Michael Anderson, founder and CEO of BizScale: Thanks for joining, everyone. This is our first event. It’s a new series that we’re launching. It’s the BizScale Learning Series.
The idea behind it is to combine the webinar approach with a meetup or mastermind approach. They’re more interactive. We’re gonna have a lot of really good content coming up.
We have some guest speakers who are 20- to 30-year vets in email, email marketing, sales, technology...a bunch of different folks so a lot of good stuff coming up. We’re really excited to have you part of that.
Michael Anderson (introduction)
Michael: A little bit about myself. This is my family here. We have three kids. You can tell that they get their good looks from my wife, not from me.
I’m the founder of 3 companies which are all active right now. BizScale, which we’ll learn about a little bit later. Scaped and Hauled, those are both marketplaces in landscape and construction and the freight business. Basically matching up carriers with shippers.
I have over 20 years of experience in technology. I’ve worked at several startups including the 3 of my own. So I have 20 years of tech experience and 10 years of startup experience.
You can see some of the companies that I’ve worked at in the past (referring to slide): Thomson Reuters; Warner Music Group; Gilt Groupe which is a really fun startup; most recently, Ernst & Young; and a bunch of startups mixed in-between.
I’m very passionate about helping others, particularly in business. My wife says I’m obsessed with it. I can’t sleep at night just constantly thinking about business and ways to continuously improve.
We do wanna have this as an interactive session so I’d like to just go around real quick. I know we have a small group here, but it’d be great to just introduce yourself. First name and — if you have your own company — name of the company, or just what your practice is.
So Brian, I saw you on there. Maybe you can kick this off.
Brian: Sure! Hi, everyone. My name is Brian Hernandez. I have been a software engineer for maybe 5 or 6 years now working at different startups including Active which is a mobile fitness startup; Canary, Single Platform, Axio where I met Michael, and a few others. I have a company called Next Day Chef. I’m the only employee right now but it’s a marketplace for virtual cooking classes.
Michael: Thanks, Bryan. Yeah, Bryan and I are working together on trying to get his MVP to the market. Very exciting stuff there. Alright, next?
Greg: My name is Greg. I work in produce and agriculture so I have two companies. One’s a consulting company called Road Advantage and we sort of function as something of a broker; connecting growers from around the world with retailers and put together that business. And then I am a partner in a business called Foodie Food, which is more of a partner distribution business, still within that produce and agriculture industry but it’s starting to take more value-added stuff. Trailmix, that kind of stuff. I’m happy to be here. Looking forward to seeing how this goes. Thanks, Mike.
Michael: Thanks, Greg. And who else do we have? I know Muhammad’s on.
Muhammad: Hi, everyone. My name’s Muhammad. I recently graduated from NYU, the Stern School of Business. And since then I’ve been working at the Traders School Success Academy as a data analyst. But right now I’m trying to work on a cooking startup which essentially makes it easier to follow recipes by having a voice interaction in the app. So you can easily see, or instead of staring at the recipe, you can get help with it just through voice. It can be a hands-free experience because, of course, when you’re cooking, you’re using your hands. So that’s the idea. Thanks for having me, Mike. Excited to be here.
Michael: Awesome. Yeah, I think that’s a great problem to solve. My wife is a cook and a baker. I’m always scared when she has her phone near all the ingredients and the sink. So that’s awesome. Looking forward to seeing that. Anyone else?
Luka: Okay, I’ll introduce myself. Hey, everyone. I’m Luka. I work for BizScale as the Head of Design. I’m 27, based in Croatia. I designed this presentation.
Michael: I was going to say that but thanks for calling that out. Yeah, Luka is very talented. We’re super happy with him and the rest of the team.
Cool! We’ll do a quick intro to BizScale then we’ll jump into the meat of the presentation.
About BizScale
Michael: So BizScale is a managed services company. You can kind of compare it to Upwork; kind of a consulting agency. The goal of the business is really to help small businesses. We are working with some startups in the mid-range. It’s really about reducing operating costs, increasing revenue for solo founders, or just small teams. Really freeing up their time to work on high ROI tasks. I’m guilty of it; I’m always getting into the weeds, and that’s not a good way to use your time.
At the bottom, you see that 70% of your time should be spent on building relationships. You’re on LinkedIn, you’re on calls, really networking. Twenty percent on sales and marketing, and 10% on knowing your numbers. That’s something that I’m working on myself.
You really wanna have a good handle on all of your numbers, all of your financials; your goals that you’re setting monthly, yearly.
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BizScale event house rules
Michael: Just a couple of house rules here. We are recording this but we won’t share it with anyone without your consent.
You see those penny trays in the cash register? So take a penny, save a penny. We really want it to be interactive where you take a learning and you share a learning. Treat others with respect and try to stay on mute when you are not speaking.
How many people here are familiar with retrospectives?
Michael: I’m sure that you’ve heard the term before. Greg, have you had any experience with retrospectives?
Greg: I don’t know. Define it for me and I’ll tell you. I’m not sure.
Michael: Alright, alright. We will do that.
Retrospective
Michael: You think of it as a reflection when you’re looking back. It could be something that’s scheduled that you have monthly or yearly. In the past, we’ve done it a lot for events. So your production environment goes down or you lose a customer. You always wanna get in the habit of looking at past events and be able to reflect on them and basically walk away with an action plan. How are you going to prevent it from happening again? Or how are you going to do more of it because it was a good learning experience?
The two problems that we see is, one, a lot of founders or teams — they don’t really involve the entire team. It is a team effort. You wanna make sure that you have the right folks on the retrospective calls or meetings. You wanna really ask everyone to share their thoughts because you may have a sales rep that is experiencing something that no one else in the company is experiencing. If you don’t get them involved or you don’t ask them, you won’t find out what is going on, where we can improve. Things like that.
At BizScale, we do them monthly. So next week we’ll be doing the January retrospective. We will look back. For example, I know one of the things that we didn’t do very well with this event was promote it well. So we’ll look back and say, okay, let’s tweak this.
So you wanna do them on a regular cadence.
Done. What now?
Michael: More importantly, you wanna make sure that you have a plan in place after you perform the retrospective. You’re gonna walk away with things that are working well, things that are not working. Then you wanna come up with your plan, and you wanna make sure you track it.
That’s where a lot of folks fail with retrospectives and continuous improvement or continuous learning. It’s not that they can’t identify what the issues are, what happened. Sometimes they sweep it under the rug. Sometimes they just don’t prioritize it.
But if you actually prioritize your action plan, you’ll see you’ll be able to do the retrospective and do your feedback. This plays into when you’re looking at 2020, essentially it’s doing a retrospective on 2020.
2020 retrospective learnings
Michael: Obviously, the pandemic had a huge impact on everybody, both personally and business-wise. For us, it obviously caught us by surprise, it shocked us. It affected me personally because I knew some folks that caught it early.
So one of the things that we did (and we don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing) is that we paused our marketing for 30 days. We stopped reaching out to people on LinkedIn; we stopped marketing campaigns; we had some clients do the same thing.
Our initial thought was that it was in bad taste to be reaching out and, one of the things that we wanna do here as part of our action plan is, number one, was to determine why we did that? Was it the right decision?
Overall, against the other items that we came up with, it’s lower priority but we do want to get to it. So understanding why things happen and why you do certain things is really important.
So that was our immediate response to the pandemic. And as we realized that life had to continue and businesses were still operating and we wanted to help others. So we introduced free trials (something we talked about in the past). We made sure that we made free trials available for folks, and we reduced our rates for some existing clients and for some prospects.
So I’ll stop there and I would love to hear how the pandemic — I know that so many webinars have done it — but it’s great to hear, especially a year later, how you were affected by the pandemic, what changes you made.
Greg, I’m very interested to see how it impacted your industry. Scaped is somewhat related in the landscaping industry and that industry actually took off because everybody was spending time at home. I’m just curious how it impacted you.
Greg: First of all, I can’t believe it’s been a year. I don’t know if time goes really fast or really slow during COVID but the fact that it’s been a year is pretty mind-boggling.
Greg: But I would say, generally, looking back, 2020 was an awesome year, despite some of the restrictions. But for a lot of reasons it was a pivotal, really strong year for me, career-wise and other stuff.
Greg: But specifically for my business, I had just started a company just before all this COVID stuff started to happen, probably 6 months before. I think part of it was I was just fortunate. I was working in fresh food, healthy food. The demand for produce and certain agricultural stuff really went through the roof.
Greg: I couldn’t have planned it. Produce isn’t that glamorous. It’s a big industry in certain states and in certain countries but it sort of fell into that industry that it’s not that glamorous, but when something like a pandemic hits, the food supply is so important.
Greg: That was really interesting. And then the second thing is the volatility, particularly when it first hit. It was just all over. Some things were way up, some things were getting lost. Some ports were backed up, so it created a need for somebody like me and my company to offer local, in-market support to a lot of these suppliers that are based all over the world: South Africa, Israel, Chile.
Greg: I think I could go on and on. But it’s generally pretty positive. The fact that I sort of decided to take the leap pre-COVID, it certainly seems to be the right decision. So I’ve never, never looked back.
Michael: Yeah, that’s great. Fortunately, for a lot of our clients, it was either status quo or they saw, like you said, an uptick We, of course, had a lot of conversations with folks that had to shut down their businesses. We are working with these folks to try and get them back into the game, try to keep them running lean, and reduce their operating cost to try and get them back on their feet.
It’s amazing how it really impacted so many smaller local businesses but a lot of other companies thrived.
Greg: One more comment that’s interesting is that we now look to scale up. There’s a lot of fractional employment that I think sort of existed pre-COVID, but maybe COVID was something of a catalyst.
Greg: So, for instance, we’re looking to hire a salesperson. We’re no longer looking to and hire a full-time salesperson because there are individuals who will work for two or three companies. That has almost become normal. Same thing whether it’s accounting or any of those services. It makes it a lot easier, I think, to build a company because you don’t have to take all the risk of having big overheads.
Michael: That’s spot on. We’re seeing a huge uptick in business this created. Like you said, a lot of CTOs, CMOs, Head of Sales — they’re consulting for multiple companies. And you’re right: early on, you don’t really need to hire a Head of Marketing but if you can get one for 10 hours per week, that can really move the needle and get you to at least generate revenue, then you can bring them one full-time.
So yeah, you’re right, a lot of flexibility there. Personally, for me I’ve been working remotely for years now, so to be able to do so much now through Zoom, Google Meet, and on the phone, I think it is a bit of a blessing for all of us entrepreneurs. Definitely makes life easier.
Personally, I’m in New York City with 3 kids. Sometimes it can be painful just to be working from home. I do miss going out to some shared office space or what have you but I agree with your sentiment that 2020 was a great year. Unfortunate events but I think we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and I think 2021 is gonna be an even better year, so I’m looking forward to seeing all of you guys and your businesses grow.
2021 action plan
Michael: One of the other things that we tie into retrospective is waste exercises so we try to do at least two waste exercises a year. You can Google “Six Sigma waste exercise.” We actually have an event coming up soon on that.
When we ran the waste exercise the first time, we realized we were really losing a lot of time. We were wasting money, not providing the best services for our clients. We identified too many hand-offs, middlemen. Our response time to clients was not really adequate, so we put in some different SLAs for that. We were lacking standard operating procedures, so if somebody was out … a lot of fundamental things here, but just like you said, Greg, a year goes by very fast.
So if you’re not looking at these things and adjusting them, you’re really not optimizing; for yourself, for the clients. That was interesting and we’re going to keep doing that.
Number two here is we completed our exercise by December 31st. A few of the changes were significant, so we gave ourselves until March 1st to complete that.
Again, just like the retrospective, you wanna make sure that everything you identify in your waste exercise you actually act on. Because if you don’t act on it, then it’s not going to move the needle.
Another one that we identified was our internal systems. It kinda goes with our number two. Our internal system that we used for time management, time tracking, for clients to be able to see their work and the time spent, etc, we were in something called ProofHub and it wasn’t that great. Now we’re in ClickUp and if you’re not using ClickUp or you haven’t experienced it, I definitely recommend checking it out.
They just raised 120 million dollars on top of what they raised before, so I’m sure they’re gonna just keep pushing hard. They release frequently. It’s an amazing tool. I’m a very visual person so I love to be able to see … You know we have our yearly goals in there, we have the milestones to hit those goals, and it’s all in ClickUp. You can really get a good handle on your business with just one tool. It’s really amazing … We’re going to finish the configuration of that tool by the end of this month. We’re excited about that.
We’re already operating much more smoothly and efficiently just by changing the tool. So having a look at what tools you are using is also very important.
And then the last one: supply and demand. This can be applied to so many different businesses. For us, as you can imagine, if you have an uptick in clients and you don’t have folks on the team to work with your clients, you get caught in a pinch and we had to scramble several times.
And of course, the pandemic made that supply and demand a bit more challenging. So what we did was we’re in the process of creating a virtual bench where we vet freelancers, folks that are looking to join full-time. We’re very transparent with what the bench is, how it’s used, but it’s worked well. It basically allows us to handle that supply and demand and meet the needs of our clients.
2021 goals
Michael: There are a lot more goals that we have. I just put some of them here. One of them is to use ClickUp as it was built, to really track our goals. It’s even got a monetary piece in there where — every time we close a deal — we are able to adjust the number very easily. It gives us a visual of our goals and where we are.
And then of course tying all the tasks and the projects we are working on to those goals and ensuring that the team understands why they’re working on something, how they’re making a difference, and things like that.
We mentioned the waste exercise and then, one of the things particularly for our business was our people, our service, our business. It’s really investing in our people and allowing them to continuously learn. And also cross-share information; knowledge-transfer internally.
I’ll stop there. Any questions? Or samples of goals that you’ve set for this year?
Brian: I just wanna say that my business is not that far along, so it’s hard to — as the only employee — it’s still very lean and I don’t even use a task management tool. But some goals are getting my first set of users and letting people know about the product and things like that.
Michael: Yeah, it can be challenging. You may think that there’s a lot of overhead with the goal-setting and the tracking. I think from a tool perspective, you probably are very early on. Although they’re not that expensive, you might be a little early for that.
But setting the goals both personally and for the business, it’s so important. Because you really need that North Star. You need to be able to look at that and think positively that you’re going to hit those goals. It really changes things when you can look at your goals — your daily, weekly, monthly, yearly goals — writing them down, looking at them, it really makes a difference.
Brian, I know we’re going to work together on getting you to the next level. At some point soon you’ll need somebody (whether it’s a student or part-timer) and you wanna share goals; you wanna make sure you have your tasks aligned to those goals.
I hear you. I think it takes a little practice. You start doing this for a few weeks and then you’ll get it and it’ll become more natural. I really sucked on those early on. I would write them down but never act on them. You just get some practice in your belt and you’ll definitely see a big difference.
[Q and A follows]
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