If you’re looking to sustainably scale your business, becoming pickier about which clients you take on may seem counterintuitive, but that’s exactly what Stephen Woessner did.
Stephen was initially on the fence about trimming down who his company, Predictive ROI, served. But he took the leap to find his niche and his business grew to the point that he had to double his staff. Now that Stephen’s seen what this shift has done in his business and in the agencies he works with, he wants to urge you to do the same.
Tune into this episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast, to discover how Stephen found his ideal customer niche, his initial fears, the benefits of this approach, and the pivotal role automation plays in the entire gameplan.
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
[00:00:22] Clate: Welcome, everyone, to this episode of Conquer the Chaos Podcast. I’m your host and the co-founder and CEO of Keap, Clate Mask. And I'm really excited today because I get to have a conversation with a longtime friend, somebody that, in fact, I was on his podcast many years ago. I think it was the first time we talked, Stephen. And I’ve been able to see the great things they've done in their business, and I’m just looking forward to an awesome conversation.
[00:00:53] Clate: If you are out there today wondering about this automation craze that's going on and me always talking about automation, we're going to share with you some specific things that I think you'll really like. So, with that quick introduction, let me just introduce our guest today, Stephen Woessner is a, like I said, longtime friend, an expert in automation, but what he really does is he helps agencies be successful and grow their businesses.
[00:01:21] Clate: And I'm going to let him tell a little bit about that and a little bit about what they do because he can do it better than me. But let me just say, Thank you, and welcome, Stephen Woessner.
[00:01:31] Stephen: Thanks very much, Clate. It's always a pleasure to be able to spend time with you. It was very kind of you for the invitation. So I'm very excited about this conversation.
[00:01:42] Clate: Great. Tell the audience just a little bit about what you do — your work with agencies and you've got 30 years of experience doing this. I think a lot of people out there who are listening have an agency of some sort, so tell us a little more about that.
[00:01:59] Stephen: Well, as you said, I've been in the agency business 30 years. Predictive ROI is now 15 years old, and congratulations on Keap’s recent birthday. I think 23 years. That's an impressive number. So throughout that 15 years at Predictive ROI, candidly, we didn't start out serving agencies, just like many small businesses where you basically eat whatever swims into the net. And sometimes you're having salmon that night and other times you're eating a boot, right?
[00:02:34] Stephen: So things were not great early on, but as we figured out more about the right fit and the types of clients that we really enjoy working with, it became very clear that we liked being able to help agencies because we had a passion for it.
[00:02:52] Stephen: We'd been in the business for a long time, and so it just seemed sort of natural to do that. Even just a few years ago, though … Just continuing to refine that, refine that, refine that, and always make it better and go deeper into the niche we finally had landed on. The thing that we really love being able to do is help agencies sell more of what they do.
[00:03:13] Clate: Yeah.
[00:03:13] Stephen: It's as simple as that. Helping them sell more or what they do — and for a higher fee. So that's all about helping them fill their sales pipeline and with a steady stream of right-fit prospects, which of course is a natural fit for the 10 years of experience that we have inside Keap and using all the tools and all of that.
[00:03:32] Clate: Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll get to the Keap stuff in a minute, but I want to just point out a couple of things you mentioned. So you got to your niche of serving agencies and helping them to sell more of what they do. How long did it take you to do that? Because when you said “Hey, you eat what you catch and sometimes it's salmon and sometimes it's a boot.” I'm sure that we've got a lot of people out there and they're like, “Yeah, I'd like to get better at getting the right kind of salmon on my plate instead of just whatever it takes to keep the lights on.” So will you tell us a little bit about how long it took you to do that and how you actually got to that?
[00:04:10] Stephen: Yeah, so we started serving agencies almost from day one because of a strategic partnership, and then also friendship with the Agency Management Institute that’s led by Drew McLellan. He's their CEO and Danielle McLellan.But I knew AMI really early on because of some past relationship at an agency that I'd worked at as an unpaid intern back in 1993.
[00:04:38] Stephen: So this is how far it goes back. Then when I started Predictive, they were some of the first people that I met. And then that turned into speaking engagements, which turned into some clients. So we were serving agencies from the beginning, but then also many others. Honestly, candidly, it was probably maybe six or seven years into it when we started thinking, “The clients that we really enjoy serving the most are agencies.” And some members of my team were like, “You know what, we need to double down on agencies.” And I'm like, “No, I think it's more like business to business professional services firms.” And so then we did that for a couple more years and then we started working with more agencies and then more.
[00:05:18] Stephen: It was like maybe we should double down on agencies. I'm like, “I don't think so.” It wasn't until 2018, when Drew and I decided to write our book, The “Sell with Authority” book — we'd been teaching workshops together for several years — then, finally, I caught up with the train. I was the lonely caboose and back of the train slowing everybody down.
[00:05:42] Stephen: And I'm like, “Okay, it makes sense that we just go all in on agencies.” And it's been an incredibly good decision for us because it's just so much more simple when you know exactly who you're here to serve.
[00:05:54] Clate: That's right. And it's really where the profits and the scale of a business start to take off. I talk with people all the time. And I say, “It usually takes a few years to get to this point.” Most of the time people will, in their businesses, they'll take on whatever they can to keep the lights on to get revenue and make payroll and pay their own bills.
[00:06:18] Clate: But I think that you're touching on something that is very common for people. It makes sense to niche down. It makes sense to get specialized. They hear the phrases like “There's riches and niches,” I know a lot of people say niche, but it doesn't rhyme with rich, so I like to say “riches and niches,” but here's the thing, the business owner is feeling the weight and the responsibilities of payroll. The pressure, the financial realities are on the business owner. And so when your team is telling you, “Look, we like serving agencies better, and we're getting a lot of them.” It's easy for them to look at it that way and for you as the business owner to look at it a little bit differently because you're like “Yes, I know. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could just get agencies? I'm with you on that, but we have these financial realities.” Is that what was going on a little bit for you?
[00:07:13] Clate: You said you finally caught the train. Why do you think you were slow? And the reason I'm asking this question is not not to poke at you. It's because I believe this is so common for business owners when they're intellectually on board with going after a niche, but financially and pragmatically, there's a reality that's pulling them away from it, or at least not bringing them along.
[00:07:39] Clate: Then it prolongs the ultimate success that comes when you do get to the niche. So can you maybe click down on that a little bit more for us, help us understand what was going inside of you as your team was saying, “Hey, we see it,” but you weren't there yet.
[00:07:53] Stephen: I think it was two things: content, and then value ladder. And here's what I mean on content. So I've had the privilege of writing five books. The first three books though, you could say that they weren't niche.
[00:08:14] Stephen: They're generalistic. They were strategy and/or tactic-specific — My search engine optimization book, social media book, profitable podcasting in 2017. But that was aimed at a wide audience, sort of a spread of audience as far as small business. It was not agency niched. So we had all of this content,
[00:08:39] Stephen: The Onward Nation podcast that you had joined me on, there were 1,031 episodes — not agency centric. An agency could get value out of it, but it wasn't agency centric. So we had hundreds of podcast episodes and several bestselling books. We had a lot of content that was non-agency.
[00:08:58] Stephen: So not that we were like the Titanic or a big ship trying to turn or anything like that. But it was, at the same point, like we had invested a lot of time and effort into building content that I needed to think through like, “Well, how do we change, or how do we switch the ship or change direction without throwing away all those assets?”
[00:09:20] Stephen: So that was one thing to think about. And then also second was the value ladder. So there was a time in the early days of Predictive ROI where our annual contracts were a couple hundred thousand dollars. And my knowledge in the agency space was … I don't know many agencies that are going to pay 200,000 for the work that we're doing.
[00:09:43] Stephen: So we needed to then be able to develop something that we could sell to agencies profitably and be helpful and all the things. But it wasn't like, “Okay, we've got all this content and we have a value ladder. This is designed for somebody else. Let's serve agencies tomorrow.”
[00:10:00] Clate: Yeah. So for the staff, it's really easy to see the pivot that needs to be made because they're not thinking about managing the business through that turn. And so one thing can be the financial aspect of it. But another aspect is the intellectual property that you've built up, the content of all of the things that you feel, as the business owner, that you've got to manage as you make the turn. And so what was it that caused you … It sounds like the partnership with Drew might have been the key thing that sort of said, “Okay, now we're going to go,” because now you're getting content you're creating things that are specific for agencies. Is that the thing that caused you to say, “Okay, we're going to make the shift and just really focus on agencies.”?
[00:10:45] Stephen: Yeah. So in 2017, when profitable podcasting came out and that book did well and then Drew and I taught a workshop in January 2018 …
[00:10:59] Stephen: So just about six or seven months after “Profitable Podcasting” had been released, we taught a workshop in 2018 and we decided, “Let's record the workshop. Let's turn that into maybe a book and see what happens.” So that workshop then morphed into what later became the “Sell with Authority” book.
[00:11:19] Stephen: And it was really through that, over the next couple of years of like … If we're really going to do well with this book — and not as like trying to get on a bestseller list or anything like that but as a biz dev tool — if we're really going to make that book helpful, then we would be even more helpful to the audience by fully leaning into how we could be most helpful to the audience.
[00:11:42] Stephen: And so it made a lot of sense to then retire Onward Nation at 1,031 episodes, start a brand new Sell with Authority Podcast now that we had a book about it, and then just continue that realignment. But I will tell you that when we decided to really pound a stake in the dirt … so we're a team of 27 today.
[00:12:02] Stephen: When we decided to pound a stake in the dirt and make this change, there are three people on our team of 27 who were there when we made that decision. The other 24 are new to the business in the last four or five years.
[00:12:18] Clate: Yeah, that's amazing. And how many people were in the company when you made the change? Was there more than three? I mean, I'm assuming there were more than three, but I'm just trying to get a sense for how the business has grown since you've done that.
[00:12:28] Stephen: Sure. No, no, it's a great question. We had 18 at the time.
[00:12:31] Clate: Okay, great. So you've grown 50% roughly in terms of the employees. How has it changed the business as you made that shift, in terms of your business growth, your business profitability? And I always like to focus on the growth, the profit and the freedom that the business owner feels.
[00:12:51] Clate: So it'd be interesting to understand a little bit about the growth, a little bit about profitability and then just how you feel in terms of running this business versus where you were when it was more general.
[00:13:00] Stephen: I think it just makes everything easy. I shouldn't say “easy.” That's not what I meant to say. It makes everything easier. Because, for example, something as simple as in a business development situation, when you're meeting somebody new, you're sharing stories and developing rapport and context and that kind of stuff. And you no longer have to either sanitize things or tell an agency story so that somebody in manufacturing is going to get it. Right?
[00:13:29] Stephen: For good or for ill, people in certain industries or business owners, leaders and that kind of stuff think they're a unique snowflake. And I get it and understand that. And so we want to be able to tell stories and things that are going to help build trust and authority in certain ways. Sometimes when you have to translate a story from a different industry into somebody else's industry, there's a disconnect. There shouldn't be, but there is.
[00:13:52] Clate: There is. No, human beings are wired to see, “Well, what are other people like me doing?” And so they connect with that. If you're all about agencies, it becomes much easier to get your messages across, to tell the stories. And then in terms of your revenue and profit, what did you see? And you don't have to get too specific, but I just want to get a sense for what you experienced as you specialized.
[00:14:15] Stephen: Yeah, I think we've seen, well, I know we've seen all of those things go up because we're easier to say yes to. We don't have to translate, “Well, but you may have done that for a manufacturer, but I'm an agency. Is that going to work for me?” Yeah, we can tell all the stories. So, on the top line from a business biz dev perspective, we've become easier to say yes to. And then from a profitability perspective, the goal that we're always looking for is a 20% net of gross margin. So 20% of gross profit is what we're shooting for in the bottom line. Do we hit it every single month? No. Did we hit it last month? Yeah. We destroyed it last month.
[00:15:10] Stephen: So as a whole for the year, that's our goal is to hit 20% net of gross profit, what we call agency gross income, which is essentially gross profit on the P&L. And hitting that goal of 20% has become so much easier. Then I know that we're going to chat about some automation stuff because what … So then our goal has not only been to develop a value ladder that agencies would be more apt to say yes to, be aligned in the niche to make yourself easier to say yes to, and then to be able to build a backend system for the delivery of those services that is a bit more automated. Then that adds to profitability, so that's a beautiful thing.
[00:15:50] Clate: I love it. I love it. Well, I just want to kind of put an exclamation point on this part of the conversation because so many businesses can benefit by niching down and getting into a specialty. And it's really interesting how there's a lot of tendencies that will hold people back and they'll say yes.
[00:16:12] Clate: And I try to help people understand when you're getting to that tipping point, where you've identified that there is a niche that you'd like to specialize in, but maybe it's only. 30% of your customer base at this point. But once you've identified it, the way to accelerate it is all new customers you're bringing in are in that niche.
[00:16:33] Clate: And that's a very hard thing at that point for people to do because they're not used to saying no to business. They've been in a place where they'll bring in whatever they can bring in, but like you said, sometimes it's leather boots instead of salmon.
[00:16:49] Clate: And what I try to help people understand is you can only bring in so many customers and so many clients. And each time you say yes to one that's not in your niche, you think that you're just saying no to one, but actually what happens is that one that you could get is so much more valuable for you that it starts to have about a 10 to 1 value discrepancy. If you bring in … If you say yes to the wrong kind of customer instead of to your niche, you're losing the network effect of that person you're bringing in. You're losing the efficiency. You're losing the expertise that you gain when you work with them. You're losing the simplicity, as you described, the ease of it. And you're going to a customer that takes much more effort. I just try to encourage people, once they've identified … And by the way, you can just look at your customers, you can talk to your employees, you can see which ones are the best customers, you can start to identify what your niche is.
[00:17:50] Clate: Sometimes your niche is an industry. Sometimes your niche is something a little bit more psychographic, or a little bit more demographic. It's not necessarily just industry based. It can even be geographic. But once you've identified what that niche is, boy, that's it. You want to start pushing that as hard as you can.
[00:18:07] Clate: I commend you for doing it. I think it's fantastic what you've done over the last six or seven years once you made that shift. And I bet your team is a lot happier and I bet you your freedom has gone up and the clarity of who you are and what you do has really intensified. So congratulations to you.
[00:18:24] Stephen: Thank you. And the other benefit that we've seen out of the niching piece is Eric and I — Eric Jensen, my business partner — we've always wanted to build a machine, a repeatable, predictable machine.
[00:18:45] Clate: It’s in your name Predictive ROI
[00:18:47] Stephen: Well, hello! Right? And that goes all the way back from reading the “E-myth Revisited.” It’s like, “Oh my word,” right? But it's really difficult to build a machine when you're cooking customized prime rib for every single client in service businesses.
[00:19:08] Clate: Yep. That's right.
[00:19:09] Stephen: You can't do it. And so over the last handful of years, that's what we've been able to … I mean, there's still a huge area of it or opportunity for improvement. There's always room for improvement, but we've made some significant advances and simplified the value ladder, making it very valuable to our client with the result outcomes and so forth that are delivered, but then on the back end, the delivery of it is just over and over and over and over again.
[00:19:42] Clate: Okay. We're going to keep this going, but first a quick message for you. Conquer the Chaos listeners, let me talk to you straight for just a minute. You're running your business, and it dominates your mind. It can be very difficult to take a step back and see what's needed to create balance in your business and your personal life, and to create great growth and development and progress in your business and personal life.
[00:20:04] Clate: One of the most powerful ways to gain the perspective that you need is to get away from things and immerse yourself in an environment where you're going to be inspired, where you can see possibilities, where you can create connections, and where you can learn and grow and develop. And I know of no better place for entrepreneurs than Keap’s Let's Grow Summit. For years. We ran this conference as just an amazing mecca for entrepreneurship. And then, truth be told, for a few years, we didn't run it. We got back to it last year, and this year, we're putting it on and it is going to be awesome. I am so excited about this.
[00:20:41] Clate: And I want you as our listeners to not miss out on this event. It's going to be November 20-22 in downtown Phoenix with the main days being the 21 and the 22. You can register for it by going to keap.com/letsgrowsummit. That's https://keap.com/letsgrowsummit. And you can take advantage of our early bird registration pricing, which expires at the end of July.
[00:21:05] Clate: So if you are needing a reflection time, an opportunity to take a step back, gain greater perspective, inspiration, and most of all, see what automation — the fifth key to success — can do for your business, then make sure that you attend the Let's Grow Summit. Keap.com/letsgrowsummit, November 20-22 in Phoenix. I look forward to seeing you there. Alright, now back to our chat.
[00:21:30] Clate: We're talking to Stephen Wessner of Predictive ROI and they help agencies get more of the right customers and sell more of what they do. You guys have done something really cool with your own business around automation. And I want you to share a little bit about that because automation unlocks so much freedom.
[00:21:50] Clate: As I talked about in the book, the definition of success is balanced growth in your business and personal life that produces freedom. I mean, that's what we want as entrepreneurs. We're trying to get to freedom and automation is one of the keys to doing that. And you guys have done that in a really awesome way.
[00:22:06] Clate: And so I'd love it if you just take a minute and share. You've been customers of Keap for 10 years. You've got 27 employees. You specialize in serving agencies and a lot of people think, “Hey, well, I can't take the personal touch out of my business because that's what separates and that's what makes me different as a small business.
[00:22:31] Clate: But I think I’ve done it in a really awesome way. And obviously, we're always trying to teach small businesses how to do this. So I'd love it if you just illustrate a little bit what you guys have done in some of the things you've done to automate your business and find that freedom.
[00:22:47] Stephen: Well, I think we've done it in a few different aspects of the business or a few different areas of the business, but I will tell you again, going back to what I said, there's always room for improvement, even though we've been using the system for 10 years.
[00:23:02] Stephen: You guys are always developing new things and so it's a constant evolution, if that's the right word, here at Predictive ROI of trying to raise the bar. We're always trying to raise the bar with excellence. So one of the most recent things I was sharing with you in the green room before we hit record is you guys have this really cool zap with teamwork.com. And that's our project management system. So our thought was, “Hey, wait a minute. When we have an agency decide to hire us for our grow work — we have a service line that we call grow, where we help them build their email list in the downstream and that kind of stuff — wouldn't it be awesome when Sarah Jones says yes to grow, that we can go into her contact record inside Keap, fill out an internal form that fires off something to teamwork, teamwork gets it creates the project, and then everyone downstream gets assigned. Wouldn't that be awesome?”
[00:24:02] Stephen: And then somebody on our team figured that out. Then he showed it to me the other day. I'm like, “That is magic.”. And so now, it's like everything from the pre- briefing, the internal briefing before the kickoff, the kickoff, all of the assignments downstream, like all of it comes from filling out an internal form in Keap.
[00:24:24] Stephen: Bam, and then everything else is just done and then we can just worry about doing the work. I'm like, that is awesome. Awesome!
[00:24:32] Clate: Yeah. Yeah when something happens then something else needs to occur. This is where … These when-then moments are the cracks in the ship of small business that causes it to leak.
[00:24:48] Clate: And these when-then moments when automated, they cause the business to grow. It's amazing. I say all the time, “It's really hard to grow a small business if you've got a leaky boat where leads and customers are slipping through the cracks in these moments,” but you identified, “Okay, well, when this happens, then we need that to happen.”
[00:25:07] Clate: I love that you use our automation platform to make that happen. And I love that you're calling out integrations with different things. Our customers integrate with lots of different things, but Keap is the automation platform that makes all of that happen.
[00:25:21] Clate: And you're right — we're doing a whole bunch of things. I'm so pumped about the things we're coming out with at our user conference here in a couple of months. We've been teasing a little bit around small business automation because so many people, they do marketing automation, but they're not automating all across their business yet. And it's where there are leads and customers slipping through the cracks all across the business in all of these handoff moments and all these when-then moments. And so I appreciate the way you called that out. One of the things that we see is a lot of times, agencies, which you work with, they'll do the stuff for their clients, but they aren't doing it for themselves.
[00:26:06] Clate: And it's the age-old cobbler's kids who have no shoes and they know it. And I'm wondering … And as you know, for our listeners, we just created a partnership with Predictive ROI, where they're helping more of their agencies use automation so that they can get the benefits that sometimes they're working hard to provide for their clients, but they're not getting in place in their own business.
[00:26:29] Clate: But I'm wondering what you see in that regard with the cobbler's kids, and in particular, when it relates to automation? What would you say to agencies or to others who are listening that maybe they're doing some form of this work for their clients, but they're not yet doing it for themselves.
[00:26:45] Stephen: Yeah. So when we, when we come across … We have two expressions. One is we eat our own dog food. So every March, July, and November, we peel back the curtain here at Predictive ROI. We teach for two days for our clients and some guests on all the mechanics, everything that we do in full transparency — literally the software, the tools, the integrations — everything that we do behind the curtain for clients that pay us to do it.
[00:27:12] Stephen: We teach it for free, those three intensives. So people say, “Well, why in the world do you do that?”. I'm like, “Because nobody hires the out-of-shape personal trainer. They want the proof point. So we're going to show you how we eat our own dog food and how we do it on ourselves as the guinea pigs, and then what we do for our clients so that it's a proof point.”
[00:27:34] Stephen: And so then we have that uncomfortable conversation with agencies sometimes. It's like you're trying to sell social media lead gen or whatever to a prospective client. Don't you think that prospective client wants to know how you're generating leads for your agency using social media?
[00:27:53] Stephen: You have to do that. And if you can't and you're the excuse of “we're cobbler's kids,” that no longer works. It's a horrible excuse. So if you're trying to sell something … So if any agencies are listening right now, if you're trying to sell something as part of biz dev to a prospective client, you better be doing that on behalf of your own agency and be able to prove the results because it is going to be next to impossible to sell that unless you have those data points.
[00:28:27] Clate: Yeah, I love that because not only are you showing what you do, as you describe eating your own dog food, but you're giving people a taste of what they can get when they work with you. When you get right down to it, people want to know you can do what you're saying.
[00:28:46] Clate: When they're in that buying process, you can do it. You can do what you're telling me. What you're selling me, you can do it yourself and they want to see the evidence of that. So when you do that, it just sounds like you do it every three months or so, you're not just opening the kimono to show them what you do internally, but you're actually building the confidence of, “When we work with you, you're going to get this same thing.”
[00:29:10] Clate: I love the fact that you're just wide open with it. So many times people will say, “Oh, well, I gotta hold back these secrets. This is just for paying clients.” And it's like, no, you just share it. You share it with them. They see it. They know, “Oh man, I want to get more of that,” and then the value transfer happens as they become a client. And you're able to work with them and build on the trust that you established in that first instance.
[00:29:36] Stephen: Can I show you something? It might sound a little bit off topic, but it’s one of the credibility enhancers. Okay. This’ll be a blast from the past for you. I promise I have seven years of these.
[00:29:52] Clate: Oh, I love it. That is amazing.
[00:29:58] Stephen: So I have seven years of these. I promise they're all up on my wall. I took this one off when I knew I was going to have the conversation with you. The reason why I'm sharing this with you is because, for me, this was the proof in the pudding.
[00:30:11] Clate: Yeah.
[00:30:12] Stephen: Or proof is the pudding or whatever that expression is. It was like, “Wait a minute, what? Oh my gosh.” And through the elite entrepreneurs group with Brett Gilliland and so forth, when we were members of that group and we got these, I was like, “Are you kidding me? This is like Clate’s and I have the ones that have your handwriting right there on my wall.”
[00:30:31] Stephen: So what that was for me is like, “Okay, so I get it.” Seeing somebody — a polished executive standing on stage, talking about the things, but then being able to go behind the curtain and see the handwritten notes of how you put together the plan. That has so much value, and then I know it's not hyperbole. I know it's not bullets on a slide deck.
[00:30:53] Clate: Love it. And in the background, I see the mountain. Now it looked vaguely familiar to me, but I didn't know why. Now I know why! And so for those of you who are listening, what Stephen's referencing is a program that we created here at Keap that our customers had been asking for.
[00:31:11] Clate: It's called Elite Entrepreneurs. You may have heard me refer to it. It's in the book, especially I talk about it in the leadership key to success. We had been using a methodology that we created from a bunch of different sources to do our strategic and executional planning work and our customers would come into town for our user conference.
[00:31:35] Clate: They'd visit our office and they'd see the artifacts of it around the building. And they'd say, “Hey, why don't you teach this stuff to us?”. And we said, “No, no, no. We're a software company. This is our strategy planning method and how we align the whole company to do what we do.” So, after a couple of years of people asking us to do it, we did it for a workshop.
[00:31:54] Clate: We decided we'd do it once a year. It turned into once a quarter. It started to go more and more. Pretty soon, we decided, “Okay, this is really its own business by itself. We'll spin it out.” So it's called Elite Entrepreneurs and it teaches seven-figure entrepreneurs how to align all the people in their business to achieve the strategy.
[00:32:13] Clate: What Stephen was just holding up was our early one page strategy plans. In the very early years, we initially did the handwritten and then we started making them a little bit more refined. But that was truly a blast from the past and a great illustration of the point that when you share what you use, what you do yourself, it's magnetic. It draws people in. They see it. They want to do it. They see that you're not just, as you said, putting a sheet of paper up on the wall. It's a real thing that you practice every day. So, thanks for sharing that blast from the past and kudos to you for the way that you share that. I think that's an awesome idea for anybody that's listening.
[00:32:54] Clate: Think about how you can take that principle that Stephen just shared. Maybe it's a quarterly workshop like he's doing. Maybe it's a trial program, but it's a way that you're giving people your expertise, bringing them in and helping them see how you do what it is that you're going to do for them. It's particularly applicable for agencies and professional services businesses.
[00:33:17] Clate: So fantastic. Thank you for sharing that Stephen. Well, it's been fun talking about automation. It's been fun talking about … We talked a little bit there about leadership and how you get everybody aligned, which is another one of the keys to success. But I especially appreciated you sharing about your growth and evolution.
[00:33:35] Clate: Congratulations. You got 27 employees. You’re teaching agencies. And not only are you practicing automation but now you're teaching agencies to do automation and giving people an opportunity to practice that and get the benefits of doing it — growth, profit, and freedom that come from automating the entire business.
[00:33:53] Clate: Is there anything else that you wanted to share? Any last thing you wanted to touch on related to the six keys to success before I give you a chance to let people know where they can learn more about you? Any of the other six keys to success you wanted to touch on?
[00:34:07] Stephen: I think maybe just … This is going to sound really weird, maybe a couple of warnings. And it doesn't necessarily relate to the six keys in particular, but it sort of encapsulates or wraps or wraps around that.
[00:34:21] Stephen: And here's what I mean by that. I think it's easy when we're wanting to go down the path of learning something new and we see something and we go, “Well, I know that already.” And I think that that is a trap. So here's my point: When somebody picks up a copy of your book, which I highly encourage them to do because it's awesome …
[00:34:44] Clate: Thank you.
[00:34:45] Stephen: … and they're going through it, one of the things that I love about the chapters are the specific examples. And so these are the warnings that if you come across an idea, either in this book or a different book, the first question I want you to ask yourself is, “You may have heard the idea, but are you doing it?”
[00:35:02] Stephen: That's the litmus test. Like I know the recipe to get six pack abs, but I drink Mountain Dew and eat Pop-Tarts way too much. It's not a mystery. But when you go through the automation chapter, which I love, there's a lot of ideas you might think “Well, I may have heard that before.” Yes, but are you doing it? Are you doing it? And then second, if you are doing it, and this is where Predictive ROI falls in … We have been using it for 10 years. But, could we be doing it better? Could we be doing it with greater excellence? Could we be doing it faster, more innovative? What additional things could we plug into the system to make it raise the bar with excellence?
[00:35:43] Stephen: So first is are you doing it? And if you are, can you be doing it with greater excellence? When I read your automation chapter, again, we're not new to Keap, but there are highlights all over this chapter about things that we can be doing better with greater excellence. It is awesome.
[00:36:04] Clate: I love it. I so appreciate that because automation is a mountain without a top. It's a buffet table. You could never get all of it. There's so much to it. And I love seeing people go deeper and deeper. I was just at a conference last week, and right when I walked into the lobby, a guy came up to me and said, “Hey, you spoke about automation last time you were here. We have been putting automations in place all across our business. And we had your software for five years before that.” And I'm like, “I know! You can do so much with it.” And I appreciated your example: Wherever there's a crack in your business, wherever there's a when-then moment, you can master that moment, and put an automation in place.
[00:36:44] Clate: With the integrations we have, there's so much you can do to take advantage of the automation platform. And I appreciate the way you illustrated that today. So thank you, Stephen, and thank you for the wise warnings: Yes, you know it, but are you doing it? And if you're doing it, could you do it with greater effectiveness, greater results? Where, Stephen … Where can people learn more about you and Predictive ROI?
[00:37:07] Stephen: LinkedIn is a great place. So you can find me on LinkedIn or PredictiveROI.com. That’s our hub for everything. So the podcast is there, all those things. And I'm looking forward to being able to interview you again in the coming weeks. I know we're working out schedules and all of that, so that'll be exciting. And I just can't wait to have your smarts in front of our audience, so thank you very much for today.
[00:37:31] Clate: That sounds great. I hope to see you and some of your team members at our event in November. It'd be amazing to reconnect in person. So, thank you, Stephen, for sharing your wisdom with us. It’s much appreciated. We'll have the links in the show notes, and we appreciate you being a great example of eating your own dog food, practicing automation, teaching it to others, and helping people to get the benefits so they can conquer the chaos. This has been another episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast. Thank you for listening, and until next time, keep growing.