Lessons & Ideas: Recent Episodes
Bryan Harris
Get an unfiltered look behind the scenes of a 7-figure online business. Follow along as I learn how to grow the company and become a better leader.
The episodes range from my personal lessons and ideas to private team meetings and recorded calls with other business leaders.
If you want to peek inside the brain and business of someone in the trenches of marketing, leadership and hiring, this podcast might be for you.
I just finished reading Influence by Robert Cialdini and loved it!
The big idea in the book is that persuasion is a powerful and learnable skill. It enables you to lead better and get more things done. And it is guided by 6 fundamental principles.
6 Fundamental Principles:
Liking Reciprocity Social Proof Consistency Authority Scarcity
Book notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15mJPrA8VCer4F-strx_fAbm13_BsNwj2Qi1o_O50iO8/edit#
Your product most likely has one of these 3 problems:
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Seems to complicated
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Problem isn’t acute enough
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Price seems too high
These 3 problems create the vast majority of buying objections that your prospects will have. And most products have 1 of if not all of these problems. In fact, some products have such strong resistance that it will all but stop buyers if they are not addressed head on.
How do you fix this?
Redefine the product.
Redefine by rearranging your prospects perspective of the product. When executed well the problem naturally dissolves.
Chapter 10 of Breakthrough Advertising covers this technique in depth. It outlines a custom tailored solution for each of these three problems.
Here is a brief rundown of how to handle each problem:
- When the product seems too complicated?
Simplification: When the product seems too complicated or hard to use it needs to be redefined. Simplify the product by taking them from hard to easy with a few simple ideas strung together so that what seems complicated to them becomes brain dead simple and obvious.
- When the problem isn’t acute for enough people?
Escalation: When the problem is not important enough or appeals to too small of a market it needs to be redefined. Escalate it’s importance with one of these 3 approaches: a) shifting to higher level area of their life b) showing how something else they want depends on it c) show how they’ll really need to use it more often than they think.
- When the price seems too high compared to the alternatives?
Price Reduction: When the problem is that the product costs too much.compared to typical alternatives the product needs to be redefined. “Reduce” the price in your prospects eyes by one of 2 methods a) show the cost of not fixing problem b) change the comparison to another class of product.
In this episode I’ll walk you through 3 Facebook ads that show these techniques in action:
4 steps to theme and create the headline:
- Who is your best fit client?
- What desire are you satisfying for them?
- What product result does that?
- Awareness of your BFC?
Answer for my product (marketing coaching progrma)
- Course creator with some traction
- To have clarity and focus on a plan im confident in to grow the business
- Simple plan with a few tweaks that will unlock them (aka: marketing plan)
- Know they need help but not sure where to turn. Have tried lots of stuff. A coach they trust sounds good, but who is that and where do i find them?
A few sample headlines and themes:
6x Faster Than Facebook ads How would you sell 28 online courses per month? How many course sales hit 50k per month? Sell 100 courses per month Want to stop advertising your courses on Facebook? Tried to sell your course or coaching w/ FB ads? 2x your FB ad spend How to 2x your FB ad ROI with partnerships When you’re course sales stagnate, try this… Try one of these 5 tweaks to increase your course sales Can you send an email? Then you can sell your online course. If you haven’t sold 10k of your course, dont read this How to 2x your FB ad roi by not using FB ads. To the course creator that needs help marketing
A friend hired a writing service recently. The clarity in their offer and the process was the #1 reason he chose them over someone who would have done a better job.
Defining who are best fit client is has moved the needle in a significant way.
In this episode I interview Drew Breaux, the Growth Tools director of marketing. And he outlines the process he uses to do this.
High level outline:
- Survey existing clients
- Study results of biggest fans
- Pull out before / after emotions
- Write the 2 part BFC profile 5 immediately update website and marketing assets to attract more BFCs
- Drink giant glass of water now
- Text 1 friend that you love them
- Drop and do 25 push-ups
- Go for 10m walk outside
- Help someome this morning
- Take 5m to imagine a 5 star future
- Eat < 50 carbs today
- Get > 7 hours of sleep tonight
What is a problem so interesting and inspiring that you could dedicate the next 3 decades to solving?
🤔interesting...
Economics of @tldrdan ‘s daily newsletter. Runs on sponsorships.
- 118,000 subscribers - 36% open and 8% click - Tech audience
Charges $1,000 per email.
Details: https://www.tldrnewsletter.com/sponsor
Got big questions about your career or company?
Good. You should.
Exhibit A: Phil Knight started Nike in 1964. Twelve years in he still had major questions about Nike...
“What are we trying to build here?”
“What kind of company do we want to be?”
Simple way to catch issues on your team before they spiral...
Track these 4 metrics:
- Hours
- Stress
- Happiness
- Education
Monitor weekly. Meet if any are out of whack.
When was the last time your team convinced you not to do something that you wanted to do?
If you can’t remember, that’s a problem:
- Everyone has ideas
- Most get run through the filter
- Yours probably bypass the filter
That’s a bad thing. Fix it.
Use “What do you think about…” to rephrase your mandates as question and give your team a way to filter you ideas.
Writing Tip: Split your writing ito two sessions.
- End each day by writing for 15m
- Start each day by writing for 45m
- Publish by 8am
Leaving it mid sentence and letting my brain work on it over night works wonders.
How to set quarterly goals
Here is the simple framework I use: 1. Vision: want I want things to look like 2. Habits: Do task X times, use streaks 3. Projects: 1 time initiatives 4. Use basecamp to log it all
Listen to this episode for more details and examples.
I've been thinking about this quote a lot...
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." -F. Scott Fitzgerald
When you encounter a thought that doesn't ring true (meaning that it doesn't reconcile with what you believe or how you view the world) you have two choices:
- Dismiss the idea
- Examine the idea
If you choose to dismiss it, that's ok. In that case, withstand the urge to disparage or form a straw man.
WARNING: Only disparage ideas that you fully understand.
You'll know if you fully understand the idea if you can recall it to someone that holds the view and they agree that it is an accurate representation of their view.
WARNING: Even then, disparaging idea is probably a bad idea.
If you choose to examine the idea, don't adopt the idea (yet) or dismiss your current view. Instead, hold the new idea in your hand and examine it.
A few potential outcomes of this examination:
- Slight recalibration to your world view
- Major recalibration to your world view
- Wholesale dismissal of the new idea
If you are forced into discussing an idea you haven't fully examined, say so. And leave room for being off target in your view.
"Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.” — Jeff Bezos
I’m keeping two tabs open in my browser at all times durring this crazy Corona event.
- Stress reducing protocol
- Worst case scenario list
These 2 docs give me instructions for handling any anxiety or stress that creeps in and a place to put the anxiety and stress once it rears it’’s head.
Hope this helps you!
Recently the Growth Tools leadership team had a meeting to talk about how to encourage and incentivize everyone at the company to identify small tests with high upside and problems with simple fixes and then to empower them to go execute on them. We even setup a large reward for the person with the simplest and most impactful project of this nature in Q1. In this meeting we talk about the pros and cons of this. How to encourage it. And how to think about it. This is a recording of a private internal meeting. Enjoy!
I came across a fun chapter from Austin Klein’s boom, Show Your Work, today. The chapter Is entitled, Share something small everyday. It resonated with me. So in this episode I’ll read you the chapter and share why I liked it. Enjoy my beautiful reading ability! :)
This week has been the most bizarre and crazy week I can remember in multiple decades.
I just sent a video and update to our team sharing how I’m thinking through it on a personal and business level.
Two key points:
- Take precautions
- Take advantage (aka: turn it into a positive)
This was originally a video, but I stripped out the audio to post here.
I hope this is helpful for you!
One of the best uses of my time right now is working with our leadership team 1:1. I love it. But one of the down falls is my calendar can turn into a hot mess of random meetings.
So, today I wrote a quick memo to everyone with a few guidelines on how to schedule with me. This will help them get what they need quicker and make me more efficient.
Listen to the episode for the details:
Here is the memo I sent: https://public.3.basecamp.com/p/64SVDti9TkZdmoQvv97kgHmM
Each day starts the same for me. I sit down at my desk and do my Morning 10. These are 10 shot tasks that take 1 minute or less to do. These 10 things set my tday up well, prime me to be productive and ensure that the most important stuff in my life is being attended to.
Hear more about it in this episode.
This is my current Morning 10:
- Pray
- Pre-log my food
- Pull notes our of my phone
- Write down tasks for the day
- Text wife
- Check Bank
- Log Q1 goal progress
- Journal core emotion wheel
- Clean out Basecamp notifications
- Look at weekly goals
In this episode I read an article by Michael Hyatt entitles “Why Vision Is More Important Than Strategy”.
https://michaelhyatt.com/why-vision-is-more-important-than-strategy/
Highly encourage you to read the article. Linked above.
Every quarter we do a challenge on our team focused on encouraging and empowering each person to find problems and opportunities for the company (and fix them).
This quarter the person with the best project wins a $2k trip.
Listen to the episode for details.
I just finished reading my favorite book on naming things (products, companies etc.) and I loved it!
I recorded a short video summary and wrote up detailed notes on the book so that years from now I can come back to it and remember the key parts and the method taught in it.
In this episode I share the audio from the my book summary video.
For the full video, notes and a few custom worksheet I made - go to my Twitter account @harris_bryan, everything is linked up there.
The notes: https://vidfru.it/2RZFgLc
Enjoy!
A few smart people I know are hardcore into Linkedin for biz dev. I've mostly looked at Linkedin as a giant spam trap. However, my curiously was piqued. So, I hoped on with Marti Sanchex who mentioned that he was using Linkedin succesfull (without spamming people). He shared his playbook for how he uses it to book 10+ sales calls per week. And how he used it in January (last month) to book $24k ARR of business. Enjoy!
I struggle to name things. Product, companies, podcasts etc. It’s so bad that I struggle to name our dog.
I picked up a book on naming recently to help. And I loved the book. It’s Hello My Name Is Awesome by Alexandra Watkins.
In it she shares her method for naming things.
In this episode I walk you through her 3-step process and and a 9-part brainstorming excercise.
Process:
Step 1: List 12 words related to it Step 2: Choose 1 & research for 60m Step 3: Repeat on each word
Branstorming excercise:
- Run the word through a Thesaurus
- Image search the word
- Look up industry related glossaries
- Run the word through a dictionary
- Search for cliches related to the word
- Google the word
- Look up movie titles with your keyword
- Search iTunes for song titles with your keyword
- Look up book titles with your keyword
By the end of this you should have 100+ names. 10-15 should be ones you really like.
If you want more examples and details go follow @eatmywords (on twitter) and grab her book Hello My Name Is Awesome: https://amzn.to/2U6FGR8
(I’ll be publishing my full notes and takeaways on Twitter soon)
I’m thinking of hiring someone to help answer 95% of my emails. Email and inbound messages have become a big problem and my slow response times is one of the biggest “weights around my neck”. Listen as I process through how to fix this.
My business coach shares a quote and post on Linkedin recently. Its been in my head ever since.
“The more a CEO does the weaker the business becomes”
In this podcast episode I read the rest of the post to you and share the 3 specific things he does in his business (and all the stuff he avoids).
Instead of asking, “What’s wrong?” Ask “What happened?”. That phrase is neutral, holds no baggage and will get the person in a more calm and logical state.
Want to go to a marketing conference with me? I have an extra ticket, thought it might be cool to see if anyone wanted to hang for a few days with me and some friends at a marketing conference in late March. Listen for details.
A quick update on what we’re working on this month at my company
- Swipe 2 of my favorite email sequences for free
- We’re hosting a “How to write your launch email sequence” class next week
- We’re hiring a coach and I’m hiring an executive assistant
- new tool we’re developing to predict how our promo’s and launches will go
- A new book I’m reading and loving - 3 Minute Rule by Brant Pinvidic
I’ve been stuck. Finally took a super small action and before I knew it I had 3x’d my production of the last 5 weeks. Quick story and tip of how to use this.
Two of my big targets for the year are:
1) Best year of marriage ever 2) Treat my personal brand like a business
These are the 6 activities I’ve committed to doing in Q1 to work towards those targets (and the number of times I’ve committed to doing them)
- Prelog my food 70x
- Work out 30x
- Read to start the day 30x
- Record a podcast 10x
- Pray with stacy 60x
- Go on a date night 8x
I had no idea what Kobe meant to so many. Over the last 48 hours I’ve been inspired, moved to tears and motivated by his life.
Here are 6 quotes that moved me the most:
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"I can't relate to lazy people. We don't speak the same language. I don't understand you. I don't want to understand you."
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“I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have fear of failure. I have nights when I show up at the arena and I'm like, 'My back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt. I don't have it. I just want to chill.' We all have self-doubt. You don't deny it, but you also don't capitulate to it. You embrace it."
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"When you make a choice and say, 'Come hell or high water, I am going to be this,' then you should not be surprised when you are that. It should not be something that is intoxicating or out of character because you have seen this moment for so long that ... when that moment comes, of course it is here because it has been here the whole time, because it has been [in your mind] the whole time."
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"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. No matter what the injury -- unless it's completely debilitating -- I'm going to be the same player I've always been. I'll figure it out. I'll make some tweaks, some changes, but I'm still coming."
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"The important thing is that your teammates have to know you're pulling for them and you really want them to be successful."
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"I have nothing in common with lazy people who blame others for their lack of success. Great things come from hard work and perseverance. No excuses."
This podcast started on a whim as a fun little side project 8 months ago. And I’ve really enjoyed it and want to take it more seriously in 2020.
My new target is to consistently get 1,000 downloads per episode.
Here are 7 ideas I’m considering to get me there:
- Publish 1+ /wk
- Repost to social w/ video
- Brand (name, theme, art)
- Start SMS + email list
- Standing first5 challenge
- Tease next 5 episodes to big list quarterly (early access)
- Tease next 2 @ in episode w/ adbarker
- Topic
1 simple hack for better meetings
- Make a ‘meeting notes’ gdoc
- Link it in your bookmarks bar
- Take notes durring the meeting in the doc
- Include 4 bullet points for each meeting (Attendees, Agenda, Notes, Action Items)
Makes it easy to remember what you talked about and agreed to do months later.
Try it out!
Story of our new Director of Marketing and how he 5x’d sales of our most important product in his first 3 weeks.
Great end of year review process from Tim Ferriss.
- Get a notepad and create positive and negative column
- Go thru calendar, pictures, orders from the year
- For each week write down people, activities or commitments that triggered positive or negative emotions.
- Filter to top 20% on each side
- Do more of the positives in 2020 and create stop doing lost you review daily for the negatives
Original article: https://tim.blog/2018/12/28/past-year-review/
Me thinking out loud about a new potential project to take on in 2020. What do you think?
I just finished one of my all time favorite books... The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard Big Idea: 3 simple 1-min tasks to be a world class leader. They aren’t hard and don’t take much time. 1. One Minute Goals 2. One Minute Praising 3. One Minute Redirect Get my full notes and video overview here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Pu4EVxsat0ZQrsWG4z-2AfgbZn-9j5qA9op_N_6MrME/edit#
I spent a few hours researching all the deals I got durring 2018 Black Friday and a few things stuck out.
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get on the waiting list x sneak peak
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our deal is live w/ subject line reminder of deal
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our deal is ending w/ subject line reminder of deal
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Re-surface best deal of the year
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Bundle multiple products together
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put the deal in your subject line (for product aware segments)
Original video recording: https://www.loom.com/share/87ef0c514a8b42df95d8ce3abb0d2c3b
Every month Will Hoekenga and I get on a call and talk about major initiatives and stuff I'm working on at my company, Growth Tools. This is our November 2019 Update. Key areas we cover: 1. Experiments in trying to figure out how to sale our 4-week marketing classes 2. Four engineering projects we're working on 3. Personel issues and hiring updates 4. A new report we use that's provided some pretty legit takeaways Hope you enjoy!
Ruben Gamez asked how I go about taking stuff from the books I read and implementing and executing on them.
- Read one chapter at a time
- Underline key points and concepts as I go
- At end of chapter, stop and write down all of the concepts into a note
- Organize the notes so it logically flows
- Rinse and repeat for rest of book
- As ideas and applications of the core concepts come up, put them in my ideas inbox
James Clear recently asked how decide which projects to work on. Here is our process: 1. Pick projects quarterly 2. Dont add new projects once quarter begins 3. Capture any new project ideas 4. Spend 1 hour a month sorting the ideas and ranking 5. Spend 1 day a quarter to pick and define appetites 6. Write out a short scope document 7. Schedule it
Every month I shoot a quick video updating the Growth Tools team on what we're working on and what I'm excited about. Highlights: Update #1: An entirely new way to learn how to build an email list Update #2: Solving 2 problems with our free tool for creating lead magnets, Attract (plus, a new partner!) Update #3: 1 position we’re hiring for, and 1 position we’re considering Update #4: Sales slumped this summer. Here’s what we learned.
We usually get 100+ applicants when hiring. Filtering through them all can be tedious. Here are 8 things that I’ve noticed make people stand out. 1. Excitement level 2. Fit 3. Follow 4. Familiarity 5. Fluffy words 6. “Destiny” 7. Experience 8. Projects
Here is a written summary of each point: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wFxfLCQGVlyoj2JOIlzoYl7YQFKnGrIArRsm8Wh63O0/edit
One tweak thats helped to 2x buy-in from the team = rephrase task as a question.
👉🏻 “What would you think about ?”
Helps leadership develop by being part of the decision vs just the conclusion.
Every month I shoot a quick video updating the Growth Tools team on what we're working on and what I'm excited about.
Highlights:
Update #1: A 94% success rate in our latest 4-week marketing class
Update #2: Two problems w/ our new homepage + potential solutions
Update #3: We’re still hiring for our first ever Director of Marketing.
Update #4: Noodling on: What’s the best way to coach someone?
Want to know how to pick KPIs for your team?
This is how we do it.
- A quesiton that pulls out your KPIs
- What to do if you still cant get them
- Two examples from Growth Tools
Val Geisler and I had a 30m coaching session on raising prices.
We talk about:
**1. Risk of raising prices
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How to do it with out scaring off clients
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Niche service idea for her to be able to charge more**
Enjoy!
8 Hacks For A Healthy Remote Team
- Track happiness, stress and hrs
- 1:1's every 3 months
- Clear expected outcomes
- Wkly KPIs tied to outcomes
- Wkly & Quarterly goals
- Meet in-person every 3mo
- Live video for hard talks
- Catch them doing stuff right
5 levels of delegation via @michaelhyatt
Level 1: Do what I have asked you to do
Level 2: Research and I’ll decide
Level 3: Research, show options and make recommendation
Level 4: Decide and tell me what you did
Level 5: Decide and I don’t need to know
My #1 company focus this year is finding our "4 Generals" to lead the organization.
One really good takeaway for me from the "5 Levels Of Delegation" concept was that those 4 people need to be in Level 4/5 75%+ of the time or I'm not leading well and/or have the wrong people. And if ANYONE in our organization spends more than 25% of their time in Level 1, we need to re-evaluate our leadership and the persons fit and role.
Monday Starts A 30-Day Experiment.
Can we do a $10k per month lead gen service for companies w/ LTV >$2k?
Goal = 5 committed partnership with projected qualified lead count of 1000 and sales of $20k.
I found a tool that turns my podcasts into videos.
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Publish an episode
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They email the video <2hrs
I do nothing. It just magically shows up. Such an amazing model. I want our products to work like that.
18 months ago I found our long term business model
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Create free marketing tools
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Tell users about our paid training products
Getting clear on that has had a profound affect and the business.
Yesterday we had a brainstorming session to talk about new product concept.
Be a fly on the wall as we discuss:
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The concept
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Should we and can we do?
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Pricing and structure?
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How to validate w/o building?
@CaseyGraham told me a CEO has 3 jobs:
1. Vision: stay focused on it 2. People: recruit and retain the best 3. Money: don’t run out
My top focus this year as CEO is #2. Finding my 4 Generals.
A challenge I gave the team last week:
- Share your top “figured it out” moment from the week
- Everyone votes on their favorite
- Most votes gets free round trip ticket to anywhere in the US
Results have been 🤯
Are you a “year end review” blog post addict?
Will DeShazo shares lessons, recommendations and highlights on his 28th birthday.
📖 Best Book: “Never Split The Difference”
🔮 Biggest Lesson: “Being intentionally dependent on others”
To get a meeting with someone:
If you know them:
- Create a cal invite with agenda in description and time of meeting
- Send it to them. Don’t ask, just send.
If you don’t know them:
- Ask for the meeting
- If no response, just send the cal invite
Each month I film a short video updating our team on: 1. What I’m excited about 2. What we’re working on 3.. A few fun behind-the-scenes things I thought I’d share an audio only version here this month.
Weird thing happens each time I hire: Apps falls into 2 groups:
- Pass
- Maybe
Then 1 comes along that blows me away and resets the bar. All the maybes turn to no’s, I get super excited & imagination for the role explodes.
2 months ago on a whim i invited 5 clients to come to dinner.
1. Meeting in real life 👍🏻👍🏻 2. Immediately evident they are craving community 3. Best product research and customer insight process ever
You should try it.
1 Lesson From Reading 3 Books Written By The Basecamp Guys
- These books are amazing talent recruiting rolls
- I (think) I’m going to write a book
- See an email I sent to our team today.
Had an idea today: “Whay if I did your list building and lead gen for you?”
1. The service that inspired me 2. Breakdown of how it would work 3. My next steps to test it
Nat's Twitter: https://twitter.com/nateliason Nat's Sales Page: https://vidfru.it/2vyCyQB
Do you use Audible?
Return books you never finished or didn’t like for credits. (h/t @robwalling)
1. Account Details 2. Payment 3.
It’s easy to come across like a jerk in an email. Use 3 words to end every on a good note no matter how difficult or direct the email is.
“Thanks so much!”
If you hate the financial mgmt part of business, try this...
+ 2 meetings (quarterly & bi-weekly) + 2 reports (transactions and RYG) + 2 approvals (bills and budget)
It takes < 2 hours per month.
Hiring is tricky. I haven't mastered it, but we've been working on it for 3-years now and have learned a ton.
In this episode I share our hiring SOP.
And 5 lesser known hiring tips that have made a huge difference for us.
- Write a job scorecard
- No less than 100 candidates
- Spend a lot of time sourcing
- Use an applicant tracking
- Get a hiring manager ASAP
TL;DR time delay posting to social or sending emails using Spark and Buffer. It keeps my brain from being attached and wanting a response
What if you could create a legit sales webinar in 15-minutes?
- Hear about an idea for our next Growth Tool
- The types of tools that have almost no competition
- I get lost in a parking lot while recording this
A tweet by @deveshkhanal inspired these thoughts...
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How I saved $60k a year in my biz
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A challenge to throw away your second monitor and fire your VA
I had a marketing idea last night I’d like your feedback on...
- Do you like it?
- How would you promote
Our Facebook ad cost has slowly risen over the last 45 days. Couldn’t figure it out.
So I hired Neville to write some fresh ads. Cost dropped from $4.50 to $1.13.
I’ve been struggling. Pep talk to myself.
- Old overweight dude at the gym that’s been schooling me
- James Clear kicking my butt
- 3 thoughts on comparison
Update and recap on my “best marketing idea in a long time” experiment.
This week I’ve sent out 100 pitches. Hear the results. 1 pitch sucked and the other did not.
Not getting annoyed or even mad at people saying stuff I vehemently disagree with can be hard.
Here is a framework I’ve started using that’s helped me: