#17: Your Business GAMEplan: Goals, Actions, Metrics, Execution

Summary

Build Your Business Podcast: Episode #17 Summary

Title: Your Business GAMEplan: Goals, Actions, Metrics, Execution
Release Date: February 28, 2025
Hosts: Matt Reynolds & Chris Reynolds
Network: Barbell Logic, The Radcast Network

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Introduction

In Episode #17 of the Build Your Business: From Fear to Freedom podcast, hosts Matt and Chris Reynolds delve into creating an effective GAMEplan—an acronym for Goals, Actions, Metrics, and Execution—to strategically grow and manage business operations. This episode provides listeners with actionable insights on setting clear objectives, defining measurable actions, and executing plans to achieve sustainable business growth.

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Understanding GAMEplan: From OKRs to GAMEplan

The duo begins by exploring the origins of their GAMEplan framework, which is an adaptation of the widely recognized OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

• Background on OKRs:

  • Matt shares, "The original concept of this is called OKRs, Objectives and Key Results... [Episode #21]" (07:44).
  • They reference influential figures like John Doerr and Andy Grove, emphasizing the robustness of the OKR system.

• Transition to GAMEplan:

  • "Five, six years ago now was we modified OKRs... we made minor modifications so that the staff of my team, and now your team, can more easily understand exactly what they're doing." (15:09)
  • GAMEplan simplifies OKRs by making terminology more accessible and reducing complexity.

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Real-Time GAMEplan Development for Marketing and Sales

Matt and Chris walk listeners through a practical application of the GAMEplan by developing a strategy for Chris's company, Certain—a B2B service-oriented business.

1. Setting the Primary Goal:

   • Goal Identification:
     • Matt proposes, "Define the marketing and sales pipeline to double the reach, leads, conversions, and revenue for your company." (38:22)
     • Chris concurs, "Yeah, that's spot on." (39:30)

2. Defining Actions:

   • Action 1: Content Creation and Distribution

     • "Build the content and define the channels... primarily LinkedIn with secondary platforms of X and YouTube." (42:42)
     • Notable Quote: "Did I make a piece of content every day and put it out?" (49:16)

   • Action 2: Lead Conversion Mechanisms

     • Transitioning from content reach to qualified leads through strategies like newsletters and premium giveaways.
     • Matt outlines, "Action two after the top of the funnel piece... fully activated utilizing certain services." (62:23)

   • Action 3: Nurturing Leads to Conversion

     • Implementing sales teams and personalized outreach to convert nurtured leads into paying customers.
     • "How do I nurture that lead? You're probably gonna have to expand your team..." (61:57)

3. Establishing Metrics:

   • Reach: Number of people exposed to the content.
   • Qualified Leads: Percentage of reach turning into potential customers.
   • Conversion Rate: Percentage of qualified leads converting into paying clients.
   • Example Metric: "If the total reach is 50,000, then the qualified leads are 10,000." (62:23)

4. Execution Plan:

   • Detailed SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for each action to ensure accountability and progress tracking.
   • Assigning ownership of specific tasks to team members to facilitate execution.

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Leading vs. Lagging Indicators

A significant part of the discussion centers around distinguishing between leading and lagging indicators to better manage and predict business performance.

• Leading Indicators:

  • "Actions that are leading indicators... like making content." (69:22)
  • These are controllable activities that drive future results.

• Lagging Indicators:

  • "I can't force X amount of revenue to come through the door." (69:22)
  • These reflect the outcomes of past actions and are less controllable.

Matt emphasizes the importance of focusing on leading indicators to predict and influence future business success effectively.

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Rolling Forecast and Dynamic Target Setting

The hosts discuss implementing a rolling forecast system to continuously align business actions with real-time performance.

• Implementation:

  • "We have a real-time rolling forecast where our expected ROI is compared against actual ROI." (70:07)
  • Adjusting targets based on monthly performance to stay aligned with business realities.

• Impact:

  • Enables quick pivoting of strategies, such as reallocating budget from underperforming channels to those with higher ROI.
  • "That's alignment with reality, basically." (72:58)

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Leveraging Strengths to Address Weaknesses

Recognizing Certain's strong activation and retention rates, Matt suggests leveraging these strengths to bolster their weaker acquisition strategies through referral programs.

• Referral Strategy:
  • "Leverage current clients who are happy to promote in exchange for discounts or free services." (65:43)
  • Utilizing satisfied customers to generate new leads organically.

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Conclusion and Recommendations

Matt and Chris conclude the episode by reiterating the importance of a well-structured GAMEplan in achieving business growth. They encourage listeners to:

• Identify and Prioritize Goals: Focus on a limited number of high-impact objectives.
• Define Clear Actions: Break down goals into actionable steps with measurable outcomes.
• Monitor Metrics: Use leading indicators to guide execution and adjust based on performance.
• Execute Systematically: Implement detailed SOPs to ensure consistent progress towards goals.

Recommended Resources:

• Undoing Urgency by Matt Reynolds
• High Output Management by Andy Grove
• Measure What Matters by John Doerr
• Software as a Science by Dan Martell

Notable Quote:

• Matt Reynolds: “Goals at the top, actions to complete the goals right underneath them. No more than three or four.” (69:03)

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Takeaways

• Simplify Strategic Planning: Adapt existing frameworks like OKRs into more accessible formats like GAMEplan.
• Focus on Leading Indicators: Prioritize controllable actions that drive desired outcomes.
• Dynamic Strategy Adjustment: Utilize rolling forecasts to stay agile and aligned with business performance.
• Leverage Strengths for Growth: Use strong areas, such as customer retention, to enhance weaker aspects like lead acquisition.

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For more insights and actionable business strategies, tune in to future episodes of the Build Your Business podcast.

Transcript

[Matt Reynolds]

Hey, I hope you get a ton of value out of this podcast. Wanted to let you all know that as Chris and I talk through in this podcast as you'll hear the process of building the game plan. If you want some excellent notes and printable guides to build your own game plan, you can go to Turnkey Coach gameplan. That's turnkey. All one word. T, U, R, N, K E, Y dot coach. That will lead you to both some example game plans for Chris and I as well as some blank game plans that you can print out and you can fill them out yourself so that you can work through that as you listen to the podcast. So again, Turnkey coach slash game plan for everything. You need some free resources there for you to be able to build out your game plan for your business. And again, hope you enjoy the podcast this week.

[Chris Reynolds]

You're listening to the build you'd business podcast powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds.

[Matt Reynolds]

Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together. Welcome to the build your business podcast. I'm your host, Matt Reynolds, co host here with my brother Chris.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yo, yo, how's it going?

[Matt Reynolds]

So I was telling you, by the time this podcast comes out, this will be long past as we're trying to get a few more in the can. So we don't have what happened a few weeks ago where we couldn't get podcasts out, but we are projected to get 16 inches of snow in southwest Missouri, in the Ozarks, which I have never seen before. Here I was trying to think about like the most snow I've ever seen. When we first got our initial military contract, we went to Ogden, Utah and I had seven or eight staff members. And so of course you want to put everybody in their own bedroom. You don't want executives to share bedrooms. So we ended up staying about 30 minutes, 30 miles, I don't know, north of Ogden in the mountains in kind of a ski town where the houses were kind of ski lodge houses. And I think there was probably two and a half to three feet of snow, which the. The driveway was like done a snowblower or something on it.

[Chris Reynolds]

Right.

[Matt Reynolds]

And so you could literally see how.

[Chris Reynolds]

Much of the snowball there's like a wall of snow.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah. So you're in Boston and we started to talk and I was like, let's just record. So this is very uncommon for us. We haven't had 12 inches of snow in The Ozarks in well over a decade.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

And that's kind of the low end right now. So it seems like that's what we're going to have.

[Chris Reynolds]

Do you remember what the last one was?

[Matt Reynolds]

Well, I remember when we were kids and we went to Grandpa and Grandma's house.

[Chris Reynolds]

No, man. This is better than that. This is a story about you and me.

[Matt Reynolds]

So, like, oh, for the finals at Missouri State. Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Reynolds]

How old was The Nova?

[Matt Reynolds]

An 80, 86 Chevy Nova.

[Chris Reynolds]

86 Chevy Nova. It was my Nova after. It was the family's Nova. You may have had it at some point.

[Matt Reynolds]

I did have.

[Chris Reynolds]

I had.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Chris Reynolds]

And it ended up dying on me. But that thing thought it was a four wheel drive truck and it was like, we're just doing this. So we get to Missouri State for our finals and we get there and they get canceled.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah, Yeah. I think I took one and then they canceled school.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, I got one in. I think I got one in.

[Matt Reynolds]

So we're super excited. A lot of people probably aren't. We brought in all the firewood. I got like stacks of firewood inside instead of outside. Rachel bought all the groceries, including. And she wants to go like. She bought, like, biscuits and gravy type. Oh, yeah, like that. Like, we're gonna make homemade biscuits. Comfort food.

[Chris Reynolds]

You get a stew going, baby.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah, stew, chili. That's exactly what we got. So last week we talked about crisis mode, and that was sort of an episode that was inserted because you had been coming out of crisis mode. I'd been sick. But in the week leading up to that, we kind of teased out systems and standard operating procedures and talking about how we use the game plan, which is really the main focus of my book, Undoing Urgency. And so we want to walk through the game plan. If you're really interested in this. There are. So you and I, the way we got to this podcast. So I had a podcast since 2017 called the Barbell Logic Podcast. If you're into barbells and strength training, there are, I don't know, 600 podcasts there. And you and I started to do a series on that podcast called the Principle Series. And in that series, we give the backstory of what is now the game plan, which stands for goals, actions, metrics, and execution. You've heard that before on this podcast. So if you want to hear the backstory of that, which is the original concept of this is called okrs, Objectives and Key Results, which we'll talk about probably a little bit today. That's episode 21. Of the Legacy episodes of this podcast. So there are. What we did was we took all of the legacy episodes that applied to business. We pulled them from the Barbalogic feed, We put them in the build your business feed. And so there's a pretty good history of legacy podcasts. And if you want to hear, Chris and I, a few years ago, you know, certainly, you know, five, six years ago, whatever, before we had, you know, we've grown a lot since then, but if you want to hear some of those things. So the backstory on okrs is episode 21 of the Legacy episodes, and the first game plan episode then is episode 22. So we kind of did a back to back. Here's the history of the game plan originally okrs. We'll explain some of that background. But if you want to look at that, that's a great place to go. And so that led to me and my team really building out the game plan. And I'll talk about why we use the game plan and not specifically okrs. As a matter of fact, when we do military contracts and we propose military contracts, they actually want us to list the OKRs. Yeah, the objectives and the key results, which is the objectives are like the goals, and the key results are like the actions. It's a widely known nomenclature among business owners. What OKR means, we just feel like, and I want to be careful with this because the people that invented OKRs, I would put at the highest of pedestals of business owners and managers and whatnot. People like John Doerr and Andy Grove and, you know, intel and. And the original Traitorous 8 and, and all those. All those guys, if you're interested in the history of technology, those guys are there. I certainly wouldn't put myself there. But one thing I noticed is that in the standard nomenclature, it's hard to get your staff to understand, okay, what is an objective, and even more painfully, what is a KR? What is a key result? And so episode 21 and 22 on this podcast in the legacy feed is a great place to get some background information on this. And so let's start there. And you were really the one that turned me onto this, to this concept of what was known as okrs.

[Unknown]

And.

[Matt Reynolds]

And what we now call the game plan.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, so the reason that I got into it was our company. My first company, name of that company is Bright Core, by the way. That company had reached a level of scale that I could no longer figure out how to manage on sort of a direct personal relationship.

[Unknown]

You know, you.

[Chris Reynolds]

You start with this thing where essentially you surround people by yourself in concentric circles. So you've got like your own circle around you, which is maybe your leadership team, and then circle around them and your leadership team talks to those people. And you're trying to sort of build a company out from your principles out. And the reality is that works pretty well. That actually is very efficient. At a very early phase, when you have a very, very small company, that can be pretty efficient.

[Matt Reynolds]

And especially. And one of the things I think makes us different is that also when you're in an HQ where everyone is in the same building.

[Chris Reynolds]

Correct? Yeah. So at that phase of our company's history, we were frequently in the same space. We were already transitioning to fully remote, but it was. And maybe that was part of it as well, that in fully remote, it was harder to keep everybody aligned to what we were trying to do. So, you know, I was already. I had. I was a student of business and I wanted to read all the books. And so I had read Andy Grove and I had read. And then John Doerr's book came out, and I read Measure what Matters, and I was like, this is really good. Like, I. I can tell that in principle, this is good. What happened was I talked to my business partner, who's our cousin, about this as well, and our brains went a little crazy with it. In fact, we sort of took it to a level that I think was maybe too far, where you try to align, you try to sort of create an almost like a matrix of these things, and they just get really, really complicated. The part of one principle you've heard us talk about a lot, and I think it's an important one, is that you just want to keep everything as simple as possible. Like, it's too hard to keep everything in your head. So I think for most companies, unless you're really, really big. Unless you're really big, I think for most people, a sort of single layer of okrs is pretty good. Slash game plan initiatives. I think that's all you really need to do. You don't really need to go all. You don't need to keep cascading that down further and further and further and further into the organization. You can go a little bit further, but you just. You want to be careful about taking it too. But you and I talked about it and I said, you know, one of the things that our staff at the time struggled with was OKR is three letters.

[Matt Reynolds]

But it's two things.

[Chris Reynolds]

It's three letters and two things.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yep.

[Chris Reynolds]

I actually think that is the fundamental marketing problem with okrs. I think it's that simple. I think it's just not that great a name.

[Matt Reynolds]

So Andy Grove is known as the best people manager of all time. If you ask people in the tech world, he would definitely be the winner. Like there may be some other ones that get votes, but he is going to be far and away. So Andy Grove, Hungarian born, immigrant, I don't know, 50, 60% deaf. So he had kind of an interesting speech impediment, but he left with Bob Noyce, who was part of the Traitorous Eight in Silicon Valley. The reason it's called Silicon Valley is because these guys are the guys that figured out the Silicon Microchip.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, pause if you are interested in that. The underpinnings of that is one of the best books that's ever been written and it's called the Idea Factory and it's about Bell Labs and it from like 2019, 24 until about 1980 something. It is so good. Highly recommend. Okay, proceed.

[Matt Reynolds]

Now the other thing, if you want a quicker overview of this, there is a documentary that's been on Netflix for years. I'm sure you can get it on prime if you need to. It's called Something Ventured, which is the history of venture capital. And because these guys are the original, there was no such thing as venture capital. And these eight engineers, Fairchild left and started their own business and they started it together. And as all eight guys left and so anyway, there's lots of story behind that, won't go into detail. So Bob Noyce, who was sort of the biggest alpha male of the Traitorous Eight, who left Fairchild and moved on, he brought this, his protege, which is Andy Grove, and they started Intel. So the business that you know as intel and I again, Intel's gone through certainly some not great times over the past decade or so. But if you think back to the 90s and early 2000s, that was the Pentium chip like those, that's all we used was. Intel was the business.

[Chris Reynolds]

It's the foundation of everything computer.

[Matt Reynolds]

Correct. And so Andy Grove eventually becomes CEO of Intel and he has this, he has a book called High Output Management, which is more about managing people and business and rolling forecasts and things like that. I would say if you're an up and coming business owner, it's probably a little bit beyond you at this point. If you are a, you know, 2, 3, 4, $5 million in annual revenue company, this is probably about the right time to read that sort of book. And then Andy Grove had a protege his name was John Doerr, D O.

[Chris Reynolds]

E R R I think so.

[Matt Reynolds]

And he was really then the mentor for Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Google. He worked with Amazon, he worked with Apple and Steve Jobs. And he took what he learned from Andy Grove. This method of okrs of objectives, which are the goals and key results, which are the actions that you can answer yes or no to. Again, we'll dive in. And he wrote a book probably 10 years ago now called Measure what Matters. And then. And again, I certainly don't want to put myself in the family tree then. I remember you were telling me about this book. I remember we went out to Colorado for vacation, stayed in our Aunt Nicole's kind of ski lodge, home for 10 days or so. And I just devoured this book and wrote OKRs for Barbell Logic for my company. And it went very, very well with the exception of the vernacular.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, the vernaculars gets everybody.

[Matt Reynolds]

That's exactly right. So that's the background. And again, you can hear more about this in episode 21 and 22 in our legacy episodes. But we want to then focus on what we came up with in I think 2019 or 2020. So five, six years ago now was we modified okrs objectives and key results into the game plan. I do a deep dive into it in undoing urgency in my book published by Forbes this past year. So I want the listeners to understand this isn't something that we pulled out of thin air, but that we learn and adapted from other highly successful investors, operators, venture capitalists, et cetera. And all we did with the game plan is we made minor modifications so that the staff of my team, and now your team and lots of other teams can more easily understand exactly what they're doing.

[Chris Reynolds]

That's right.

[Matt Reynolds]

So, okay, so that's the game plan. So I just got back from Washington State where I met with. Because my team is fully online, as is yours, fully remote, we do at least two in person weeks with the executives where we set the game plan or the strat, what we often call strategy deployment. For all of 2025, we were in Washington state and we just worked for the entire week setting like here's where we're going in 2025. And so this is fresh in my mind. I'll share some of that. What we're doing. I won't go into super detail because I don't think it transfers as well to the listeners. But same thing for you. You're kind of working through this now. Your business exploded last year in 2024. You have a growing staff of remote devs and trying to figure out how do you grow this company? And so one of the things we wanted to do is kind of walk through what that might look like in real time as you try to dive into the goals, actions, metrics, execution for a piece of your business, probably not the entire business. And so.

[Chris Reynolds]

That's exactly right. Yep. So, I mean, I feel like one of the things that we do and participate in this kind of thing for a lot of our clients, because we are proxy very frequently. I mean, I'm a proxy proxy CTO for many, many different companies. And so there's part of that. But then doing it ourselves is sort of. Tends to be on the back burner, which is. Which is not great. We need to do better at it. So we're. Today, we're gonna. You're gonna help me. You're gonna. We're gonna use a part of my business which is specifically, I think, something that every. That will apply to everybody, and that is our marketing and sales function within the organization. Yep, we're gonna work on that. We're gonna sort of game plan that out. You're the coach, I'm the student. And let's just go through this process for what this would look like for this little segment of the business and for listeners. It'll be very similar for you to go through the same kind of process.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

Very quickly, in 60 seconds or less. Let me explain. We've talked about it some. The game plan, what you want to do when you're a founder or owner of a business is identify the most important goals. So, and when I say the most important goals, I'm talking about like, three is perfect, four is okay, five is too much. Probably the most important goals for the business to achieve this year, annually. And then on average, you'll have about three actions, which, if you complete the action. So the actions are, should be able to be answered yes or no. Did I do this or did I not? And if you did all of the actions and your hypothesis was correct, and this is really just the scientific method applied to business, then you will complete the goal, and then the actions beyond that become. Okay, how do we measure that we're moving in the right direction? Which are the metrics? That's the M in game plan. So goals, actions, metrics. How do we measure that we're actually doing the thing we said we're going to do. Are we moving in the right direction? Is the ship steered the correct way? Do we need to move 5 or 10 degrees and then the execution is actually what we talked about two weeks ago is the systems and SOPs, the day to day checklist, who owns it, due dates, things like that. So each one basically supports the one before it. So you have a major goal for the company or three whatever and you have say three actions that if complete, they will complete the goal. You have the metrics to measure and there are metrics we divide into two separate pieces by time. So there are metrics that are what we call TTIs or targets to improve. So kind of here's where we are today, but here's where we want to be. And then there's KPIs which again very corporate vernacular which are key performance indicators, which are a snapshot of where you are today. So the goal is to get here with the tti. The target to improve the KPI is where are we today in relationship, like what's the delta between today and where we want to go? And then the execution is just the step by step process of how to complete an action. And often those actions will actually be identified. So the goals are laid out in priority order. What is the thing? And this is where we bring in like minimum effective dose. What's the thing that's like uses the least resource that will move the needle the most. Actions are often actually put in chronological order because you have to complete action one before you move to action two and so on and so forth. And of course the metrics then to measure that and then the execution. So how do I get the execution plan to complete action one so I can check off that action and then move on to action two with the same thing. And then what are the metrics, what are the executions? So that is the basic layout of the game plan again laid out in undoing urgency in my book. And so okay, let's do this in real time. And we haven't tested this. I don't have any idea what Chris is going to throw at me. So I certainly don't know that I'll do this perfectly at all. Actually I definitely won't. But okay, so you were talking about you've got this company certain, which is a team of developers, you solve problems for other companies. You are a B2B business business to business. So you're not dealing with end user clients, you're dealing with businesses. And figuring out marketing, a B2C marketing plan is actually much easier. So if you're, if you're dealing with the end user, this is where like social media is huge and you know, for Barbelogic online coaching, which is our B2C company, we can advertise, you know, the quality of our coaches, the service, the average compliance or consistency of our clients, the percentage of clients who reach their goals, all those sort of things kind of traditional, you know, even think all the way up to like a business like a Coca Cola. Coca Cola is advertising to the person who's drinking the Coca Cola. They're not really. I'm sure they do, but we don't see this. They're not really advertising to the restaurant or the gas station or the grocery store who's selling the Coca Cola. Now they, I'm sure, again, I'm sure they do. We just don't see that. So for you, as you start to think about marketing, what are the things you're thinking about as major goals for marketing in a B2B business as opposed to a B2C business?

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, one other important factor because I'm sure some of our audience is actually aspiring entrepreneurs, meaning maybe haven't started yet and are still kind of trying to think about what they're going to do. The difference between B2C and B2B is really, really, really important. And at an early level you want to sort of decide which direction you're more likely tuned for. B2B businesses are generally easier as businesses. Sure, B2C are harder as businesses because they are. They require an exceptional go to market strategy, sort of meaning that you've got to find a way to get in front of enough people that you can actually have the appeal that you need to have and make the sales and do all those things. And it's a very crowded market in general.

[Matt Reynolds]

It relies on extremely high quantity.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, extremely high quantity. Low price. High quantity.

[Matt Reynolds]

That's right. And so it doesn't always have to be low price, but that's also a hurdle. If not so in B2B. If you think about it for like for us, we started as a B2C company for five years. We still are, but we added the B2B piece. So both in the private sector where we are licensing out turnkey coach to other coaches to license out our software for online coaching, but also military. So. And I want to focus on military for a second. So if we are a. I won't say exactly where we are, but just for round numbers, if we're doing $5 million a year in top line revenue and a military contract is 1.25 or $1.92 billion for the contract, that's a massive. You close one client you're improving the revenue of your company, say 33 to 40%.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

One of the things that happens with B2B is that every client's lifetime value, if done well, is enormous compared to the B2C. And the other kind of crossover here is with turnkey coach licensing out the software to other coaches. That is actually a B to B to C company. So we are advertising to coaches to license out the software, but then the coaches, we don't make money unless coaches get their clients on their roster and actually work with them. So you are a true B2B business, true B2B.

[Chris Reynolds]

Straight up.

[Matt Reynolds]

We are a client, I would imagine, one of the bigger clients that you have. And so how do you think about marketing to B2B? Yeah, for companies like mine who started as a. Actually our company's probably a good one to use. We're a service oriented company, we're people oriented. We don't have a big dev team, we don't have all the knowledge that we need. And that's not to. If you're listening to this from Barbelogic, we've got, still got a great dev team and a project manager, product manager, COO with Andrew Jackson, all the stuff that he does. But the flagship product has been the B2C product. But the growth in the company is in the B2B product. So we bring on a company like yours to help us grow in our tech stack development software, et cetera. So, okay, I'll turn it over to you.

[Chris Reynolds]

So when we think about like how, how do we market the company? I think one of the first things that I think about is how to make it clear to people what it is that we do. Right. So this is going to be the case I think for any services company that's out there and there's going to be a lot of you because I think that's a pretty common area to be in. When you think about like we need engineers or we need people that know, you know, all the technical ins and outs of, of various things. There's a sort of a spectrum of that You've got your, you know, outsourced offshore companies with 500,000 programmers in India, let's say. And that's like a low cost leader. These people are, you tell them exactly what to do, they're going to do exactly what you tell them to do, whether it's the right thing or not. You know, that, that sort of thing. We are nothing like that at all. We're not even in that camp.

[Matt Reynolds]

Well, on that dev Scale. If you're thinking about a bell curve, these are the companies even in the B2B industry. High quantity, middle of the bell curve. These are average developers, which is still fine for a lot of people. You've tried to set your vision and standards for your company far to the.

[Chris Reynolds]

Right, so far, as far as it can be. The way that I describe us internally, frequently is that we're SEAL Team 6 of that world. When the worst possible thing in your world can happen when it comes to engineering and tech, and you don't know, maybe we have companies that'll frequently hit a scale problem while they're growing.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Chris Reynolds]

So basically, this is the end of their company if they can't figure out how to scale their application. And usually, you know, we talked last week about this, but time is of the essence. You got 24 hours, and it's ticking, and you got to figure out how to do it. We're the guys you call. We're the A team.

[Matt Reynolds]

If it breaks, you're in trouble.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

You're the company you call if your company is going to break in scale, in tech, in development, et cetera. And you guys go in, you're. Again, you're like, you talked about this last week. You're like the wolf on Pulp Fiction. You guys go in quickly, quietly, work around the clock if necessary, fix the problem, solve the problem so that the company can continue to scale and grow. And you're always sort of behind the curtain, behind the scene. You don't take credit for the thing. It's just like, this is something that even the client might not even notice occurred, but that you fix the break, you fix the problem.

[Chris Reynolds]

That's what we do. That's the business. And so part of the difficulty that we have on the marketing standpoint is we can't tell customer stories. Right. Like, think about that.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah, sure.

[Chris Reynolds]

I cannot tell a customer story.

[Matt Reynolds]

Private. Right.

[Chris Reynolds]

I can tell generic versions of the customer story. And so there's a big portion of that. That's what we do. So from a marketing standpoint, the first thing is you have to make sure that you've communicated in a way that people will believe and understand. It's one thing to say, we're SEAL Team 6 of this, you know, of this world.

[Matt Reynolds]

Those are just words.

[Chris Reynolds]

Those are words.

[Matt Reynolds]

Right.

[Chris Reynolds]

It's another thing for people to believe it. Right. And so the people that we. That we work with, I think, you know, one of our biggest strategy points here is to prove that we are the experts in the space. And part of the Reason that I have content on LinkedIn. Part of the reason that I have, you know, that we do this podcast and all those things. There is sort of a business aspect. Aspect to that which is helping people understand that we have a tremendous amount of expertise in this space.

[Matt Reynolds]

Sure.

[Chris Reynolds]

And that if that's what they're looking for, this is a good place to go. So part of the strategy is that I've said before that I'm a huge fan of the founder led strategy playbook. So you basically are trying to do founder brand strategy. That idea is the founder needs to talk a lot about what's going on. It's complicated in my situation because again, everything that I do is secret. So I have to be very, very careful. Some of the things that I do that are secret are for entities that are also secret. And so we've got to be very, very careful. But, but the idea is still the same. Right. We need to make sure that we get, that we get out there for a large number of, of our audience. We are target. Our goals in the space are to sort of think about how do we fill up our sales pipeline. There is for everyone that's listening, there's basically never like it's never a bad problem to be so full on your sales pipeline that you can't fulfill it.

[Unknown]

Sure.

[Chris Reynolds]

If you are fulfillment constrained, there are all sorts of other things that you can do to solve for the problem. But if you're fulfillment constrained and you've got a full pipeline, you can literally just decide which customers are best for you and you tell the other ones like you're going to have to wait.

[Matt Reynolds]

Right. So which is fine. Though I will say that obviously everyone who's a business owner wants demand to outstrip supply. That's a great problem to have.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

However, turning down money unless they're, if they're a bad customer, it's different. But if they're, if they're a good, what is potentially a good customer? We don't, we don't turn down customers.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Matt Reynolds]

We figure out how to meet the demand with the supply. So the first thing is we get into this is as we think about marketing goals, the first thing I would ask you is, is our demand and supply, are they on the same pace? Demand is just about right for the supply you have. Is demand outstripping supply so you don't have enough supply or is demand not enough and you need more demand because you have too much supply? That would be the first thing I would go to when I'm thinking about the Game plan is like, where would you identify like between those three? Like, are they, is supply too much, is demand too much or are they pretty well equal?

[Chris Reynolds]

I would say at this moment they are pretty well equal.

[Unknown]

Okay.

[Chris Reynolds]

The demand, they always go a little bit back and forth.

[Matt Reynolds]

Sure.

[Chris Reynolds]

When I focus my attention on the demand side, the demand gets higher than the supply. When the demand gets to a certain level and I focus on the supply side, we get plenty of supply through the door and we're able to sort of fulfill. And that's actually what we think of as. And I actually think this is very healthy. We have a stair stepped growth pattern.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Chris Reynolds]

I don't like.

[Matt Reynolds]

It's not linear.

[Chris Reynolds]

I don't. It's not linear and it's not a smooth curve.

[Matt Reynolds]

Right.

[Chris Reynolds]

I like the idea that you at each step of that staircase that you learn stuff and you make adjustments and sort of figure out where you're going. You also get a chance to like catch your breath. Oh, this is a new level of revenue. This is a new level of intensity. I've got to get different players for different reasons. So what I would say is right now it is fairly equal. Like anyone, you know, I want that pipeline to be as full as possible. I want to have, you know, a wait list that's long enough that I can select the ideal target customer for us. And yeah, so that's my primary target in this space.

[Matt Reynolds]

That step sort of function is that you basically grow to the point that you have pain points.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

And things start to hurt and start to break or people start to work too much or whatever. And then you make another, you make a step which is still, I would argue is a minimum effective dose step to higher than more supply. Or how do we scale? And then it jumps immediately. Like you immediately see a, whatever $50,000 a month jump in revenue.

[Chris Reynolds]

And we've literally never seen our revenue has never made the other turn. So essentially as we've been growing, our, our growth pattern has been such that we have grown like crazy. But the reason we've grown like crazy is because the pattern, I think the pattern that most people see is you go out and you get certain kind of developers or whatever and you can kind of slowly scale linearly for us. It has been especially, I think, as AI has become a bigger and bigger deal. What you're looking for are people that are absolutely phenomenal with even those tools that have made that switch in this tiny short period, period of time. In general, you're talking about people that have such a deep background in what we're doing that we know how to navigate the complexity of the tech ecosystem, space for any company. And it doesn't take us long normally to get a good sense of the business and then figure out, you know, how do. How are we going to leverage technology in the best possible way to help them. But in order to do that, well, I gotta, I have to be in front of a lot of people that, you know, will listen to this podcast, we'll listen to, you know, whatever. It's part of, sort of part of the strategy to go, oh, this is perfect. This is exactly what we're looking for. We're looking for somebody to do this thing. Now, part of the problem that I've sort of thought through here is, you know, there's probably a target. There's a couple of goals that we could talk about. Like I think revenue is always a goal of some kind, right. I think revenue should always be a goal. And so we'll use theoretical numbers here. I want it to apply as well as possible to the audience.

[Matt Reynolds]

So hold on, let me apologize really quick because this is exactly where I was going to go. So now we're going to go. So we have a basic understanding of your business. Now we're going to build out a game plan specifically for the marketing and sales piece. Knowing that you would probably have, you know, I don't know, three, like two other goals maybe on top of this. So this is just one. This isn't necessarily the most important goal. Maybe it is, right? So as you identify the goals for the company, you definitely put those in priority.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Matt Reynolds]

So maybe this is number one, maybe it's number three. We won't dive into that in this episode. So in thinking about scaling growth, it's marketing, sales, conversions, et cetera, how would you. Could you fairly easily identify what is the primary goal you're trying to achieve in the marketing world for your company? Certain S u r T o n. What is the primary goal there?

[Chris Reynolds]

Right. So I think, and, and this has always been difficult for me. I, I'm a later to the marketing and sales game. Well, not really sales. I've done sales my whole life, but marketing a bit. I kind of got to tie these together. So I think the end goal would be the revenue number. And we'll use as an example for people. I think it's a useful number for, for anybody can basically get their head around it. We'll say, let's say that the Target is, is $5 million of revenue. Okay. So if we said annually 5 million of revenue annually.

[Matt Reynolds]

Right.

[Chris Reynolds]

So if that's, if that's the goal, then I think the question that has to be answered is how much marketing pipeline is needed in order to deliver on that revenue.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

Right.

[Chris Reynolds]

And so the marketing pipeline has to be for us. We're not. We don't have any outbound motion. And what that means is we have zero members of staff and zero effort being placed on trying to go out and find customers. We do everything that we do. We do as inbound.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Chris Reynolds]

And. And I like that, especially early on. It also fits my personality well. I'm not a big. Like, I don't go out and do the hard sell on people. Like, it's not, it's not my style.

[Matt Reynolds]

Cold, cold emails, cold calls, reaching out, whatever. Right.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yeah.

[Chris Reynolds]

So I think it makes more sense for us to say, like, what things can we. Can we do in. Here's the other part about inbound, that's hard. And I think listeners will appreciate this. It feels, it can feel like you don't have control over inbound. It's like you're waiting on the phone.

[Matt Reynolds]

To ring right inbound.

[Chris Reynolds]

And so the thing that you have to do is what thing do you have that is in your control? And the thing that we have that is in our control is how much content do we put out there? That's the thing. Right.

[Matt Reynolds]

Okay.

[Chris Reynolds]

Because the more content that we put out, that's completely in our control. We can put content out and we can see what comes back in to the pipeline.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Chris Reynolds]

And so that is an action that we can take that would help sort of support it. Now, we haven't yet talked about how much pipeline do we want. So part of that is, all right, if you want to make 5 million revenue in a year, your pipeline probably needs to be. It kind of depends on market dynamics, but let's just say for good, for good measure that the number there needs to be about 10x. So about 50 million of pipeline is what you're looking for. Again, it's completely theoretical number, and that's top of funnel.

[Matt Reynolds]

Right.

[Chris Reynolds]

So top of funnel.

[Matt Reynolds]

I'm not going to ask you what your revenue is. Now for easy math and understanding, let's say you're a 2.5 million company now and you want to go to 5. So you want to double, let's say just again for easy math and understanding. So the goal here is to define your marketing and sales pipeline to dramatically expand reach or to 2x, let's say reach, leads, conversion and revenue. So the goal that I would lay out there is something like that. So define or you know, build the systems and SOPs of your sales pipeline. Primary goal for marketing to expand or to 2x reach leads, conversions and revenue. That would be the primary goal.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

And so that means at every one of the things you would need to do, this could be an action, is to identify the life cycle of the customer. So how do you double the reach, I. E. How do you double the top of the funnel? How do you double the lead? How do you double the nurtured leads? How do you double the conversions? How do you double the revenue? And then I'm gonna go to the next, I'm gonna stop there. Because it doesn't stop there with any company. And a lot of times people think this way. They're like, if I could just get this many signups. But the key there is actually also then I'll just tease this out to dramatically reduce churn, to get activation, to get buy in, to get expansion, to increase lifetime value. We'll get their next. So does that sound fairly close to what the goal would be for marketing to double to build out or define the marketing sales pipeline to double the reach leads, conversions and revenue for your company?

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, that's spot on.

[Matt Reynolds]

Okay, so that's the goal. Now then we take the goal and we say, okay, now what actions do I have to put in place to make sure that I do that right? And so this is where I think this actually works perfectly with the way we set this up. Actions that are not priority driven, they are chronologically driven. So again, I may be oversimplifying, but I would start with how do I get 2x or again 10x of the conversions? How do I get that number in the top of the funnel, the reach. So what is the action to get as many people as possible? Say if you're going to convert 10% of them, how do I get as many people as possible into the top of the funnel? That's the question, that's not the action. So that's right. What do you think are the big needle movers for getting people into the top of the funnel?

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, there's no question in my mind. I think this one is the most reliable way to do it. And having done it now for not quite a year, I'm getting a pretty good sense that this is what it is. And this is where I think the founder brand thing is the thing. So essentially what you do is you have to be someone who is, who has an audience. You need an audience. You have to have an audience. You don't have an audience. You don't have anything. So how do you do that? Well, for me, that's about podcasts and that's about social posts. My social posts tend to look a little podcasty. Sometimes they're even clips of this podcast, right?

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Chris Reynolds]

And part of the goal there is just making sure that people know that I exist and that our business does this thing.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Chris Reynolds]

In general, even the our business does this thing. I kind of think of as middle of pipeline for the founder led content. Because at first you're looking to just build trust. I think building trust is really, really, really important.

[Matt Reynolds]

Absolutely.

[Chris Reynolds]

So you've got to build trust to do that. It means I've got to be seen a lot by a lot of people in the world to be able to think, oh, you know, this is like an ideal setup for us. So I think that's the driver. I think the primary driver for me is the amount of content that I put out. I don't know, I don't weigh super heavy on, for example, like written or SEO content yet, because part of that is I'm not sure how well it applies in the post AI world.

[Matt Reynolds]

So we' so the first action again from a chronological order would be top of funnel piece. How do I get 2x or more top of funnel qualified potential B2B clients understanding what we do and who we are. So one of the questions I would have. So you said you have ownership or you have responsibility of producing high quality content.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

Right. Then the next question there. And so we're building up action one is what are the channels? Right. So let's go opposite of you right now and go. If you're a B2C business.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

I'll ask you because I know you'll get the answer right. What would be your primary social channels for B2C?

[Chris Reynolds]

Instagram and TikTok.

[Matt Reynolds]

That's right, Instagram, TikTok, maybe Facebook, maybe, maybe YouTube. Right?

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

But this is direct to consumer to the end user. But that's not you. You're B2B.

[Chris Reynolds]

Right.

[Matt Reynolds]

So where is the focus? And you can't have. This is kind of one of the things from Hormozi and a lot of the people that we've worked with. Again, I got to go and meet those guys a few months ago. You can't focus on five channels. No, you gotta focus on one or two. Like what's the main. So where are the channels that you're going to put all of your efforts in this content that you're gonna build to drive that reach for qualified business owners.

[Chris Reynolds]

It's so obviously LinkedIn that it's, you know, it's a hands down thing. I think number two is actually tied right now and we'll see where it goes. We post on LinkedIn and X. Yep. But we will probably begin and you and I do this on, on this one. We will probably begin putting a lot of that content on YouTube as well.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Chris Reynolds]

I think YouTube is becoming interesting because you just. It's such an incredible channel for learning. It's like I think it now has the highest number of searches, which is interesting. Right. Like Most people search YouTube before they search anything else. As the kids get older, that's even more so. It's crazy.

[Matt Reynolds]

Just I did it yesterday so I got a. For Christmas I got a really nice smoker, a Kamado Joe Big Three. The thing's massive. It's like £700. And rather than even looking at like it just quickly flipped through the instruction booklet. I never went to Google. I went to YouTube, like how to put this thing together.

[Chris Reynolds]

Me too. Every time.

[Matt Reynolds]

And then I texted that video to kaylin to my 19 year old daughter and I said, I'm going to pay you to put this thing together. Here's the step by step thinking how to do it. So you're gonna build all this content. Much of the content is gonna be built. So the long form version of the. Of the content is via podcast. This podcast. Right. And then that will convert on some level or be able to be parsed out in short form content. You also make an additional amount of short form content. You've got a company that you work with that asks you lots of questions and you solve problems and so there are these little like 60 seconds, two minute videos, whatever.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Chris Reynolds]

It's a really good call. I'm going to mention that because I think it's important. I do. I have a company called Compound Social that I work with that and they're great call out Compound Social. There's a. What they do with us is they, they will interview me once, essentially once a month. It's once every three weeks actually, but for an hour and a half. And we agree ahead of time on the questions. And it's a call just like this. It's a, you know, we'll record it on Riverside and I am literally just talking. It's just me. I don't do a lot of, I don't do a ton of prep for maybe a couple of bullet points. That's about all it is. What they're trying to do is get to the heart of who is Chris and what's the business that we do.

[Matt Reynolds]

And it's back to the founder brand. Right?

[Chris Reynolds]

Back to the founder brand.

[Matt Reynolds]

People don't have emotional ties to brands.

[Chris Reynolds]

Correct.

[Matt Reynolds]

They have emotional ties to founders. So that the story of the brand is the story of the founder. So now you're talking and answering questions and solving problems on behalf of the brand, but the viewer sees it as Chris Reynolds.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

And you know, I'll use us for example, I don't know how many devs do you use at certain that work for us? Yeah, we've got like five, six, seven, something, whatever.

[Chris Reynolds]

I think we have four, I think we have four that are sort of exclusive to you and then we have a handful of them that when you need very specific expertise, we'll bring them in for that.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

Okay. So my company doesn't, with the exception of the one or two that are working all the time on our, on our stuff for the most part we build trust in Chris Reynolds who owns certain and therefore we trust the devs, the team, the staff, et cetera. So you build this content in action. So Action one is going to look something like build the content. And there's probably an actual defined number, amount of content. Like I'm going to put out let's say 20 pieces of content per month. So on a 30 day month, like, or maybe let's say maybe even 30, like I'm gonna put out a piece of content one a day, something like that. And I'm going to leverage primarily podcasts which business owners listen to. And the main focus point is gonna be LinkedIn with the secondary platforms of X and YouTube. Right. So now you've got long form via podcast. You have short form, which I've noticed that you use both short form video and then either a transcripted version of that video or a tightened up version of the video. So via written. So for people who are, you know, I do this all the time too. I'm laying in bed at night, Rachel's going to sleep. I can't actually play the video. I don't want to hear sound. This is another place where I think captions are great. So I can actually see what you're saying or somebody's saying. But I can also read the point of the post.

[Chris Reynolds]

Right.

[Matt Reynolds]

And so you're going to the platforms where your clients are. And so we know business owners listen to podcasts. It's very common. Podcast is doing great. This is great. This is almost like icing on the cake. You can, you can again pull out shorts out of the podcast. But also you make a lot of other shorts that are one minute, two minutes long. And you post that, and you post it specifically to these channels. This is primary. Channel number one is LinkedIn.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

That's where business owners are. Now if you're B2C, LinkedIn's crap.

[Chris Reynolds]

Probably not gonna help you.

[Matt Reynolds]

Not gonna help you. Right. Then it depends on the, the age demographic between Instagram, Instagram Reels, TikTok. If you're Gen Z, YouTube. And I still think a lot like YouTube's got a vast amount of demographic. Like I watch YouTube a ton. I watch YouTube shorts a ton very wide. As does my, you know, like your oldest probably does Kinsley, who's 14, same age as your, your son. She watches it all the time. It's just showing, it's just showing her eight bit Ryan and Mr. Beast videos. And you know, I'm watching something else. So. Okay, so that is. So I think the first action is really a, it's a yes or no question. Did I make this much content and put it out on these platforms?

[Chris Reynolds]

That's right.

[Matt Reynolds]

Did I make a piece of content every day and put it out. And by the way, I actually remember this and kind of noting in my head, while you were in crisis mode a couple weeks ago, you still put out content every day because you weren't putting out the content.

[Chris Reynolds]

Correct.

[Matt Reynolds]

You had recorded the content.

[Chris Reynolds]

It was all.

[Matt Reynolds]

Yep. You have a team that schedules the content. It comes. So I'm like, Chris has been up all night long solving this problem, you know, in crisis mode. And yet to the rest of the world, you're still just putting out videos and content on Short form on LinkedIn, on X, et cetera. So that would be to me, action number one is top of funnel.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

Now the next question is what after that? Right. So there is. Is Action two in at the same time and in conjunction with Action one, or do I need to complete Action one? And again, the question is like the action is put out this much content on these platforms and at the end of. And there's a due date, let's say I'm going to put. Now I'm going to put out 30 pieces of content per month for six months. So in six months you can say, did I do it or did I not? That question has to be yes or no. Yeah, I think that's critical due date, yes or no. Okay, yes, let's say you did it six months. Now the Question is, do the next couple actions not even start until action one is complete? And I think for you the answer is no. I think you've got to start to put in the next actions into place. They're still chronologically behind Action 1 or follow Action 1. So to me, and by the way, I do want to give a shout out here. So we've talked a lot about buy back your time from Dan Martell. I've got a great book if you haven't read it. By the way, I was thinking about you a lot reading this book. So we have really worked through a book called Software as a Science, which is also by Dan Martell and his team. Software as a Science.

[Chris Reynolds]

Awesome.

[Matt Reynolds]

Unlock limitless recurring revenue without losing control by Dan Martell and his team. Now here's the way I would then convert the next several or build on the next several actions. So number one for you, Dan Martel would call this acquisition. The entire sales pipeline is part of the acquisition pipeline from just they know you exist. From like reach to an understanding that you are experts in your field to leads. Obviously there's probably an action there to like, how do I then turn that reach into leads? How do I capture email addresses and phone numbers? You know, that's another important thing. How do you nurture the leads? How then do you convert the leads? But then, and this is where we're at with Barbalogic, I'll just give you a taste of where we're at with our game plan for US acquisition right now, especially in the B2B sector. And turnkey coach is actually relatively simple and quite easy. And I'm actually going to lead the sales team this year. As a CEO, I'm the obviously I don't want to do that forever, but I'm a sales team led, people oriented CEO. I'm not a tech guy. I don't know how to write code. So acquisition to be able to get more conversions in our different products is a very important piece to us. But it's actually number two. The first goal for us which comes from this book is what Martell would call activation, which I use the term buy in. My COO is not crazy about that term. But the concept there is one of the big hurdles or the biggest hurdle we have in turnkey coaches. Not the conversion of the coach coaches or coaching companies or logos. Signing up for this service is to fully activate the service. It's to get fully. You know, again, I can remember when we moved to HubSpot as a CRM that was from the time we signed up to the time we were like, fully truly activated, it was probably a year.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

Took a long time. And so same thing for you guys. You can have a client sign up and then if they don't really leverage your expertise, your services, et cetera, like, you get paid by the hour, you get paid by the work, you get paid by output. So the conversion actually doesn't matter that much. Much like us in B2B, it's actually the work. And so to me, action number two after the top of the funnel piece is when the top of the funnel is literally from top of funnel probably to conversion is what do you do with the client's post conversion, which is how do we get the clients fully activated? How do we get a client who understands our expertise? And at first they're kind of just like using us a little bit. Maybe they're spending 2,500 bucks a month or five grand a month. How do we get them to spend $50,000 a month to, like, truly with both a tremendous amount of value for you and a tremendous amount of value for them. So that activation becomes. That's the next piece that I would think is also. Let's say we just stick with the same numbers. We want to double the number of clients that are fully activated utilizing certain services, you know, dev team, to solve all their problems in technology. Now, the hardest part of this is how do you bridge the gap between conversion and activation, between acquisition and so you've converted the client. How do you get them fully bought in and actually using your service every single day so that you are a linchpin in their company? To me, that's the second part of this, is that activation piece makes sense.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah. So I think for us, this is. This is easier for us than it is probably for most people. And the reason why is people come to us with an emergency on their.

[Matt Reynolds]

Hands, so they quickly activate.

[Chris Reynolds]

We activate in a day like it's. It's crazy how fast it happens the hardest. And the reason we're successful at what we do is people will hand us an incredibly complex system, right? Let's say it's Amazon Web Services and it's got 50 servers with, you know, a bunch of different infrastructure around it and. And software that's like four or five different software repositories that we are supposed to understand. We need to understand it completely, thoroughly in basically seven days. Like, that's what we have, right. And then in that time frame, form a plan, do the execution, all the stuff that needs to be Done. Now, that means that we've been able to lean very heavily into what we'll call very secure AI and where AI is able to help us a lot, figuring out, you know, what are the complex moving parts that are here that we need to understand to basically teach us about this stuff as fast as possible. We already understand all the concepts. All we need to do is understand, like, how is this thing put together and how does it work? But because they come to us with an emergency, almost always the actual process for us is if we just deliver on what we said we would deliver, and we literally have not. We have zero failed projects. Zero, not, not once. If we just deliver on what we say we're deliver on, they're a client for life. We don't lose people. It just doesn't happen. Because at the very minimum, if their revenue drops and this happens. Right. We provide this super flexible way for them to stay customers of ours. We basically say, look, if you want to reduce your overall revenue spend with us, we're all about that. We want your finances to be in a good situation. Right.

[Matt Reynolds]

We can move from this many hours a month. Can't move this many hours a month.

[Chris Reynolds]

Exactly. Can't be a good business opportunity for us and for you if you can't, if you don't have that level of flexibility. And so because we do that, we provide, you know, they'll basically never go away. They're like, why would I ever lose contact with these experts that can solve the most complicated problems that I can run into?

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Chris Reynolds]

And so that's what they do. And we keep them forever. And. And so I think our activation part is. Is solid, I think, because we deliver really well. That piece is. It feels. Feels good.

[Matt Reynolds]

So this is great from a coaching perspective for a game plan. So activation should not be a goal or an action for you because if it's business as usual and everything is healthy, it doesn't go on the game plan.

[Chris Reynolds]

Right.

[Matt Reynolds]

So we are similar for barbalogic. Online coaching acquisition is number one for the B2C business. Once someone is ponied up money, they activate immediately. Within three, four days, they're doing their test workout. They meet with their coach on zoom, they're activated with Turnkey coach. Our B2B business, the acquisition part is the easy part, the activation part is the hard part.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

So as you think about a business like ours that has multiple products or services, we're actually dividing those up by goals, actions, metrics, by what is the. What's the thing that's Going to move the needle. So for you it sounds like goal one, probably goal one, like in the business is the acquisition channel.

[Chris Reynolds]

There's no question about it. And I would say what would be interesting, I'll be curious to get your take on this. Again, we didn't rehearse this, so we're just guessing. Where we struggle is we can put out a tremendous amount of content. And I'm confident in being able to put out that content. I've got all the right things in place to make it happen. I am terrible at the next step. So that getting from here's the content. How do we convert those into leads, like legitimate leads? This is again, sort of a new area for me. I've really only started studying it about a year and a half, two years ago. And so the process is still very immature. We don't have a good way right now of converting those into, you know, are you, are you really genuinely interested? If you are, let's get an email address and let's, you know, let's maybe have a conversation, whatever. That process has been very difficult. What we've done instead is I have, I have started a newsletter that targets more specifically CTOs and founder CEOs for anything that is sort of specific to engineering so that I can sort of give them, hey, look, I've done this for 25 years. Let me, let me keep you from making a bunch of mistakes in this particular space.

[Matt Reynolds]

Sure.

[Chris Reynolds]

And the newsletter, or the point of the newsletter is essentially to provide really, really high quality content that is more targeted. So what I would consider sort of middle of funnel type stuff for a very specific segment of the audience, type.

[Matt Reynolds]

Of clients, you want to get their correct. Yeah, yeah. So I think with this piece, again, I think goal one for you, for the whole company is probably the acquisition channel, the sales pipeline, and Action One is producing the content or defining the amount of content you're gonna put out and what channels it's gonna go to. The metric that's gonna attach to that is the reach. Right. And that's very hard, especially on social channels because it's rented space. You don't own X, you don't own LinkedIn. Certainly you can put out, I think the newsletter you own. The blog post on your website you own.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

And so, so that's probably Action one and identifying like what, how many people do we actually want to have eyes on this? And then Action two is how do I take them from knowing who we are to.

[Chris Reynolds]

Ideal customer profile. Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

Qualified leads. Ideal customer profile. And so that Requires one of two things or both, which is what you're doing with the newsletter is a freemium product. They cannot get the free, so it's very high value. It doesn't cost anything. But they cannot get it without putting an email address in or some sort of contact email name, maybe phone number. The other option here, which we've started to explore over the last year, which is actually has a tremendous amount of value, is actually not just freemium, but actual premium products that are sort of giveaways. So we, for turnkey Coach, we've started to give away things like an entire setup for online coaching, a MacBook, a camera, a microphone for you. Maybe it's like your first five hours of using certain is 100% free.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

Upon conversion, whatever that thing is. So. So you start to give away both a combination of freemium to drive those leads to become, you know, highly nurtured leads. Very moving from cold leads to warm leads. And then your third action step then is. And. And that would also have a number attached.

[Chris Reynolds]

Like, what percentage?

[Matt Reynolds]

Percentage. Probably it's a percentage of. Of our reach turn into qualified leads. And it's probably. I don't know what it is. 10%, 20%, let's say something in that ballpark. Right. Maybe it's 20%, let's say. So one in five of the people who know who we are are qualified leads. And. And so if the number for total reach is 50,000, then the qualified leads are 10,000.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

And then of the 10,000, how do I. Then the next action step is how do I nurture that lead? You're probably gonna have to expand your team at some point, have some sort of sales team in place. And maybe it's you in the beginning to actually reach out and have moving from a passive freemium product like a newsletter, to an active product, which is a zoom call. Five hours of free work from certain. Something like that, so that it's an active piece of your team so that you can move them from nurtured lead to conversion. Right. At some point, we all know the process goes from I am consuming an automated process to I want to talk to a real human. At some point, there's the bridge from automation to real human. I want someone to hear my problem. Right. And to say, and I want to believe them that they can solve that problem.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

And that moves them to conversion. And then if post conversion. So conversion, there are all sorts of things you can do. You can say, like, hey, we're. You know, I think you guys do this, like there's no, you know, there's not a 6 month contract or 12 month contract like you can, if you want to, if you want to put us on retainer for this, you get a discount. But also you can just try us out for X number of hours. Your first five hours are free. You know, they do it for 10 hours, they get a great product and then you can negotiate the post conversion because it seems like the activation is really, really simple. And so that is clearly to me number one. And then potentially, let me ask you a question then. The last piece of Martel's book then is about what he calls expansion, which is how do you drive and improve lifetime value of the customer? You don't want them to hire you for a single 10 hour job. No, you want them to use you for 50 hours a month, every month, forever.

[Chris Reynolds]

Right? So that one is another one that for us has just been so easy. It's the reason the business has grown, our business has grown despite very poor nurturing action. So just to be clear everybody, the.

[Matt Reynolds]

Acquisition point is weak.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, exactly.

[Matt Reynolds]

The activation and retention are strong.

[Chris Reynolds]

Excellent, right? Because think about it, right? Our whole value proposition is we're SEAL Team 6, right? You bring us in and we solve your problem. And we have zero failed implementations, we have zero failed projects. You bring us in and we solve your problem. Of course we have all the expansion opportunity that you have available, right?

[Matt Reynolds]

They're stark raving fans, they're all stars. Now here's where I would push back on then. What I would do if I were you is take those places where you're super, super strong and leverage that where you're weak. So that's where I would do a referral program of some sort. So if you're a company who's had received tremendous value from certain, if you connect us with someone who becomes a client, then you get X number of hours free, this much discount, whatever. Use your current clients who are happy, especially if activation and retention are strong to drive the acquisition of new clients. And again, because of the industry that you're in, everyone kind of knows everybody.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

And so leverage that. So leverage where you're strong to utilize those customers to promote where you're weak, which is in the acquisition piece. So what we end up with is a goal that is based on acquisition with clearly defined metrics. The goal does not have to have a due date. It can, but it doesn't have to. Then you've got. It sounds to me like you, you're going to have about three actions under Acquisition from top of funnel to middle of funnel to conversion, identifying that sales pipeline systems and stops. What are the numbers? What are the metrics attached and clear due date with those actions to say, did I put out this much content? Did I convert this percentage of reach into leads, nurtured leads, Did I convert this percentage of nurtured leads into conversions? Like did we get there? Yes or no, right. Six months from now, whatever that, the quarter, whatever. And that's your goal one, and then with three actions underneath it with metrics attached. And then probably the most time consuming piece is again jumping back two weeks in the podcast is then for each of those actions, writing a systematic, logical progression order of operations of what we have to do to get action one completed and same thing for action two and same thing for action three. That is the execution plan. That's just the checklist and who's going to do what. So here, Here are the 30 steps. Things like the company, what's the company you use again to interview you and do videos?

[Chris Reynolds]

Compound Social.

[Matt Reynolds]

So okay, so utilize Compound Social and Chris, make the content, I assume Compound social for these different platforms. And from there do you have a place to collect that reach and turn them into leads? Whether some sort of CRM HubSpot type thing. What do we do with them once they become leads? How do we nurture those leads? Probably through a freemium product. And then we convert the leads through a premium product through something that actually costs us. There's like no customer acquisition cost to newsletters and to, you know, freemium type content. But then you actually to convert, you may actually need to spend some money for customer acquisition cost to convert. Because we know once we convert we are going to get activation, we are going to get expansion. And so then either goal two or Action four for goal one, that becomes how do I turn our customers into a profitable referral program so that they bring us more customers and they get a discount and value off of that same thing.

[Chris Reynolds]

And that's, that's exactly right.

[Matt Reynolds]

That's how the game plan works. So now we have a goal, we have three or four actions, we have metrics that are attached, we have an execution plan in place to actually get that done. And we have a very clear calendar. Due dates, yes or no, Did I do the thing? If you did what you said you were going to do via the actions, you work through Action 1, then Action 2, then Action 3. If you answer yes, you should 99.9% of the time accomplish the goal.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yeah, you only didn't in the Circumstance where you didn't design it well, you missed. And also not design it well might mean you don't know. Like you made your best guess with all the best information that was there, but it just wasn't quite. Didn't quite. It wasn't quite comprehensive enough to hit the goal. Right.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Chris Reynolds]

I do have one question about this and I feel like maybe, maybe our listeners will as well. I'm a big fan of the whole idea around what are leading and lagging indicators. And so one of the ideas there, I'll just explain really quickly. A leading indicator is something that I can, I can do, that I have power over. So an example of this would be I can make content. Right. Like, no one can stop me from making content. I can make content. A lagging indicator is the thing that happens afterwards. So what I can't do, what I.

[Matt Reynolds]

Can'T pull on, how did it go exactly?

[Chris Reynolds]

I can't. I can't force X amount of revenue to come through the door. I can't force X amount of leads to be qualified or whatever. So when we go through our actions, do you think about actions like, they should all be leading indicator items?

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

And what we do is we do a rolling forecast. So we have a real time. And this is what's changed with adding a VP of Finance or what will be a cfo, is that we have, if we do this, our expected return on investment or return on ad spend, whatever that is, is this.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

And then so we have, in every category of the metrics chart, we have two rows, we have the target and we have the actual right underneath it.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Matt Reynolds]

And as the actual changes, it changes the target. So if we significantly beat the target, then it raises the target for the rest of the year. And if we underperform, it lowers the target. Right. And so we're constantly looking at this is the leading indicator of what we're going to do if we do it. Our expected return on investment is this. Our actual return on investment was this. Therefore, that's how it changes your actions moving forward. Because so, for example, we've done things in 2024 where we were on some TV shows and things like that, we thought that there was going to be a big return on investment. There wasn't. And so we go, okay, that's not where the ROI is for us or the ROAS is for us or whatever the thing is. But when we started to look at some other things, even for us in the B2C channel, specifically paid advertising on Facebook or Google, which is also YouTube. So Facebook and Instagram or Google and YouTube. And they came out much higher than average. Then we said, okay, well, let's not spend the money on the TV shows, let's not spend the money on the podcast ads. Let's spend money on the, on the ppc, on the pay per click for, you know, maybe even channel specific or platform specific. So we're getting a great return on investment on these platforms, but not on these. So we have a. And this, Andy Grove does this great in his book, he has this, it's sort of this matrix of here's what I expected in January, here's what we got in January, here's what I expected in February, March, April, et cetera. And then each month as you hit it, it then changes the target. Here's what I expected in January for February and March and April, here's what I actually got in January. So now then the next row down is now, here's my expectation in February for March, April, May. And so you can see that even the target number over time changes, goes up, goes down, whatever. And you can see very quickly with that rolling forecast where you should be putting your time, effort, money, resources to make sure that you're getting that, that payoff.

[Chris Reynolds]

And so it's an alignment to reality, basically. So it might be, you might be lowering expectations, you might be raising expectations, but whatever you're doing, it is alignment with what reality has shown you.

[Matt Reynolds]

That's exactly right. That's. That's right. And then again, we always have these targets to improve. Like, here's the goal metric to achieve. And then here's the KPI, the key performance indicator, which is the snapshot today or this week of how far away we are from that. And so we want to see that delta shrink and close over time. If it expands and gets bigger, then we go back to the drawing board and go, okay, hold on, this thing isn't working for this reason. And that's where those strategy meetings become really important. So that's how we set up the game plan. So again, we did this in real time. Chris and I didn't talk through this ahead of time. You think through. And I think this is. We've to come back to some previous episodes we've done. I think that some undistracted think time where you probably don't even have a computer on you, all the distractions are off, and you sit in a room by yourself and you think, what does my business need to grow? What does my business need to move the needle? What does my Business need to have better margins, to have better top line revenue, to have better conversions, whatever the thing is. And you'll start to identify, okay, like if I can do these three things that will make a massive difference in my business, well, those are your three goals.

[Unknown]

Yep.

[Matt Reynolds]

And then for each of those goals you say, well, okay, where are the speed bumps or the roadblocks or the actions that I have to do to make sure I complete those goals? Which is what we just did for you for the acquisition process for your business. Now you end up with three or four actions with metrics attached and due dates. And then you go in and say, okay, now if I'm going to get action one done, it's going to take this checklist, this SOP in place, that's the execution plan. And I'm just going to work my way through this sop. I'm going to assign steps of that SOP or the execution plan not just to me, but to my staff. And I'm going to give ownership of these pieces to this staff so that at the end of that execution plan, you've accomplished the action, you should be closer to the goal and you move to action two. And again, sometimes you'll do multiple actions at the same time. A lot of times the actions are chronologically ordered, but that's the simplicity of the game plan. Goals at the top, actions to complete the goals right underneath them. No more than three or four. Five is probably too many. More than five is definitely too many metrics to measure that you're moving in the right direction. And the execution plan to complete the action, that's the game plan. And again, dive into it much deeper in Undoing Urgency. The book that I wrote, if you're a software company, if you're a SaaS company, I can't recommend enough the book Software is a Science by Dan Martell. Actually, when I read Buyback your time, it was an extremely important time that I read that book because I was writing Undoing Urgency. Now that we move from primarily a service business to a to a software SaaS business, this book came at the perfect time and it really for us, helped us populate our game plan for 2025 from that book. So if you're in that tech space, Software is a Science by Dan Martell. Excellent book. Talking through the process of acquisition, activation and retention or growth of lifetime value for the client. Figure out where you're strong. Figure out where you're weak. Focused on the weak. Leverage the places where you're strong to help support the weak and you're golden.

[Chris Reynolds]

Awesome. And if you are a CTO or a founding CEO and are interested in learning more about engineering organizations and how to run them, well, check out theblueprintnewsletter.com which is where my newsletter's at.

[Matt Reynolds]

Excellent. There's another episode of the Build your Business podcast. Hope you got a bunch of value out of this. I know it was a long one, but I hopefully it was brought a ton of value to you. If you did, we would love a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast. Hey, Share the shorts. We post shorts every week from the podcast with friends and family. Share the podcast. Hopefully let's get some more listeners in again. We're top 50. I think we've been as low as or we've hit 43 or somewhere in there.

[Chris Reynolds]

Yep, 42.

[Matt Reynolds]

Love to get into the top 40. And again, that's it's been a real honor and a blessing and really cool stuff to be able to do this podcast. So scratching an itch for me. I'm sure it is for you as well to be able to put out the things that we've learned over the years in this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for giving us your time on this Friday morning and we'll see you next week. See you next Friday.

[Unknown]

Bye.