting that we do during that month that we have I mean knock on all the wood I can find in my office right now we have very very very few complaints or challenges or issues I'm going to say it's been three or four years since a client said I'm not happy with something wow that's impressive maybe five it's it's been a minute and so we work really hard to be as proactive as possible to defuse anything before it becomes an issue to keep everybody on the same page and part of it is just the business model so we don't charge by the hour I think a lot of agencies run into trouble because they charge by the hour and clients are always angry about the invoice but by having a fixed fee you know what to expect you know what it's going to cost so there's no questions one of our processes came out of that issue you Becky that you're talking about with fixed fees is we had a lot of confusion internally because we do a fixed fee too when when clients were asking to do work that was outside of scope sure then my staff would just do it and I'd get angry or the staff would say no that's out of scope and they the client got angry because just the way it was said and so we recently did a process about changing our the way we do change orders now um because when you do fixed fee like like you like me it's it's hard because a scope can never be completely black and white and make sure that neither the client's unhappy or make sure that uh I'm not unhappy our staff is doing a bunch of work right uh we just implemented a new process we I should have done years ago it's changed a lot it's made sure that clients aren't unhappy it's very clear and that I'm not unhappy about the profitability because we all understand what's happening with the change order I love that how's the process work well the first thing is telling staff if they think something's out of scope that they shouldn't if it's out of scope they shouldn't be telling the client I'm not doing this it's out of scope they should bring it to the project manager who then brings it up on my oneone and we discuss it even if it's only you know an extra sort of 10 hours or an extra 100 hours and then we'll go back to them we decide uh I still do it so myself and the project manager uh the first step is deciding this out of scoop and if it is is it a few hours we're going to do it anyway or is this need a change order so step one decide if you need to change order step two scoping it out we have a written form now it's a contract that says this is in dendon to the contract you want us to do X Y and Z and it cost you another 50 hours here's the price here's the payment term so it's contracted dendo we then go back to the client explain why this is out of scope if they agree they then sign that document we then give it over to we have three different people our accounting right it has to go into our CRM it's put in as a specific change order it's also put in um to our accounting standpoint and then it's given to the project manager who goes out the client operations what was happening before like I said we were making the clients angry or making us angry but then we weren't communicating effectively so we would go forward and do it and accounting didn't know about it or it wasn't in our Salesforce that's our pipeline that's our software that we use and our CFO couldn't forecast because let's say another client just gave us a bunch of change orders they had unders scoped the project they knew it or a staff member left they wanted us to do the work she was forecasting based on the old amount not on the new amount uh so it's helped a lot make sure that customers aren't unhappy about scope make sure I'm not unhappy about profitability and made sure we're communicating effectively because I think that's the hardest part is communication I could see where just what you say to the customer they go oh can you blah blah blah I could see where how that is handled is gonna make the difference between really pissing someone off them going oh you know what I didn't realize that you're right that talk about an art form of being able to say to them you know what Bob I think that is a good idea but our original um our proposal didn't include that if you'd like to do that I can get you how that's stated is very important and there's a famous story I think it might even be true in Lake Michigan there's you know a lot of boats so there's a big boat and then the big boat has a little boat behind it the name on the little boat is called Original contract and the name on the big boat is called change orders oh my gosh I love that J you're exactly right look line managers sometimes don't understand just let's not Nickel Dime the client to your earlier description of the $300 overnight cost sometimes they don't do it but I want to air on the cost and if they come to us and say look this is out of scope it is it's going to take you three extra hours please just do it and don't even tell the client right or hey this is going to take 10 extra hours but let's tell the client hey this is out of our scope but we think it's integral to the success of your meeting we're going to do it anyway or then finally charging them um and I have not empowered those line managers to make that decision because they're just not strong enough to understand that difference but I I love the boat I'm going to go look that up and see if that's on there in the example that Jennifer gave it it was very obvious what led to the creation of that process what the problems were and what the need was can can you remember what problems you ran into before you had a real sales process what what problems did that solve well it solved a lot in terms of a steady flow of prospects it solved a lot in US understanding who our right prospects were uh because we've always had people you know trying to come in the door calling us emailing us but they weren't a good fit and so it really became important for us to know who was a good fit and then to you know how many of them do we want to have and then how we were going to get to know them and develop a relationship with them and then eventually sign them and I think that was just a real GameChanger to say we get to be in charge of this we shouldn't have to just wait to see who walks in the door we should create the kind of uh business we want to have and grow according ly so it was a game Cher for us because it put us in charge here's what's fun about this business is pretty predictable like the same things happen over and over and over again so when I speak to picture framers at the trade show and I've got you know 50 in the room I said I'm about to teach you that when you hear this one word it means you're about to screw yourself and they all are really and I write it on the board and I just oh could you just touch up the corner of this Frame or oh could you just hang this they all laugh because we've all been there a hundred times where the customer wants to minimize something oh while you're out can you just hang up this P that's what people use when they're trying to minimize something and it's true and everyone in the room got it because they've all been there so no matter what business you're in the same things are going to keep happening with customers like and either of you two they'd say oh could you just give me an audit of the blah blah blah and that's when you'd say well it's not as simple as it sounds that's actually going to require you know 10 hours of work I'd be happy to get your price for that is a word that people use when I'm not even saying they're being deceptive they're just we've all done it we've all asked the delivery guy oh could you just do this or i on to something no very much so I find it that and then I find they often say it's a little or it's a small dot dot dot I'm like there's not if it's that little or small you do it yeah it's not little or small Jackie what's the key part of your process that helps you determine if uh a potential customer is in fact a good fit how do you know we evaluated based on industry uh Revenue size employee size their uh marketing team and then the state that they are in are they in a state of growth are they in a plateau are they in a freef fall we don't want to work with the biggest in the industry the one who has the biggest Market segment I I want the middle the company that's sitting in the middle but has big plans and wants to grow that's is a good fit for us people who want to do things differently if they want to do the same thing the same way we're out everything you just said I'm the guy that started by myself and grew to a decent sized business is absolutely correct if I had to make the list it would have been everything you just said like I think a company that's doing a million dollars a year is simply not going to have enough money to go pay you what you need to do to that there is a critical mass there whether it's hiring a PR person whether it's hiring a lot of professions that unless you get bigger to where you got more cash flow it's just a bad business model to think you're going to make money helping small companies do marketing quote unquote there just simply isn't enough money in their cash flow to afford it so every single thing you said I checked off because I've been there and there was a point where I couldn't afford any of that right thanks Jay that's quite the compliment Jackie I think and you you're the branding expert isn't that the term like knowing your client Persona we use the term attendee Persona a lot to figure out who's the person that's coming to the convention is that is that the same thing client personas it is so we look at these um and we call them target audience segments we start there before we get to Persona because segment is a real important word a lot of people try to keep their Persona or their target audiences too wide and so by segmenting you're now taking a sliver of that and saying oh this particular group has a unique specific challenge problem opportunity thought process paino and so the language to them is going to be a little different than this little segment and when you do that and then you prioritize those segments now you can be more focused more targeted and way more successful Jackie are those W to be clients aware that you're evaluating them I mean I think the nature of our questions make it real clear that we're grading them far more than they're grading us you know Sarah's had the same conversation with us with PR it's the same thing I can tell you $10,000 as a proposal when you're doing a million dollars a year is very different than $10,000 when you're doing $18 million a year and I've been at both so it's it's very very different and this is a matter of just saying to the customer I have to tell you I I don't know that you're you're going to be able to afford our services and like that's not offensive it is what it is as a small business person you have to be strong to say no to the companies that aren't a good fit Jackie is an established company but somewhere along the line she had to make the decision to say no to the people that wouldn't fit but I bet you early on you probably took a couple companies that made you get into that process right did you take a company that wasn't a right fit and you're like oh no no no for 15 years over and over again kep wondering why it wasn't working out and couldn't understand what I was doing wrong until I realized oh wait it's not me it's them they are not a good fit for me and so what I realized though to your point and to Jay's point I not felt bad about it I didn't walk around carrying guilt but I felt like I wasn't on Mission because if my mission truly is to help businesses and I'm telling all most of the companies 80% no then how am I on Mission how am I and I don't want to sound all hooky about it but how am I sharing my gifts you know I have a talent at this and now only so many people can get that Talent that's not right and so that's when I started teaching workshops and you know during the teens they were all in person and then in 2020 they became all online but the idea was okay you're not going to get the custom bespoke uh work of The Talented Craftsman inside this building but you still need something so I'll teach you how to do it so you don't have to do it on your own you'll have some profession guidance and help but you can't suck the resources of my agency and that felt like a fair Middle Ground to me and that has been a game changer because now I don't have to say no to anybody I say yes you come to the agency and you can have all this super affordable help that you need for $79 a month or $1,900 for this one thing or whatever it is you need I wouldn't call it fair either because it's not fair or not fair it's really just about being accommodating and being nice to people like you know what you really can't afford to use us but let me show you some of the things you can use to do it yourself that's a nice you're helping people and not only that but you are in fact got a farm team now that some of those people end up being clients down the road as they grow perhaps but uh hey they do it's the greatest thing they do I love it I would think really small companies that the way that they can grow the fastest is to do what Jackie said and create a segment of a client a segment of the industry that they want and to develop their business system around it when you try to do everything to everyone you you can never scale up never so take a lesson from Jackie find your Market segment and and just crush it in that one segment I think it comes back to the word business model that you can't afford to give to have the right people working for you pay them X dollar you need to charge why in order to do that and it's just the business model you can't afford to be taking deals where you'll bill out $1,000 a month the math simply doesn't work that's all correct all right in the time we have left I'd love to follow up on a couple of things with each of you let me start with you Jay the last time you were on uh we were talking about uh employee Retreats and you made a little bit of a a joke about how your retreat is uh you've cut back on your advertising spending and we really didn't have time to follow up on that but I wanted to ask you how did you come to the decision to do that and is that typically what you've done in the past with interest rates so high people are not move you know the the people moving it's probably down by 50% so they're buying Less Furniture so the entire Furniture industry is off that's for sure and I can't keep spending this the same amount of money for advertising so I cut back on Advertising because I don't know the cash flow to do it and uh there's less customers out there so I'm I cut back for a little while and every time things get tight that's one of the thing I can't do anything about my real estate taxes I I'm not going to go laying people off uh I can't do anything about my electric bill but I can certainly cut back on Advertising some the interest rates hopefully are about to drop and business will get back to more normal but like I said the entire Furniture industry is um feeling the hit of having high interest rates so Jackie I'm sure from time to time you have clients come to you for whatever reason and say you know I need to cut back on my advertising or my marketing spend what do you usually say to them well actually the conversation usually starts with me going to them and saying you're spending X Dollar in this medium uh Billboards you're spending X dollars over here boosted Facebook post you're spending that's all trash stop it right now not Billboards in general but for this client in this particular scenario that I'm thinking in my mind it was an awful idea and they're spending $180 ,000 a year on something that had absolutely no practical application for them so we start with that like please stop doing that we need to you know save this money you can allocate somewhere else we need 20% of this money you were spending to do this thing over here and we're going to reach three times more people so let's go do that because we aren't incentivized for them to spend more or spend less we're incentivized for them to grow their sales and revenue and so I want them to do that smartly not wastefully I don't make more money just because they spend more money Jay let me ask you a question about your situation uh I completely understand I mean when there's less money coming in you need to cut somewhere but do you worry that in doing that you're going to make a bad situation even worse that if you you know sales are already soft you stop advertising they're going to get even softer first of all I really trust I don't use the word worry because I'm not worrying about anything so no I don't worry uh do I consider oh is that going to make it worse um that's where I said in the beginning it's cash flow I just I can't I can't afford the it's to the point that I I really it would be irresponsible to be putting the same amount of cash out so no I don't worry about it all because I know it's the right decision and avertising it's not as simple it's I had an advertising agency very small I don't know a long time ago she says to me oh um we're doing work with another Furniture Store um we did a big ad campaign form and they took in $300,000 uh over one weekend so I said well how much money do they normally take in over the weekend she had no idea okay I said well if this works so well why don't you just take that money and then put it back in again and do that a few times it's like doubling a penny I said after a few months they'll be billionaires and she said I swear I'm not making this up word for word she goes well everybody decides how big they want their business to be yes yes that was the last conversation I ever had with her advertising is an investment in the future and like you're lucky if you can break even on it in the short run but it's pretty difficult if not impossible to go spend now there are probably some Direct Mail people to do it fair enough but I'm just going generally it's a long-term investment so in this case I know that the money I'm putting into the advertising is not going to get is not going to come back and pay for itself the short run it's not Am I Wrong Jackie am I wrong no you're not wrong at all the fact that she didn't know what they normally do on a weekend and was claiming all of the sales being from her promotion is sad for lack of another word Jay this is back to my point of why the industry needs licensing and certifications and continuing education because that's almost criminal I want to go to my next update Jennifer when you first joined we talked about your being stuck in the Valley of Death a good bit working 12-hour days 6 days a week not sure how you were going to get out of that more recently you've taken a nice two week vacation you took your company on a retreat and I'm would just like to to tie this up do you feel like you're still in the valley of death I think I'm coming to the end of it I'm certainly not working 12 hour days 6 days a week I'm still working 6 days a week but more like 8 to 9 hours a day but I'm definitely towards the end absolutely we've made a huge change in the past year like um maybe not even change but we've moved forward if I think of the valley death kind of like a desert I'm more than halfway through I realize I have enough water and supplies to get me to the end but I still have a couple more systems in place that are needed to to finally get out of it but absolutely on the right track do you feel you know exactly what you need to do I do one of my biggest items I'm working on now is Management training there is a fine line as you grow between wanting to promote from within and train them and hire from without with skills and so finding that correct balance on management and Leadership and then training the people that are fantastic they're in they've been with you for a while they really have strong core skills but they need Management training so that's my my goal this year to focus a lot on Management training and then uh what's missing is the same ways Jackie had mentioned a business development system we have really good business development but it's not a system so those two are my final final two things that need to be finished before I can say I'm out of the valley of that you know I just figured this out lately and this I think applies very well to where you're at I now tell my managers we have two jobs one is to make everybody as good as they can be and the second one is to know when you hit the ceiling so instead of using the word balance like you did it's a question of there's some people that work for you that you could very well turn into key managers and there are some people that just are not going to get there for whatever reason they're they're valuable employees but they just have hit the ceiling and you've tried to coach them out of it and it's not working and our job is to figure out when that day is because otherwise you just keep spending a lot of time on trying to get as they say in the South this dog won't hunt totally agreed Jay and that's that's what I'm going through is one of my strongest abilities but also like it's a dge sword one of my weakest abilities is loyalty and when you're a small business owner there are some people that have been incredible to help you grow and you want to give them every chance possible to grow with you and and maybe they're growing but maybe like you said they reached their limit and finding out where that limit is is and be difficult not just on a skill set but on an emotional level oh it's horrible we've all been through it it it's tough yeah if you are good enough to grow your business and to keep expanding it you obviously are talented at something and you're good at it that doesn't mean that the person that started with you in the beginning had that ability to do it and it's a horrible painful thing but I now recognize that that old thing about oh these people have been with me since the beginning I absolutely have some people with me from the beginning a few literally a few but the fact of the matter is the nature of business is if you keep growing you are going to outgrow some people period And if you don't believe that you are still living in the land of naive it's just the way it is J I believe it but how long do you give somebody how long did you give somebody to try it well I'm embarrassed to say in some cases ears I you know but but now what would I do I don't know I forgetting about how long I would say how many heart-to-heart conversations where you'd say you know what you can't think like this you need to do that you're in charge you're the boss how many of those conversations would I have I'd say on the third or fourth one you're running out of steam I mean on one hand it's it certainly is painful and it's certainly stressful but uh it doesn't have to be too ugly you you you know you here's my line I tell them at some point I'm starting to get really um concerned that this isn't the right position for you this is now the third time I'm telling you the same thing and I'm getting really concerned about it at least if it gets down to where they either have to go or whatever you've told them and maybe they'll go look for another job but that's a good line I'm getting concerned this you're not right for this job this is the third time I told you you can't look the other way when the employee keeps coming in late it's your job to say to them if you can't get to work on time you probably should work not probably you need to work somewhere else because we need to open the door at 10 o'clock if they can't do that and they can't handle the confront some people were not meant to be managers period it's just the way it is I got just enough time for one more update here I want to get to Jackie Jackie early this year you told us you were excited because you had two big clients ready to sign on I think I asked about it a few months after that and they hadn't quite signed on yet has that happened happened you know it it's interesting as we've evolved into bigger and bigger clients I've had to uh reset my expectations for longer and slower timelines and so no but now there's 10 literally 10 oh and each of them would be the biggest client we've had and so could you handle all 10 yeah yeah we have I've put our capacity in place for exactly that reason because as they come on board we're able to just continue to expand our capacity to in house because we've got people in house uh so that we don't um have that issue with growing too fast that's something we learned in the first couple years which is such a thing for sure growing too fast is a thing so how many of those 10 do you think you will ultimately get I mean based on our typical closing percentage is six has this been a problem for you this year do you have people sitting around oh no no no no we're busy um because if you have a spare minute you're you're working on something that's agency focused and so there's always something to do you know I've started a whole new company this year train yard advisors uh where we go in and do organizational assessments and I have a team that helps uh companies get through the hybrid hangover or changes to culture especially with mergers Acquisitions and those kind of things so we've got plenty to work on but not all of that would be uh working for clients um correct I guess utilization rate is the uh term of art there is that a concern no not at all because of um the fact that if they're working on brand State you or trainyard advisers they're still working on something that propels our growth and we're still getting paid all right uh my thanks to Jay goz Jennifer Karen and Jackie Russo and to our sponsor the great game of business which helps businesses use an open book management system to build healthier companies you can learn more atre game.com 21h hats thanks everybody one thing before you go everything we do at 21 hats is created by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs to help us all learn together so if you get something out of this podcast or out of the morning report please tell a friend tell an enemy tell every business owner you know your word of mouth entrepreneur to entrepreneur will always be the most effective way to build this community for all of us thank you it means a lot lot this episode was produced by another entrepreneur Jess staron founder of blank word Productions thanks for listening everyone [Music]