Ters 103 metrics for growing your business by EntrepreneursRadioShow

THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

Episode 103: Geoff McQueen In this episode, Travis had an informative talk with business entrepreneur Geoff McQueen. Geoff and his company have helped many starting and even established businesses with CRM solutions that run across many platforms and provide plenty of solutions for today’s dynamic entrepreneurs. Geoff is also a great guy that extends his knowledge and expertise to those who need them. In their talk, Geoff and Travis shares valuable insights and wisdom for any type of business owner. They emphasized importance of measuring your metrics while catering to a particular niche for your products. In that way, you can ensure that you focus on providing quality products and won’t run the risk of going beyond budget. Geoff also teaches the value of innovation and being on top of your product and providing great service for clients especially in the IT sector. He also gives his top things businesses today should focus on to make it successful such as systematizing and automating your business whenever possible. These and so much more are what you can expect in this episode of the Entrepreneur’s Radio Show.

Metrics for growing your business TRAVIS: Hey, it's Travis Lane Jenkins, welcome to episode number 103 of the Entrepreneur's Radio Show, a production of rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com. Just in case you started listening, each and every week I connect you with rock star entrepreneurs and explain their journey to success and what has been the key principle to finding a high level of success as an entrepreneur, so that you can see that they're everyday people that stayed committed to constantly taking action each and every day. And the more you surround yourself with these type of people, the more empowered you'll become and the more successful you'll find yourself. So, just pretend each and every episode that it's me, you, and our guest having a candid conversation in our little mastermind together, okay? In today's episode, I'm going to introduce you to Geoff McQueen. And Geoff spelled G-e-o-f-f. Now, beyond the fact that Geoff is really brilliant and has a really cool accent, he also talks about some key aspects of growing your business, which very few people ever talk about, which is focusing on setting up trackable results. This is something that I've done in each and every one of my businesses and I coach other business owners to do. You've got to be able to track what is and what is not happening. Now he also goes in to several other key aspects of what you should be doing that are absolutely brilliant and 1,000% on target. So I know for a fact that you're going to get tons of value out of this interview. Although before we get started, I want to take a minute and thank another person for taking the time to write a great review for us over on Stitcher. We have Audio Lovah. It's spelled L-o-v-a-h, which I think is just kind of a phonetic way

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

of saying Audio Lovah. So listen, Audio Lovah, thank you for taking the time to write the review, I really appreciate the positive feedback and the encouragement. So, thank you very much. Now, just in case you didn't know, writing a review really helps us reach more entrepreneurs just like yourself. The reason for that is, is iTunes and Stitcher believes that if you're leaving comments, then the show must valuable, right? Therefore, they'll serve it to more of their audience. So if you have time and you find value in the show I'd really appreciate it if you'd go and leave us a review and just tell us how we're doing. Tell me what you think of the show and if you have any suggestions for improvement, feel free to list that also. Just be very candid, and I'd really appreciate it. And of course, I'll recognize you on air and say thank you. Also, I wanted to say thank you to everyone that called in and left me a message. Thank you very much for that, I love to hear from you. Just in case you don't know this, you can go to either website. rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com or you can go to the Entrepreneur's Radio Show. And on the right-hand side is a little, tiny emblem of a microphone, you can click that. It's just like leaving a voice message. And you can basically tell me anything that you want to. I really love hearing your stories of dreams and aspirations, and even your words of encouragement. Those do matter to me, I do listen to each and every one of those, and I really, really appreciate it. So thank you. One last thing, before we get started, I want to remind you that there's three ways you can take these interviews with you on the go. You can go through iTunes, Android, or Stitcher. Just go to rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com, click on the iTunes, Android, or Stitcher names there on the menu bar and it will take you directly to the podcast, where you can subscribe to the show there. You can also leave a review if you've got time and you want to do that. So, now that we've got everything, all of that out of the way, let's go ahead and get down to business, what do you say? Hey, Geoff, welcome to the show. GEOFF: Thank you, great to be here Travis. TRAVIS: Man, I'm excited to spend a little time with you. I know it's been a crazy morning with you. Hey, do you mind giving me kind of the back-story of what brought you to today and what made you the success that you've found so far? GEOFF: Yeah, absolutely. I'm kind of quintessential college dropout tech entrepreneur. So I started out back in 2000. I was in college doing telecommunications engineering, and a whole lot of work that goes with that around programming, and signals, and cueing, and all that fancy stuff. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: And I realize that my real passion was actually business and entrepreneurship. And I looked at some of the stuff I'm studying and thinking, "Man, if I could go down this track I'm just

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

going to end up being a guy in a cube somewhere working for a big Telco, or a big consulting firm." And that really sort of had me realize that wasn't the right way to be going. So I dropped out of college and started my first business, which was a digital agency. And started that pretty much in the shadow of the .com crash. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: Actually, it was sort of I guess you could say the same week that the NASDAQ started to crash was the week that I started that business know as Internetrix. And it was actually a really good time because the approach that I took to that business was very much around making sure there was positive return on investment and real business benefits from the internet for our small or medium-sized business customers. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: So that was the beginning. As anyone listening to this podcast who's built a professional service business would know you start really small, begging for every client account you can get, every project you can pick-up. But over time grew that business out to the point where it was doing millions of dollars a year in billings. We had a team, I think at one point we got up to 23 people. We had customers ranging from small guys, which is really the bread and butter for a lot of those digital agencies all the way up to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in Australia. TRAVIS: Nice. GEOFF: So, we had a good spread. And at one point we actually had Google tap us on the shoulder and say, "Hey, we'd like you to become a partner with Google Analytics product." We were the only the second company in Australia. And one of the first from anywhere in the world that Google tapped on the shoulder and said, "Hey, we'd like you to join this program." So, from sort of the mid-2000 through to 2009, I really concentrated on building that agency, building an international stable of clients, opening an office in China, all sorts of cool crazy stuff. But one of the things I realized with a lot of frustration while I was building that business is how terrible the tools were that as a business owner I could take an advantage of to do everything, from managing my customers to keeping track of work productivity and billings. It seemed like everyone was just using a mixture of different stuff. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: A bit of BaseCamp here, a bit SalesForce there, nothing talking to anything else, billing being a nightmare that you had to deal with on your Saturdays and not spend time with your family and friends. And that frustration boiled up to the point where the hacker or coder in me

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

took over, and I ended up building a very basic tool to run the business. And that in a sense became the genesis of what is now AffinityLive and the business that we've now built with customers in almost 100 countries around the world that we're smashing out on a daily basis. TRAVIS: So, what I hear you saying is it's a tool that has maybe customer relationship elements to it. It also ties in to back off as accounting things, billing, recurring, things like that. Is that what you're talking about? GEOFF: Yeah. What we set out to do was build the tools that you would build in a SAS or a Cloud-based world. If you were to do, say, SAP or Oracle have done for many industries around the world that were very mathematically orientated, be it logistics, or inventory, or manufacturing. Professional services is a space that really doesn't have any proper business management tools. It's got individual things that you can do to manage, track your customers in one place or your projects in another. And it was just such a mess that we were like, "You know what, let's build a business automation platform. Let's build a system that professional service companies can actually use to run their business and bring them up to like the 21st century instead of them being stuck with technology from the 1990's and running their business with spreadsheets." TRAVIS: Well, yeah, that's still a problem today. GEOFF: Yeah. TRAVIS: You've got to master all kinds of different tools out there. I use several of the one's you mentioned. BaseCamp for project management, right? I speak to a lot of business owners that have a big chief tablet where they keep track of what they're task should be, how they follow-up on leads. It's really kind of crazy, right? GEOFF: It's very manual and cumbersome, like email made it a lot more efficient than it used to be when it was just letters and phone calls. And spreadsheets are fantastic if you're trying to do some analysis or some crunching of data and drawing graphs. But as tools actually manage our day-to-day, and our work, and our businesses, it's all really, really cumbersome. If you're using BaseCamp for example, it's really, really hard to see if a project's on time and on budget. Sure, you got a nice, pretty list of tasks, and you got some notes and attachments in one place. But when it comes to actually the stuff that drives business success, and frankly survival. For a lot of professional service companies, you win a 10k project, if you're spending more than 5k in billable time on it in terms of your labor cost, then you're in trouble, because you got to cover your overheads as well. And so, a lot of the time growth can actually choke and kill a company if they're not managed well. And without good systems, it's almost impossible to do. It drove me crazy, it drove most of my peers crazy. And we've said, alright, we're going to focus on

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

professional services and maybe to give them a CRM tool that's designed specifically for their industry that focuses on relationships, not selling widgets. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: And we're going to give them a project management tool that focuses on handling that chaos in projects where, you know, you don't know at the start what's really going to happen. Anyone who tells you they do is lying or deluded. And making a nice mixture between agile and traditional project management so you can still be flexible but keep things on time and on budget. And then we've done the same source, the things with billing and time billing. So really, focusing on the stuff that pro-serve companies need. And it's working out really, really well. Because as you said, even in your business today, you're still doing stuff in the 1990's method. TRAVIS: What I hear, and let me give you a perspective from the other side, okay? GEOFF: Yeah, sure. TRAVIS: And we'll kind of hammer this out together, alright? GEOFF: Yeah. TRAVIS: So what I hear you saying is really a tool that facilitates-- see most people don't know how to do-- this conversation that we're having just blows people away, right? GEOFF: Yeah. TRAVIS: It's so broad and it's so deep that most people just check out because they're like, "Man, this is overwhelming." And really what it is, is what you're describing in simplified terms is a set of skills that I learned to develop after I'd been in business about 10 years, So, I'm blown away that you have this level of acumen starting in business as recent as, a little over I guess 14 years. GEOFF: Yeah. TRAVIS: But it took me 10 years to realize that I needed all these systems to track profitability, to track this, to track that. And I'm not even talking about just accounting, because most people don't even understand accounting math. And I'm not trying trivialize or marginalize everybody, but accounting math doesn't make mathematical sense. GEOFF: That's right. It's all about keeping in compliance and all the other things that it does, but it's not really about math.

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THE ENTREPRENEURâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

TRAVIS: Right. Although, a comprehensive tool that allows you to project manage, to keep track of the last 50 interactions with this client, what they've bought from you, all of these other things, and then tie it in with the financials is a higher-level skill set for an entrepreneur. And if you can have a software that is a comprehensive solution, I think it's a quantum leap for all businesses especially young businesses. Does this make sense? GEOFF: Yeah, absolutely. Building all of this sort of stuff, even knowing what the problem is and trying to find it is-- I love Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hours Thesis. I'm a really big believer in it. And I spent those 10,000 hours as you did running a business, really getting an understanding of what those pain points are because you lived them and you've walked a mile in someone's shoes. And then we were just right place, right time. Able to take advantage of changes with SAS and the Cloud, to enable us to make the kinds of products that used to cost literally tens of millions of dollars, available for 40 bucks a month for companies where they can have a turnkey. So they don't have to think about all of these things the hard way. They can show up and have something that actually outlines an ideal sales process for professional service firm. And then they're able to go, and customize, and change those things as they wish to. But they can get the 80% out of the box without having to think about it. And they don't have to deal with all of the integration headaches that would otherwise fail anyone who's taking this project on. TRAVIS: Yeah, so qualify this statement, professional services for me. GEOFF: Yeah. For us it's really any organization that uses the talents of their people, where their people contribute to a client's outcome. And generally speaking, the business model is a time-billing business model, although with tweaks. It can be something, which is more like, we do a retainer-based business model for example. We don't charge specifically for the time, but that's still in essence what's happening. You just tend to put like a pricing ring fence around it. So classic examples would be companies like I started back in the day, which was a digital agency, web development, consulting, advertising services, social media, all of that sort of stuff as a business service for other companies. Other ones that are classic examples of IT consulting practices, marketing consultants, public relations, obviously you've got your lawyers and accountants, which are sectors that we're probably all familiar with. So there's all these different types of professional services and in the U.S. make up 12.3% of all of the businesses, and yet most of them are stuck using spreadsheets and a couple of manual cumbersome tools that don't really make their life any easier in aggregate. TRAVIS: Right. And the problem with the spreadsheets is they become data islands that-- and to qualify that for everybody listening is the data is ageing the second you enter it in there because people are not able to constantly update it. And so, how do you get through the learning curve and teach people-- there's four stages of competence. So stage 1 is unconsciously incompetent, and the second stage in consciously competent, which means you

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

now know what it is you didn't know. So, how do you get people to the stage where they realize that they need an all-inclusive, comprehensive solution? GEOFF: That's a really, really good question. Over the holidays this past Christmas period, that was something that I went for lots of long walks and just really contemplating how to solve that problem. And it's actually culminated in a major upgrade, a new release that we shipped just a week ago. We took the all-in one model, which has proven to be successful for us, but requires companies to feel like they've got to make a big jump all at once, and no one wants to do that. And instead, we've made it available on more of an ala carte basis. So let's say you're professional service firm, let's say you're an IT consulting practice and you do system integration for your customers, and you've been using BaseCamp up until now. And you've realized after getting burned one too many times that there are a couple of major problems which relying on a product like BaseCamp to manage a higher value or complex project. The first one is when it came is to keeping track of where you're up to from the time and money perspective you're blind, and you realize after the fact that the particular engineer or technician has spent the whole week working on something that was not even part of the scope, or if it was it was only designed to be done simple, not complex, make it like super complex. So, whatever the scenario is at least at this point, you're like, I need to get some better project management software that isn't the generic horizontal stuff that can be used for planning a wedding, or running an IT project. I want one that's really focused on the things that I care about, which are business automation. I want it to be able to keep track of budgets in real-time and I want it to be able to link to my canning package like QuickBooks for example and spit an invoice out. So, then you look around for what are the best project management tools for IT services or professional services firms. And so now, we've actually got the dedicated products specifically for the delivery of projects. And so, if you don't want the CRM piece, and you don't want the recurring contracts and retainers piece, you don't have to take them. And you can just get the one that you want, and then later get the sales team involved and say, "Hey, you know this call thing here that automatically captures all of the emails that we send to clients and receive from them around a project? Wouldn't it be cool if you have something like that to track your sales?" Or even better, you say that the sales folks who are in a professional services firm are much more about relationships and account management. You say to them, "Hey, you're kind of the go to guy or girl when this customer has a problem via the account manager. You should be able to see what's going on within this project and make sure that we're delivering what you promised. But what would be even better is if you're using something as cool as this product here, we could see what's coming in the pipeline before the deal is closed and you could get us involved and help me to write in proposals and answer questions that are maybe a bit too technical and out of your realm." And so, by getting everyone on the same platform gradually, companies don't have to take that big leap all at once. It makes it easier for change management, makes it easier on the budget, makes it easier on your people and you can gradually get into things.

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

TRAVIS: Interesting. So, does it have an auto responder element to it or does it tie-in to things like that, Infusionsoft or whatever? GEOFF: No, it's got the auto responder piece built in there, so it handles those sorts of approaches. And it doesn't try and get in to the world of marketing automation quite the way Infusionsoft does. But then, Infusionsoft and products of its similar nature really don't come far down the CRM track. Or at least if they do it's not really their core benefit or their core feature and as a result, it's sort is delivered with a sort of secondary level of quality or detail. TRAVIS: Yeah. So, something that is in interesting from my perspective. One of the things, a lesson that I learned, thinking back 17 years into my business, and tell me if this is part of what you have created and your teaching. GEOFF: Yeah, sure. TRAVIS: I made the mistake that for the first 17 years, and I used to pride myself at being a fast learner, and so, it's embarrassing that-GEOFF: Hard to say. TRAVIS: Yeah, that 17 years it took me to realize this. So, I used to look at financials as trailing evidence as to how we're doing, when really, accounting should be used to steer the vehicle of your business. GEOFF: Yeah. TRAVIS: That to me is a take on what you're talking about. GEOFF: Yeah, very much. If you're just using the accounts that your bookkeeper has helped you compile to drive the business, basically you're looking through the rear view mirror all of the time. And if you're paying close attention to the rear view mirror, you can see that the road behind you has just started to curve, and you can kind of assume that maybe going forward you should turn the wheel a little bit. But I don't think anyone would advocate driving looking only through a rear view mirror because it's just obviously going to come to tears very quickly. TRAVIS: I didn't mean to step on you there, that's a dangerous thing. This is a multi, multi, multi-million dollar business. So, this is a common problem that almost everybody is having is it causes you to be reactive rather than proactive. GEOFF: Absolutely. And it also means that your anticipation of what's coming in the future involves a lot of uncertainty and a huge amount of stress. So, let's say for example you've got

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

an agency. Maybe you've got, I don't know, let's say 15 staff. And let's say on average those people are getting paid 80k a year. So now, you're dealing with a monthly cost just in payroll of $100,000. And then when you add-on some rent, and maybe some car lease payments, and obviously your overheads in terms of utilities, let's say your business is now costing you 120k a month to keep going. Well, if you don't have visibility, not only of your sales pipeline but also of the resource utilization, like how busy your people are going to be, because bench time cost you not just in terms of dollars going out, but also the lack of dollars coming in. You can end up in a lot of trouble pretty quickly. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: So, being able to really understand what's going on with the business from sales through to projects and production and then into billing is really, really important. And unfortunately, for most of my career and experience when I was running a digital agency, I was just kind of wing and a prayer, man. You'd set your sales targets and go, "Okay, we're going to make 100k a month with the sales. What's our pipeline look like?" And then you can use some functions like what's our probability of close and how far through the process are we. Are we a step 1 or step 8 to get a sense of your pipeline, which is great. But then let's say you close a 20 grand job and it all goes pear-shaped before you can get a handle on it because you're not using good project management, you're using something simple like a BaseCamp type product to just keep track of your notes and your attachments. And then that 20k actually turns into really effectively 5k when you take into account all of your cost. And all of a sudden you've just put a massive hole in things and that can sink you really fast if you're a professional service business. TRAVIS: Right. Most people don't know what it takes, they don't understand total land it cost to deliver something. And so, you're example they're selling a $20,000 package, but once COGS (cost of goods) are sold, or averaged in, or added in, and then fixed overhead expenses, and all those other things, and you run the numbers, it actually cost $22,000 to produce those $20,000 package. GEOFF: Yeah. You've had a 2k donation. No profit. TRAVIS: Yeah, right. And so, most people don't know how to decipher that because several of them bridge over different boundaries and they don't know how to quantify it, right? And there are methods to figuring that out, although software can do that for you. Knowing how broad of a reach this is that you're working on, this is a massive project that you undertook here. Did you realize how massive this was when you were taking it on? GEOFF: Yes and no. I knew it was a really big problem, and I knew there are a lot of business owners just like I was who had that problem. So, I looked at the opportunity and said, "Yeah,

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

that's a worthwhile endeavor from an entrepreneurial perspective." And then, in terms of what it actually takes to deliver. I guess everyone underestimates what's involved in that and I definitely fall in the same category of having underestimated just how much was involved to we're still going. Our product development cycle we've got a team of engineers, we ship code every single day. The product continues to move forward, and it'll never be done because there's always better ways to do things and improve stuff. But I really underestimated how much work it would take, not just to solve this problem but also to build a product-based business from a services background. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: Because when at services you can go, "Alright, cool Mr. Customer, we're going to do this thing for you and it's going to cost 30 grand" let's say. And the customer is like, "Alright, fair enough" because it's maybe custom software development is what's you're doing for the more particular problem set. You take some tools you've already built or you take some technology you've put together, and you roll that out to the customer. And you kind of feel pleased with yourself because you took this product and that helped you deliver 80% of it. And so therefore your actual revenue per hour and your margin is really, really high for that services working, you feel awesome. And of course, then what you do is you think, "Right, I'm going to know go and productize this further." People can buy this online without me having to do services work because every services company has the dream of de-coupling hours from dollars. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: And so, you then start on this process, and we're actually doing some work at the moment to quantify how much of a dollar it was to go from a version 0.1 that was more like an internal tool that would then be customized and tweaked through services offering, through to a 40 automated SAS product that we've now got dozens and dozens of companies a day signing up and getting started with. Totally unattended credit card payments go in. We get paid while we're asleep. That sort of completely products focused company. And I think we probably underestimated what was involved, or at least the difference between that services-driven product versus a true product is probably 50 times as much work. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: So when you go out and you ship your-- you implement something for a customer in a professional services role built on some existing IP, whether it's technology or whether it's a framework that you deliver as a consultant. The delta between having that able to be delivered as a service versus completely product-based is probably about 50 times the initial effort you put in to getting the IP together. So it's a warning for new players who are like, "Yeah, this is really, really cool. I've been doing this work 3, or 4, or 5 times over from a services perspective, I

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

want to productize this." "Okay, cool. Just appreciate that you've got-- you are about 2% of the way there right now." TRAVIS: Right. I'm laughing-GEOFF: And make sure that you're prepared with what it takes. TRAVIS: Yeah. I'm laughing because I've been down the same road. I'm not laughing at your pain. GEOFF: No. You're like, "Yup, I agree man." TRAVIS: I'm laughing at your learning because it's, wow! I think sometimes ignorance is bliss. Sometimes it's good to not know that, that mountain is 50 times taller than you realize it is. Because, I think, I wonder if I would have started out on some of these treks when I was young and naive if I hadn't known how far it really was. Now I'm not living with regret because I'm glad I did. But the ignorance-- I broke a lot of rules and found success on incredible levels where I wasn't suppose to as well because I just didn't know that I wasn't supposed to do that, right? GEOFF: Yeah. I love that story that the aeronautical engineers look at the bumblebee and ran it through the maths of how they know that lift is created. And they say, "This thing can't fly." But the bumblebee flies anyway because no one told it. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: You make what seems impossible happen. And that's kind of what we've done with AffinityLive. We've basically built a product that has literally cost millions and millions of dollars of hours of our development team, and our design team, and our sales and marketing team. And we've been able to do it pretty much on a bootstrap basis with a tiny amount of external angel capital. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: And now I got it to a point where it's a fast-growing, 7-figure, recurring revenue business. So, it is possible that's just-- you really underestimate it. And certainly I'm guilty of that. Dramatically underestimating how much is involved and really developing and delivering a true product-based company. TRAVIS: Right. Now, let me take it back a little bit. I want to ask you, I'm really interested, how does a guy that has never started a business before build his first business into a multi-million

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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

dollar business? Now, I had the good fortune of doing the same thing. What was the secret for you and what was the turning point? GEOFF: I guess, we probably could've built a bigger business than we did. And from my perspective the key driver is to make sure that what we were doing was always delivering real value for people. Because we could always hang our hat on delivering a positive return on investment and making sure that they got more value out of what we did for them as a business than we took from them in fees or billings to actually make that thing happen. So, there were opportunities to go after fads or fashions, they were opportunities to chase the hype of something, or rather. And there's a lot of people where they say fools born every day. A lot of people with their wallets open or their checkbooks open, looking for someone who sell them what they thing they want to buy. But we'd always been really, I guess, driven by a long term, sustainable platform, and making sure that we did was always created value. And looked those first couple of customers you need to recognize when you're starting out and you've got no track record and nothing behind you, people are taking a big risk. So, a lot of the time you're competing on price. A lot of the time you're working I guess for really long hours and delivering exceptional service for a fraction of what they should really be paying in our open market to establish yourself and get going. And then you trade on those credentials, you trade on those case studies, and you really just try and drive forward. So, that's probably, I wouldn't be surprised to hear you did exactly the same thing. You really just get started, anyone who'll take a chance on you, take any work you can get. You deliver really, really well and make sure the customer's really, really happy. And then on you go from there. TRAVIS: Yeah, it's just a series of steps after steps, and working very aggressively. I started knocking on doors, my first business. I didn't have any money. GEOFF: I'm the same thing. I walked up and down the local shopping mall, which was a silly idea because retailers are a very interesting customer base. Yeah, I started out the same way, knocking on doors saying "Hey, nice to meet you. I'm so and so, this is what I can do for you. Are you interested?" Really laborious, really miserable, lots of no's, lots of rejection, lots of piss off. But even just a random phone call was enough to land one of our biggest accounts. So you just never know. TRAVIS: Yeah, one or two people out of 100 like the fact that you're brave enough to be out there knocking on the door, right? GEOFF: Yeah, absolutely. One or two of those 100 people actually have the problem that you're trying to solve right now. If you get better at business you do a better job of identifying where's the best spots to try and drill for oil. You don't just randomly drill everywhere, you just have to use a bit of intelligence, and you start to use a bit of technology, and you start to use a

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bit of scientific method. You then go after it in a much more effective manner. But when you're getting started, if you don't know, you're just going to get out there. TRAVIS: You just try everything. It's funny, you use that analogy. For me, early on I grew to realize, it was like I was drilling for water and I would just drill anywhere. And I think that's the problem, is most people will drill anywhere. What you need to do, thinking back, hindsight, is find out where the water is, build your town around that, and then drill. GEOFF: Yeah. TRAVIS: Or drill and then build your town, right? GEOFF: Yeah. Absolutely. And that's where-- when we started out with AffinityLive and going down this productization track. Like everyone you have delusions of grandeur and you think that every customer in the world needs your product. And every company in the world needs your product, they're all going to be your customer. Of course you're not stupid enough to really believe that but you think that the most possible market is bigger than it really is. And that's probably one of the worst things you can possibly do in my experience. You got to be really, really focused. You got a focus on a particular type of customer with a particular type of problem. You need to talk to those people, not just sell to those people. Understand what their pain points really are and clarify, and fix any of the problems of your assumptions. And then, once you've managed to really satisfy those guys then you expand the circle out from there. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: So, I think that's been really what we've learned. And in some ways it's been the hard way. But for us we're 100% professional services target market, and we think that there's literally million, not many million, but millions of professional service businesses in the world that are in it, that are in our sweet spot, and that have the pain points we have. And then it's a matter of going out and getting them. TRAVIS: I think services don't get enough attention. So many people are focused on products. I'm actually put off by this because I believe that the majority of businesses out there are service-based, right? All main street businesses are service-based, almost everything is service based. Yet very few people speak to them. And so, I love the fact that you've really niched this but this is a gigantic opportunity because there's so many different industries and verticals, and things that you unique-fy this for and go after. GEOFF: And so many of them are being ignored by technology. TRAVIS: Right.

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GEOFF: Because programmers at their core are generally mathematicians and logic experts. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: Now, if you can't put a barcode on a person, if you can't give an SKU to an hour and inventory that hour, then when it comes to software to run a business and help with the business, technology just lets you down. And the existing technology guys are like, we don't want to build something to handle fuzzy things like people, or hours, or service delivery, which is why services keep getting ignored and keep getting marginalized. And then the other one that we see is that the average company size and the professional services sector in pretty much any developed country is 21 people, 21 head count. And that's the average. So that includes really big outliers like PwC and Deloitte, and their ilk, kind of pulling the numbers higher so the median's actually lower than that. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: And so, as a result, these guys are too small for your Oracles of the world to sell to with their 6-figure salary, plus maybe 7-figure bonus sales guys rolling around with the Rolexes. And doing the long sale cycle golf course thing where they sell to Fortune 500 type customers. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: They just can't come down the market, and no one's been able to come down market properly, which is why it's still so miserable and ignored. But thankfully times are changing as they say. SAS has made a huge difference, and the Cloud has made it possible to do these sorts of things for prices that, that sector can't afford. And with an implementation model that they frankly really like. So, it's exciting. It's the right place, right time, and finally solving a problem that's been around for these poor guys for so long. TRAVIS: Yeah. great point. By the way, SAS is Software As a Service. GEOFF: I shouldn't use too many acronyms. TRAVIS: No that's okay, just in case there's people listening that don't know what that acronym is. So, was there a paradigm shift along the way beyond just taking constant action and refinement? Was there a paradigm shift, and was there a big mistake looking back and you thought, "Dang, I wish if I had to do it over I would have done this instead." GEOFF: Yeah. I think for a while I was still running the agency while doing AffinityLive, and with hindsight that was a mistake. It's really, really difficult to run one business successfully. To think that you can do two is very dangerous thinking, particularly something which is just high-risk,

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which involved so many upfront capital cost like software development where all of your money gets spent before you get to earn any. It's just the kind of business that really doesn't lend itself to being distracted in any way at all. And so, I invested and advised a lot of start-ups now, and some of them come to me and say, "I've got a couple of things going. I'm working on a few things--" and I let them say they piece and fairly quickly say, "No guys, this is not the way to do it. This is bad idea." TRAVIS: You got to keep your eye on the ball. So ultimately you hired someone to replace yourself in the other business. GEOFF: Yeah. And that was I guess a necessary thing to do, but what I really should've done was solve the business earlier. Because there's a big difference between entrepreneurship and management. Management can be exceptional at running things, but it tends to need that entrepreneurial drive, particularly for a smaller business. It's different once you've got thousands of employees. But when you're a smaller business you really need that entrepreneurial drive, that entrepreneurial zeal to be able to go out and create new things rather than manage what you've already got. TRAVIS: Interesting. I'm reflecting on that. And so you're talking about from the-- to keep the business fresh you've got to be in the innovation type mode, is that what you're saying, that keeps the business growing and thriving? GEOFF: Yeah. I think so-TRAVIS: Sorry about, we've got a little bit of a lag. So if you're not involved then you're not innovating, and then it ultimately dies on the vine? GEOFF: It tends to at least in the technology-based industry so I'm familiar with personally. It might be different if you run-- say a friend of mine runs a quite successful mini-storage business. Effectively a series of storage sheds and they lease them out on a monthly basis. Now, that's a business that probably doesn't require the same level of entrepreneurial zeal because there's not that much of change. You've got your capital, you've got your sheds, you've got your customers. But in the technology sector where it changes so fast. I think I have to do is generally accepted sentiment which is time moves about 7 times faster in technology because things that are new move, come in so quick, and things that are currently dominant disappear so fast compared to any other sector. That having an arrangement where there wasn't lots of entrepreneurial energy going into a technology business. Even if it's a services company that's doing advisory work is always a dangerous thing. TRAVIS: Yeah. And reflecting on it, I agree with you because there's a maturity cycle in every business. And I think the storage building was a good one because it's not a very fast moving

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type business. It is what it is. But even in my construction business, I own a construction business that I spend 3 hours a week in. But I'm not in there innovating, I'm not in there staying on the cutting edge of all the technology and stuff. And so, while they do quite well, it's not thriving as incredibly good as when I was super excited about it, right? Because I was the critical piece to it. It still runs well, we still deliver a great product, but we're not on the cutting edge. GEOFF: Yeah. And it'll probably, over time, diminish or trend down as an operation. But the time scale of that trending down is probably 20 or 30 years, and that's totally okay. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: Whereas in a technology sector, if you don't stay on top of stuff, you've probably got 2 years in you doing what you were doing 2 years ago. TRAVIS: Yeah. Then you're out of business. GEOFF: It didn't take long for the iPhone to go from non-existent to dominant. And that means that anyone who interacts in a digital world with their customers’ needs to be cognizant of that and aware that the customers are coming in and they didn't see things that are mobile friendly. And that's just one example. TRAVIS: Right. Okay, we've got 3 or 5 minutes before we need to segue into the lightning round. So I want to ask you real quick, what are your top 2, 3, or maybe 5 things that you believe that a business should be focusing on today to make it successful? GEOFF: I think one of the biggest ones, it's a classic but it's still so valid is the lessons of Michael Gerber in the E-Myth. If you're not running your business with a system you've really just bought yourself a job. And instead of having no boss like you maybe dreamed when you started out as an entrepreneur, you've actually got hundreds of bosses, each customer is a boss. And then your employees with their demands become in some ways a boss. You end up with the opposite scenario. So, I think the first thing is just recognize that if you don't have a system you don't really have a business, you've just got a job that makes you work harder and probably pays you less. And you have a lot more stress and less free time. So, I would say, first of all, focus on what it takes to actually systemize your business. And start simple, you don't have to go down a technology path to start with. But at the same time don't trick yourself into thinking that writing an operations manual is building your business a system. Because it's actually something that sits on a shelf and gets ignored. It's great for inducting new employees but after that it's pretty much useless. So, think about ways and processes, and things that you can do inside the business that people use on a daily basis, say interact with that they use to guide their activities and workout how to make systems out of that. So that's the first and

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probably the most important thing. And if you're a small team with a simple process, put it on a bloody white board, and put the numbers up there what's in each box, and just update them. It doesn't have to be super complicated. Then again, once you get beyond that point you realize that manual stuff isn't that great. Feel free to look at technology. That's what we're all about is making that stuff really easy and affordable. There might be people listening to this who are in different industries, look for something that's specific to your industry. Talk to people who are in your industry who are thought leaders and try and understand the best way to go forward. So, systemizing it be one of the main things. TRAVIS: I like that. I didn't want to mess up your flow there. GEOFF: No, that's alright. I guess another important one would be to try to automate where you can. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: And a lot of that means that is your business systems as much as possible shouldn't require people to duplicate their work just to keep a system happy. But instead, they should really be intertwined and working together. So, an example of something that we've seen have really, really big impacts for our clients is something as simple as changing the way people look at email. And so email, a lot of people talking about, "Oh, I'm email bankrupt", there's all these different ways of describing it. But in reality email's not going anywhere, and if you've got customers you're probably going to be talking to them via email, and if you ignore them they'll go to another supplier. So you can't ignore it. What we've found that works really well is you make email part of the shared kind of customer delivery as oppose to an individual silo that you feel like you're alone. So, as an example, when somebody sends an email to us here at AffinityLive or any of our customers for example. Whenever one of my colleagues answers that email and gets back to a customer, even though I might have been CC'd on the original email, when that reply gets sent out, then my inbox will automatically updated and mark those messages red, so that I don't feel like I'm getting overloaded and I'm actually treating email like a team sport amongst my entire team. And then the other aspect is by doing that sort of thing and having it all connected together, when I want to see the latest thing that's going on with a particular account, I could just go to their account inside, in our case we use our own product, inside AffinityLive, and see what's actually going on there like a Facebook newsfeed. So, that's probably another thing that I'd recommend. Email was built for a very horizontal, generic, used case, which was sending private messages from one person to another. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: But if you've got a team of people and you've got a client, particularly when it comes to this client emails it's now a team sport. And there are tools like ours that can allow you to

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synchronize those customer emails, still keep things private but synchronize that customer email so that you're no longer operating I guess in isolation. TRAVIS: You know, we do the same thing. We set the expectation with the client that everyone- if the client has the power to hit reply to all and let anybody know that they're not satisfied with something, and they're told initially in the welcome setup process that we take them through that if you feel like you're not getting attention, the owner of the company reads every email that comes across when XYZ happens. And I engineer that based on the fact, I know fires are much easier to put out when they're embers. GEOFF: Yeah, absolutely. TRAVIS: Versus when they become a raging forest fire and so we just have a system for how we handle all of those things, and I completely agree with you. I love what you're saying because it's a page out of my book. Systemize your business, diagram the customer experience, automate the redundant and create that experience for that client so that they feel special. I understood the need for CRM early 2000 when Microsoft come out with CRM. GEOFF: Yeah. TRAVIS: And I spent almost a million dollars trying to get that implemented into our system. I finally had to give up on Microsoft and go with another tool But I got early on that CRM was going to be critical to-- I speak to Mr. Johnson and I work for him 3 years ago. "Hey Mr. Johnson, how was that XYZ going?" It's the premises that the client feels special even if they call 3-5 years later. We know who they are, we know what we did for them. We know every challenge that they had. And we can have that instant conversation with them as soon as they call in. And most of them are surprised that we know everything that happened with them. GEOFF: Yeah, and it's so powerful to do. And as you experience. It used to be something, you used to have to spend a hell of a lot of money on, and/or require everyone in the business to be incredibly disciplined or remember to always forward something to this address, or always update this thing. Or maybe use a separate system and go and put in lots of notes, which only the most kind of OCD folks would comply with over time particularly when things got busy and they had to prioritize between a system that was an important long-term benefit, versus something short term, urgent, and crisis-driven. TRAVIS: Right. GEOFF: And that's why the focus on automation is really key so that folks don't have to do those-- they don't have to change how they work, and they don't have to modify their processes internally. So now, it should be an expectation that, that full customer history is able to be used

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regardless of whether staff are going in and filling out, and updating things. Or whether they're just replying to an urgent email in the back of a taxi on their iPhone. And just using the built-in standard mail client that they prefer to use, and know that, that conversation is being tracked and managed in part of a customer history all in one place without needing to go to all of these effort. And because the wheels would fall-off in that process. So, it's really automation and streamlining is probably the other part so that this stuff can be streamlined and fit in with the actual work process and workflow rather than becoming yet another thing I've got to find the time and the day to do. TRAVIS: Exactly. It's just something that happens in the background, right? GEOFF: Yeah, totally happens in the background. TRAVIS: Right, cool. GEOFF: And so that's what we found works pretty well. TRAVIS: Cool. I know we're running a little long on time. What do you say we segue into the segment. I sent you 3 questions over, I don't know if you had any time to look at those. GEOFF: Yeah, I had a quick look at those before. TRAVIS: Cool. The questions are what book or program made an impact on you related to business that you'd recommend and why? GEOFF: There's a couple of them. When it comes to getting started and really understanding where you're at and what your challenge is going to be, I really think Gerber's work around the E-Myth is brilliant, and it's just timeless. I think the next book, or at least thought pattern that I've really appreciated as I've started to build a growing company has been the Rockefeller Habits by, I believe it's Verne Harnish. It's a brilliant book that really, I guess, instills a discipline and a cadence into any entrepreneur who's trying to build a growing company, because it is very, very difficult to do. So I think there are a couple other things that I would recommend anyone who's an entrepreneur or a businessperson to make sure they've at least checked out and read the overview even if they don't feel like they got time to sit down and read long books or anything like that. TRAVIS: Cool. Both great books, I agree with you. GEOFF: And both pretty bite-sized actually, they're not really that long. TRAVIS: Yeah.

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GEOFF: You'd probably knock them over in a weekend. TRAVIS: Right. What's one of your favorite pieces of technology, or tools that you've recently discovered, if any, that you'd recommend to other business owners and why? GEOFF: I've been doing a bit of work lately around marketing automation and there's a new product which is just launched, which is called Prospect Ace. And what it does is you load it into your web browser, there's a Chrome extension. For those who aren't familiar with the tech that it's not that statement, basically it's a little button that appears inside your web browser. And you can click on that button up in top right usually is probably a series of icons up there. And what this thing does it uses some really clever technology to search through big databases of names, and email addresses, and social profiles, or things like that. And so let's say you're on a website, for argument's sake, LinkedIn for example, and you really want to get the contact details of a particular person to reach out to them, maybe you're looking for advise, maybe you're wanting to start a conversation around a partnership, or maybe it's a straight-up sales. You can use this Prospect Ace tool and it uses some amazing technology using all sorts of other sources around the internet to try and piece together a whole picture of that particular contact or prospect. So it's really, really smart. It's sort of like an intersection of big data and sales, or at least that sort of prospecting process. So that's worth checking out, Prospect Ace. It's only just launched in the last week or so, I've been playing with a little bit and I know a bit of the technology that's under the hood and I've been really impressed by that one. So if you're in a sales role that's one worth checking out I would say. TRAVIS: Interesting. They're using some of the stuff, kind of like Facebook's doing, gathering information from a lot of different sources and bringing it to you in one compiled way. Interesting. GEOFF: Yeah. TRAVIS: So it's Prospect Ace, Ace? GEOFF: Correct, A-c-e. That's a little kind of red paper airplane icon. TRAVIS: Is there a quote that best summarize your belief or your attitude in business? GEOFF: I think to a fair extent, it's the classic JFDI, just get out there and do it. You can sit around a lot and think about things, and ponder things. And I know most people love the idea of sitting and strategizing, and planning for world domination, and all of that sort of stuff. But really, at the end of the day, there's a lot of people who talk. Talk is really, really cheap. Action's what really matters. And so I strongly recommend to folks is just get out and do it. And then that applies to how you go about building the business, how you go about testing whether products

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or what customers want, whether the service offering is what customers want. JFDI talk to people. Just pick up the phone and say, "Look, I'm looking for some advise. I'm not trying to sell you anything. Have you got 5 minutes?" You'd be surprised. We did some customer development a year and a half ago and we ended up, I think we called and talked to 120 business owners over the course of a couple of days. Incredibly valuable. And the ratio of people who said, "No, go away. I don't talk to people on the phone" to people who said, "Yeah, I'm happy to give you some advise and help you out" was incredible. I think we had something like 60 or 70% of people who would happily get on the phone and talk to us, and answer our questions once they knew that they weren't part of a telemarketing campaign, and we weren't trying to steal their time from them. But we were going to be very gracious and appreciative of their advise. TRAVIS: Excellent suggestion. I did the same thing and had very similar results. Excellent suggestion. Hey, how do people connect with you Geoff? GEOFF: Probably the best way would be via Twitter, or via email depending on what they prefer. Some much where they handle is Geoff McQueen, and that spelled with a Geoff McQueen. And if you want to email me, it's pretty simple. It's geoff.mcqueen@affinitylive.com which is affinitylive.com. TRAVIS: What's the URL for your software tool? GEOFF: Check out AffinityLive.com, spelled the same way AffinityLive.com. Check us out, have a look at the products. We do free 14-day trials of all of our products. So folks can get in and have a play some of the stuff we've been talking about like shared emails, and business processes, and projects that you can have real-time tracking of budgets while still being pretty agile. You can get those products starting at 5 bucks a user per month. So it's really, really accessible to everybody. And anyone listening today, feel free to come and check them out. Mention when you go through the signup process, we've got a promo code form and just put down in the bottom of that promo code Travis, just Travis and we'll know that you came from the show and we'll make sure we keep an eye out for you and give you a bit of special attention. TRAVIS: Cool. You are brilliant my friend. It's been a great conversation, very valuable. GEOFF: Cheers. TRAVIS: I appreciate you being so candid about your journey, and your perspective and everything. So, let's stay connected and thanks for being so open. GEOFF: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a lot, thanks very much to you and your audience as well. I really hope that this has been useful. A few battle scars, and lessons learned, and I'm more

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than happy to try and help out anything more that I can with anyone out there who's struggling with these sorts of things.

End of Interview TRAVIS: Excellent. Thank you for that. Remember that you can find all the links to the books and the resources mentioned in the show in the show notes. Just go to rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com. Before I close the show today I want to read a quote from Zig Ziglar. And I always search for quotes that I feel are ways of either inspiring, instructing, or just giving you a nudge in that direction of really reaching your true potential, whatever that is for you. Now, I really like this quote, and the quote reads, "You are born to win. But to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win." This is Travis Lane Jenkins signing off for now. To your incredible success my friend, take care.

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How We Can Help You We know that finding someone that you can trust online today is hard and that so many “so called gurus” are self-‐appointed and have never really even done what they teach you to do. That’s exactly why we created the Double Your Profits Business Accelerator. This is an exclusive offer for our fans at a fraction of its normal cost. Here's what to expect. We'll Schedule a 'One on One' private session, where we'll take the time to dive deep into your business and tell you what is missing, so that you can have your best year ever! We'll do this by performing a S.W.O.T. Analysis. This tells us your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats within your business. This will be an eye opener for YOU, for several reasons, however some of the most common reasons are. As the 'Business Owner' it’s difficult to see the big picture of your own business because you’re in the middle of a daily management. And you are too emotionally involved to completely impartial. This is a common problem for EVERY business owner. It doesn’t matter if you are a one-man army, or an army of 150, the problem is still the same. Travis Lane Jenkins Business Mentor-Turn Around Specialist Radio Host of The Entrepreneurs Radio Show “Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs That Grow Your Business"

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