← Built Online
Built Online
73. From $100K to $1M: How Smart Hiring Scales Your E-Commerce Business with Yoni Kozminski
01:03:14
Loading summary
Transcript82 lines
- [00:00]
Yanni
On it. One of the big problems that we typically see with E commerce business owners is that as their business grows and their revenue grows and the complexity grows, they are slower to bring more products to market. And that in a marketplace is typically the thing that starts to really harm your revenue growth and your profitability. You know, you need to perpetually be, you know, innovating and improving your products or bringing new products to market. And so, you know, these are things I would say from giving like, you know, learned advice and the experiences that I've had is that finding ways to get yourself out of sort of the nitty gritty, sort of dirty, you know, Details.
- [00:41]
Cody McGuffey
Details? Yeah, like the details.
- [00:43]
Welcome back to the Built Online podcast where we talk about all things online business from E commerce to digital marketing to building your dream life and your dream business. I'm your host, Cody McGuffey and if you've been with us for a while, you might remember us as the Etsy Seller podcast. Well, we're expanding, expanding our horizons and transitioning from just talking about Etsy businesses to covering all types of online businesses.
- [01:09]
Because we believe the opportunity is so.
- [01:12]
Massive that we should be covering so many unique businesses online and at ever be. We believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to pursue their passions, live life on their own terms. And we believe in making E commerce accessible to everyone in the world, no matter where they are, and be using it to make a positive impact in our families and in our communities. We believe that anyone who truly commits to something truly pursues it with undeniable.
- [01:37]
Force of will that they will succeed.
- [01:39]
Let's jump in to today's show.
- [01:40]
Yanni, what's going on man?
- [01:43]
Yanni
Cody, great to be here, my friend.
- [01:46]
Cody McGuffey
Thank you for joining. I'm really excited to have you on, excited to bring this level of conversation to our audience because I think you have a very unique perspective. You've done a lot of things and you're a very interesting guy. So I'm very curious personally to learn about you and learn from you.
- [02:04]
Yanni
Well, I'm like I said, excited to be here and you know, most importantly, I hope we can get some value into those who are stopping by and listening in.
- [02:13]
Cody McGuffey
Let's go, man. I have a couple notes here that I'd like to just maybe introduce you. Typically I like to do the introduction separately but we, our team did some research and you can correct me if I'm wrong any here but Yanni is the co founder and CEO of Multiply Me Staffing, a company that helps global businesses reduce their operating costs. Increases their efficiency and achieves their growth goals by providing them with the best Filipino talent. So specifically you guys focus in the Philippines, which is very interesting. I've hired a lot of people from Philippines and had great experience overall, excellent people. And so that's why I'm really curious about your experience there and I'm hoping I can learn from you. And specifically you have also this cross of experience through just all things E commerce, so Amazon agencies and just overall, just E commerce. And I'm really excited about that. Did I miss anything there? I'm sure I missed a whole bunch of things. But does that kind of summarize your experience so far?
- [03:12]
Yanni
I think you've captured the lion's share of what I'm up to. The only other thing that I'm currently active in is our process improvement consultancy at Scala, which works very closely hand in hand with our staffing business to help not just look at how do we help make it accessible and guide people through that journey of finding Filipino talent. And you know, I'm sure it'll come up and I'm happy to tell you the long or short version, fallen in love with the Philippines and the value proposition, they're beyond your experience but you know, really helping people understand how to build out their systems, processes, standard operating procedures and you know, helping like really maximize your ability to scale a business that isn't entirely reliant on yourself. So being able to do that and then plug in the right talent and the right roles into that can become a real force multiplier for, for us obviously, but for people that we work with as a service, 100%.
- [04:13]
Cody McGuffey
I always have this quote, I don't know who, who, who said this. I know that I heard it from Dan Martell, maybe you know that name. Yep. Personal development guy. And I'm a big fan of him. And he mentioned, he always talks about the same thing. He says like build the people and the people build the business. And I, I thought about, thought about you, you know, when I, when I thought about that quote and I'm just like, that's kind of what your guys methodology kind of is a little bit is like you get the right people on the boat and they'll kind of help you get to where you need to go. Is that correct?
- [04:45]
Yanni
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think you definitely need to plan sort of business backward as opposed to like person forwards. When you talk about like how you approach recruitment, like just because you and I vibe Cody doesn't mean we should like work together because we might be the same type of archetype and deliver the same compliment or non complementary similar skill sets. But, but, but absolutely. You actually remind me of another book that is in that same vein called who not how by strategic coach Dan. Dan Sullivan.
- [05:22]
Cody McGuffey
Dan Sullivan. Okay, I have that title on my wish list, I think on audible so I need to listen to it.
- [05:28]
Yanni
So it's a really quick read. But it's the same concept. The idea is that if you want to create value and really quickly stop creating that sort of limiting beliefs and think who do I know that can deliver this value and see how you can build a win win scenario where you can bring them into that equation. So just like, just like you mentioned at the end of it, people are everything. And if you look at either one of those types, if it's Dan Martel or Dan Sullivan, people are the core of your business and until AI really takes over, I think they're going to remain to be.
- [06:09]
Cody McGuffey
So yeah, I completely agree with that. A lot of people listening to this right now are first time, second time entrepreneurs, maybe third but more so on the first or second go at their business. And so they never really made a hire before. This is like their, they would be their first time hiring somebody. So they're not even sure where to start. Meaning there might be an E commerce business owner who, who has an Etsy shop and maybe has a. Some sort of their own website, website storefront and they don't even know necessarily what they need. Or maybe sometimes people do know what they need. Like oh my pictures just. I've heard from lots of people that my pictures and my, my product photography is just poor. Right. Or my, my descriptions are just not optimized. Something like this. And so they don't really know how to navigate this first hire. Should it be a freelancer? Should it be a one time per. Like one time thing where they just go through and do all of it or is this an ongoing cost? And so there's so many questions that come into making this first freelance hire or full time hire. What would you say to them to maybe kick us, kick this conversation off? Like what would you, how would you talk to that person?
- [07:18]
Yanni
It's a, it's a great question. I think it's where everyone should start, you know, their discovery process when it comes to taking that first step at the end of the day. Like the, the great equalizer is that we all have the same number of hours in the day and you know, I don't care if you're working 20 hours a day, it was a day or whatever your week looks like, ultimately you're going to run out of hours that you can actually put in. And I would say, like, even if you're the 20 hour a week girl or guy, you're going to run out of productive hours. And so you need to look at the equation in saying, how can I create this force, multiplier impact from my business where, you know, protecting yourself and preventing burnout needs to be core to it. When you're, you know, the founder, when you're the person who's really sort of, you know, especially early days, the engineering, you really need to make these, you know, calculated assessments. And so there's a couple of approaches that I would personally take and I, and I get myself into a conversation like this semi regularly. I'll often have people come and, you know, I have a, I have an inbound sales team that will get on the calls. But, you know, I'm always having conversations with really great entrepreneurs and, you know, they'll talk to me and say, well, can I come and work and hire someone through you guys? And a lot of the times on the questioning and prodding, my recommendation is to find an agency partner for certain elements for paid media or things like that. And so how do you actually get to making a decision? Whether it's a freelancer on a platform like Upwork that you might find to do that work, or working with an agency, or maybe someone part time or full time. I think the first thing you need to do if your owner operator is, is take a stock take of one. How are you investing your time? So a really simple way to do it. And like, my whole, my whole team knows exactly how I operate. I account for every hour of my day. Like whether it's personal time, if I'm with my kids, you know, before or after work or on the weekend or if I'm at the gym or. It's all, it's all marked in my calendar, it's all color coded. And, you know, I'm even breaking it down into internal meetings versus deep work and specific projects. You know, podcasting has a different color. So this is all to say that what I would recommend if this is you as an owner operator, is firstly looking at how are you investing your time, where are your hours going to? And not just putting that together and looking at it holistically and saying, okay, I'm spending like 30% of my time on my marketplace management, you know, which consists of listing creation and optimization and keyword research, and another 20% on, you know, inventory management and however it works, but actually looking at it from the lens of saying what are the things that are actually moving the needle for the business? What are the things that I uniquely bring to the table that is going to grow my, you know, I want to say grow my profit. People love to talk in revenue but you know, at the end of the day your business needs to make money. So growing the actual business in a, in a meaningful and scalable way. So once you have that clarity of understanding, a way you can do it is you can look at all the different, the different activities, grade them from a 1 to 5, 5 being something that needs to be you, you uniquely at this stage of the business are the only person that can really bring it to market versus, let's say, I don't know, keyword research and listing optimization and paid media and things like that, that might be a 2 or a 3 might require a degree of your input, especially early on, but you can delegate that kind of work out. Especially if you can consolidate skill sets and not trying to say, well I want someone who can do design, do my, you know, image listings, but also manage my inventory and my forecasting and you know, like you've got to be realistic in terms of who you're going to bring on. So I would say that's the first thing. Understand where you add the value and understand what you could hand off and just to add more complication here or more options here is you can take the approach of saying I want to bring either agencies part time or full time resources that do things that I can't do or you can say I can do it but I can bring someone in that can handle it more efficiently, more cheaply, devote more time to it and look at it that way. I would say you typically want to know enough to be dangerous. So like my general advice to people just starting out in E commerce marketplaces, business in general is get a, get a decent handle of what's actually happening before you start to try and handle all these things off. Because you want to be able to give, you know, important and meaningful feedback so that you're not sort of flying blind and trying to critique someone in something that you have no idea. When you know every dollar at the start of your business in particular counts, you can't take these bigger swings. So I'd say that's a really long winded answer to you. And in understanding and then based off of that, you know, as an example for PPC manage, there's going to be expertise that an Agency has that an individual contributor might not have. You know, they might look, be looking at like 20, 30 different accounts and so they can understand and have a deeper sense of knowledge. So you just want to look at it and say, well what is the cost, you know, the cost benefit analysis on if I go to that agency versus bring it in house and what am I giving up? And so I would say, you know, coming right back to the start of it, if you don't have enough work to fill a full time role and it's not justified, I would say build for the mission outcomes and attributes that need to actually succeed in that, that mission and then define is this full time or not? And if it's not, then freelancer or potentially agency. If you know, if it's for example like a project manager that you know that you're working with multiple agencies and that's a lot of back and forth and you want to give that service delivery, then I would then say, well maybe a full time project manager makes sense because they can actually help traffic and work, you know, work around it. So long winded answer for you there, Cody.
- [13:51]
Cody McGuffey
No, that's great. You know, and that's, that's it's warranted in this situation because hiring is very complex. I think it can be right when you're, when you're first kind of getting into it, there's a lot of different options you can go. And typically somebody would ask that question like how should, how should I make my first hire? And you would answer this way the way that you did. And the reality is it's there's no right way and wrong way to really make your first hire. I mean there's probably a couple of wrong ways, but mostly like you are the center of your business. You understand, you have your finger on the pulse business. There's a couple of ways to look at it, but the cool thing about it, as soon as you make a hire, you can like always, if the hire doesn't work out, it doesn't work out and you can shoot, you can try again. So as long as you're not running yourself out of business by making on a hire, making a hire, you typically are going to learn a lot from that and then be able to, to learn from that mistake and then move on to the next hire. I think the problem that I've see happen once in a while is people take a big swing way too early on on making like a big expensive hire when they're maybe like maybe they just got out, they went from zero to one, they finally got some revenue, but they're not profitable yet. And somehow they like make this big swing on, like this person's just going to solve all my problems. And usually it doesn't work out that way. In my experience, like, it almost never works out that way. You should start smaller and kind of like start chipping away at things that you're already doing, the things that you are owning. Like you're wearing the hat for designing. You're wearing the hat on the business and the operations and also the finances and also the marketing, and you're wearing the hat on everything. Don't just expect someone to come in and solve all those problems or three of those problems for you hire to solve one problem at a time and have them own that one problem and you'll learn a whole bunch from that. And then you can start chipping away at the other hats that you're wearing. What are your thoughts on this?
- [15:40]
Yanni
I think you hit the nail on the head with that one. And I'm sitting here smirking. You know, we've, we've placed I think close to 1200 people into other businesses outside of our businesses in the last five years. And I've just had the experience that you're talking about for the first time ever crop up where we were working with a guy who has an agency and hired for the first time a PPC manager and got great reviews the first month and then dropped off and didn't perform for the next two or three months. And the guys come back to me and saying like, you know, we, we, we said, listen, I've lost my two accounts that I had, like, it was really poor performance. And he sort of tried to stick the onus on, on us saying like, we should refund all, you know, we, we didn't charge him for the sourcing like we on the work just to look out after the guy and he still wanted more. And it just makes me realize, to your point, and I think this is like the lesson for someone like that is that just because you hire someone and it's your first time hiring someone, they're not going to like, you need to build the guardrails to protect your business. And starting with keen focus and not just saying, oh, well, I've hired someone and they're going to solve all of my problems. Like, that's like a, it's a really risky thing and it's something that I would never, I would never do. So coming back to, coming back to the point that you were making, when we talk about that first, that first hire and making those decisions, I would say slow and steady wins the race. It's often the advice that I like to give people is don't come and say it's hire five people if you've not had extensive experience or you don't have clarity in the direction, get it right, refine it. And then slowly but surely, if it's moving from, you know, a lot of the times we'll work with people who have been working with agencies and they're costing them circa 2, 3, 4, $5,000 a month. And you know, as an example, a PPC agency, it's like, you know, they're in your account, you understand what they're doing, they're sort of farming it at that point. And it's like, well, you can hire someone for $1000 1500amonth, they can do this work and do it full time and maybe even start doing the keyword research. So there's also, I think it's probably a nice sort of full circle response here. But like, I think good advice often is you're going to pay more typically for an agency. And if you can find a good agency, you can, you're paying for the education so you're spending more money to get that shortcut of education. And once you have a deeper understanding and you know what you need to do, then you can bring it in house, then you can bring in a remote, you know, team member that's going to cost you less but can actually on it and probably take you further at that time. So I think like that can be true for a lot of different types of, you know, delivery functions for that too.
- [18:46]
Cody McGuffey
Just so for anybody. Pause on, on, on that for a second. For anybody listening to this, agencies, if you're an Etsy seller, you, you probably haven't used an agency because there's not many agencies that you can use for your Etsy shop. There are probably some ways, but, and what we're talking about, PPC here, it's pay per click. If you're not familiar with like, you know, marketing and that can be on Facebook ads, got Google Ads. You think about any kind of paid ads that you're running on these platforms, not Etsy ads. Just to be clear, there's agencies that do this. Agencies meaning like a team that specifically they specialize in that thing and they help you spend the money optimally and getting you the results that you want to get. Just quick little thing in the case that we lost anybody and hopefully we catch everybody back up, um, But I think it's interesting, Yani, because I have a lot of conversations around hiring too. Naturally, our team is a team of 40 full time, full time folks. So we hiring is a bread and butter of, you know, what we think about as a company. But also a lot of people, a lot of my friends, they're hiring their first or 10th person and they're making mistakes and they're being successful in certain things. But another common pitfall that I see, and I've made it myself actually, and I'm hoping that I can help save somebody right now with this is a common mistake, is you hire somebody and you hire them for this skill which they have, they have this experience, the skill. But the thing is when you hire this person only for the skill, you still feel like you, you have to tell them what to do all the time. They have this like skill of doing this thing, but you constantly have to tell them, like, let's just say it's a blog writer, for example. Their job is to write blogs. And they can, they know how to write blogs. Excellent. They know how to write blogs on behalf of you and they write them great. But you have to constantly tell them what to write. You have to constantly tell them when to publish it. You have to constantly kind of be with them. And you're now you're thinking about blogs all the time and that's a mistake. The solution is to, when you hire somebody, a blog writer for this instance, hire them not only for the ability to write blogs, but also to own this entire mental energy that you would normally be putting into blogs. And they have now removed all that for you. That is what a successful hire looks like. They completely take it off of your mind and off of your like to do list. Yanni, I'm curious about your opinion. You've hired way more people than I have for other people, other companies. What are your thoughts on this?
- [21:16]
Yanni
Well, Juan, that's fantastic advice. It's, it's a lot of what is quite central to both of the businesses that I'm running today, and you know how we would articulate that is that for a lot of early stage people who are looking to hire their first time, where people get it wrong is that they're delegating tasks and not accountability. That's sort of the, that's the, that's, you know, how we would articulate exactly what you are expressing here is that, you know, one of the critical things here, how you work, you know, people often use the term working on your business, not in your business. And if you're still, again, like let's use your example of blogs. If you're saying, Well I need 10 blogs and then you need to think about what's the blog topic cluster and then you know, what are the different topics I'm going to write about and it needs to hit on these points and it's like you're still at the end of it. Yes boss. Now what do I do? Like that's not effective delegation. So I would say that how you can approach building success into this. So I'm going to restate, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail into what I was, what I sort of skimmed through before. But when you're looking to actually hire someone and let's stay with this blog.
- [22:32]
Cody McGuffey
Actually can we, can we change the subject? Can we say it is not subject. I'm sorry, change the example to yeah, product photographer or not not photographer, maybe a product image, image designer. Somebody that's going to do your product images. You know what I'm saying?
- [22:46]
Yanni
Yep, yep. Listing image specialist.
- [22:49]
Cody McGuffey
Thank you. Beautiful.
- [22:50]
Yanni
So, so let's assume that that's, let's assume that that is their, that's the title of the job description that we're trying to create.
- [23:00]
Cody McGuffey
Perfect.
- [23:00]
Yanni
What, what we're effectively going to do here first is we're going to define, there's three like there's two ways we can approach it. The first way is we can define the mission. So it's, you know, effectively one or two sentences that will dictate what does success look, what is their mission? If they are successful in this mission then they are therefore successful in their role. So the mission for a listing image, you know, a designer photographer, is that for them to be, they need to produce optimized images that yield the most click throughs and conversions to my listing. That's their mission, you know, that's what they need to do. If they're, if they're able to succeed at that, we are absolutely stoked. We're over the moon. So in order for them to be successful at that mission, they need to have, you know, you will typically suggest building three day outcomes. So one outcome is that they need to be able to produce high quality photography. That, that photography needs to be on brand and optimized for, you know, the, you know, the technical specifications needed for, you know, for the image criteria, like what does each image size need to look like and the different types of positioning. You know, another outcome they might need to achieve is they need to review the analytics how many clicks are we getting at the moment? Are these yielding the conversions they need to actually take ownership of what does the success look like in it. And that is sort of, let's say, let's just hone in or focus in a little bit on that aspect. While their key skill set might be their photography and their touch up skills and how they actually use, you know, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Canva, whatever the platform is that they're using, you're giving them more room to grow and actually take that accountability and say okay, well I'm seeing now that we had three clicks come through and you know, let's, let's assume that you're writing the, you know, the image, the listing copy and you have a good handle on what keywords and how to actually make sure that you're ranking. But you know, it's, it's relevant. So they're doing that now. You can continue to build the outcomes. There probably are some additional outcomes that you can think through and then you need to think through the attributes. So or historic experience or character traits to does this person need in order to achieve the outcomes and be successful at the mission that you're trying to, to hit on. So that might be, you know, they need to have experience with Photoshop and they need to have, you know, a DSLR camera and know how to use the thing and have historic experience inside of the Etsy platform. Like you know, you'd build all these attributes, you'd build the outcomes and you clearly state the mission. And so once you're able to craft that into, you know, that clarity, then you have a degree of accountability, you can take it further. But I'd say like that's stage one, stage two and I can actually share with you to put in the show notes. We have a free mirror board template that you can download where it teaches you how to build an org chart and accountability chart and there's a difference and you know, maybe we'll move on to other topics because you can go and watch me explain that on a three minute video and you can download the free template. But with accountability charts you'll typically give three to five accountabilities to each person. You might have every accountability in your business to start with. So accountability chart is everything that needs to get done and be accountable for. Org chart is who's reporting to who and people spend a lot of time on their org charts. But actually your accountability chart is the thing that you should focus on because that's also going to be your hiring roadmap as you look to grow into the next layer and the next layer and the next layer.
- [27:11]
Cody McGuffey
That's so interesting. Yeah, I agree and that's so much to unpack there. But I think at the end of the day, understand what you're doing currently in the business, what you are uniquely qualified to do at this given at this phase of the business, what are the things that you cannot stop doing? Right? You're just like, I'm very unique in this way. Like I serve the business in this way. I cannot delegate this. Fine, hold on to those ones. But there's definitely other things you can delegates to somebody that can actually do something probably better than you at the same or probably even better than you if you hired the right person. And that's probably your along the lines of your next hire. And there's multiple. And then you constantly. It plays a game of trying to replace yourself more and more like you're just trying to replace what you do with somebody ideally that's better than you and they can take full ownership of it. That's, that's the game. I'm hoping that people can take that away from this when they make their first hire, second hired and the fifth hire. And then of course don't sink yourself into a hole by hiring someone to just like anything else, don't run yourself in, run yourself out of business essentially by hiring one person. You always have to be mindful of the finances.
- [28:22]
Yanni
I think the path you are on is like a good ethos for people to have, you know, as they start to scale their business. I spend most of my time trying to think how do I make myself redundant? How do I continue to bring in great people so that the contribution that I have is less and less to sort of the perpetual viability and growth and profitability of the business. How do I make myself redundant? And you know, I sit, you know, largely across our sales and marketing function in terms of my, my accountabilities in the business which again there's organ accountability charts and you know, you sort of divide and conquer and look to the things that you do do best and you know where circa five years in and a team of about 85. But you know, I'd still say we're a maturing company, you know, we're not this, you know, like it takes time to get to, you know, you know, I wouldn't say like corporate and not that we ever want to be like a corporate, but to have that real, you know, I would say like a professional CEO and having sort of the you know, we're on the path. Like, we're really on the path. But coming back to it, the mindset of just trying to make yourself redundant is sort of the best thing you can do. And I bet everyone listening here who is selling on Etsy or E commerce business, the thing you're sitting there and saying, well, I'll never be able to hand off product development. No one can do what I do. And I would say I actually have a whole presentation on this in terms of how you can build processes to get yourself out of doing all of the legwork. Like, you also need to separate the logic of this. Surely there's things that we all bring to the table that we are uniquely positioned to be the best at. It's usually, you know, I'm, I'm someone who thinks I'm only good at a couple of things. And so I'm really trying to narrow my focus and hone in and become better at those. Like, you know, my business partners will tell you I'm a terrible project manager, but you just want to continue to drive in that direction where you can add, you know, the most material value. And so if product development is something that you're passionate about, you can still be the yes no person and deciding which products come to market. But if you're able to document your process, if you're able to hand over the research component, which takes time and realize that, you know, while you're looking at it and like you're so unique, there's a process that you're running in your mind. You just need to sort of put it down on paper, break it down, and then have, you know, people spend potentially more time on it. One of the big problems that we typically see with E commerce business owners is that as their business grows and their revenue grows and the complexity grows, they are slower to bring more products to market. And that in a marketplace is typically the thing that starts to really harm your revenue growth and your profitability. You know, you need to perpetually be, you know, innovating and improving your products or bringing new products to market. And so, you know, these are things I would say from giving, like, know, learned advice and the experiences that I've had is that finding ways to get yourself out of sort of the nitty gritty, sort of dirty, you know, details.
- [31:48]
Cody McGuffey
Details? Yeah, like the details.
- [31:50]
Yanni
It's an important step.
- [31:51]
Cody McGuffey
I completely agree. Like, that's something that I am willing to do personally in my business. I've always been willing to get into the details, but I've had to learn that skill. And I'm actually not gifted naturally in this. I understand that I'm not a detail oriented person. Not really. So therefore, as soon as I was able to hand off those details, we got better. The company got better, the team got better, the customers were better. Like our, they were served better, they served everybody better. And it's interesting because that's what we were shooting for when we, if someone's resistant to hire somebody, for example, right now, if you think about, let's say listing images, let's just keep running with that for a second mockup, creating mockups and all this stuff. You probably work on mockups and creating listing images and product development for what, couple hours a week? Probably maybe five hours a week maybe. Right, because you have, you're, you're doing other things in the business, naturally. Then you have family of kids and all this stuff. Like you're doing it five hours a week and you feel like you're working hard because you are working hard. Now imagine just for a second and visualize what if that was one person doing that 40 hours per week. That one job. That's all they got to think about and all they did for 40 hours per week. How much better would your would your business be? How much better would your customers be served? How much better would your revenue be and your profits? Like that's the difference for me. Sometimes when I think about something like, oh, I could just do that myself, I'm like, oh, yeah. But really, how much time do I could I really dedicate to this? Probably one hour a day. What improves in the business in anything with one hour per day? Maybe our health, our fitness. Right? But that's pretty much it. Like your marriage will suffer one hour a day. Like you as a dad, you can't do it one hour a day. Your business is not going to succeed with one hour per day. And you may as well just, if you have the means and the clarity, hire that person to focus their, make that their duty in their life. Almost like their job is to do that one thing. Passionate subject of mine and obviously of yours too. So it's fun to talk about it.
- [33:57]
Yanni
You touched on two things there. One, I said, you know, just because we're vibing, we shouldn't work together. And I'm also not a details guy. So we'd probably make a terrible team if we were left to focus on the nitty gritty details of something.
- [34:12]
Cody McGuffey
But we'd have a lot of dreams, but nothing would get done.
- [34:15]
Yanni
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. And the Other thing that you touched on is, I think, something that a lot of entrepreneurs don't assess and understand that they need to value their time. Their time is, you know, like the saying, time is money. You're the most, especially early on, you are the most valuable resource in your business. And so looking at it just like you did there, Cody, and saying, one hour of my time, where could I be putting that one hour or two hour or five hours a week? And as an example, if you're the person that has all the supplier relationships in your business and that's something that you've nurtured all these relationships, that's not something that you can really delegate off, not easily anyway. And you're going to pay someone $1,000 a month to work 40 hours a week on taking your creative to a level that you just could never even achieve even if you spent the 40 hours. Then you got to look at like, I'm getting more clicks, conversions, I'm growing the brand and I'm getting better rates or finding additional suppliers or, you know, building, you know, a business that isn't reliant on just a single source of, you know, of manufacturer. All of a sudden you just, you've got to look at the picture holistically and understand that where you spend your time is critical and, and make and understanding the trade offs.
- [35:47]
Cody McGuffey
Completely agree. And it's not only the time doing the thing, it's the time thinking about the thing that's so freaking important. It's the time, the mental. It's, it's at night when you're sleeping in bed or getting ready to go to sleep in bed and you're thinking about this thing, you're like, oh yeah, I have to remember to tell Jenny to do this thing. It's like, no, that's, that's, that's when you're doing it kind of wrong. Like if you hire the right person, that person takes all that off of you and you don't have to think about that anymore. Like, she's thinking about those things like, because, because to your point, she understands the mission. The mission is to do this. So that's her job. That's the only thing to do. Another thing I was curious to get your opinion on. Another thing that I see people make this mistake is they hire a generalist to come in, which I'm not sure if it's mistaken. I'm curious to get your opinion on it. I think I might eat my own words here, but really, they, they hire somebody to come in and then they, that person doesn't own anything, but they do a whole bunch of miscellaneous things. So they're kind of like the, the traditional, like va, the virtual assistant. And I understand the benefits of this, but it doesn't remove the mental energy because you still have to give them a task list all the time. And that's my problem with it. And I'm curious what your opinion is on this because you probably have to hire generalists, of course. I mean, I hire journalists too sometimes. But I'm curious what your opinion is.
- [37:12]
Yanni
Yeah, I, I look to avoid it at as much as possible. And I think that going through that exercise of mission, outcome and attributes, or that is called the four R's role requirements, responsibilities and results, like really thinking through like, what does my business need to grow and what does that person need to look like helps you really hone in on bringing that right person into the business. I would say that it's almost like a, you know, it's like it's part of the journey of entrepreneurship. I went through hiring generalists, you know, people doing really baseline tasks, even things like creating coupons on Amazon and thousands of them, because I didn't want to have to create that kind of, do that kind of output. And I think where you land in many instances is that, you know, I think like you've called out as well. It's like you're still sort of. It's mental energy because you're like, okay, what do I now put them on? Which is, you know, in many ways stressful. But because you're now spending someone that you need to think through what they need to be doing and achieving on a regular basis. And you know, the. There's a lot of sayings that I'm throwing out here today, but, you know, it's a jack of all trades, master of none. If you really want to elevate your business and take things to a level that you're really excited and proud about and you want to have experts coming in. So I'll, I'll say all of that and also sort of steel man it as well in when you are early stage and if you can find someone, you know, I'll give you an example. I'll give you a personal example I have right now, okay. Where I'm right now looking for a revenue operation specialist. And I'm looking to hire them locally here in Israel. And honestly, the reason why I'm very interested in having them here is as incredible as the Philippine. The Philippines is in Filipino culture. And you know, I didn't even these topics here. I think one of the, one of the weaknesses that I see is a limited ability to manage up. So you know, the culturally it's very conflict averse. So it can be difficult even. You know, I'm the nicest guy, I think and you know, you know you'll never catch me ever yelling at someone or you know, I'm always giving, if I'm giving feedback, it's constructive and I want to see you grow. And my team all knows that, you know, like no one's concerned or feels threatened but it's a challenge. I need someone here because they can manage up and they can hold us accountability accountable to the goals that we're looking to achieve. And what's more is I'm a terrible executor and project manager. It sounds like Cody, you've been able to solve this in your business. And I'm still sort of fumbling and going between like the things that are my superpower and that's like relationship building. You know, I like to get on podcasts and have meaningful conversations and add value and speak at conferences and do all of those things which I enjoy. I love putting a presentation together and thinking through like how is someone going to learn something valuable that you know, in a few years time they might come back. And it's not about the, it's not about the gratification for me, but it's just knowing that I've had a positive impact on someone else and help them not make a mistake that I had historically made. So focusing on these things, if I can find someone who is not a pure generalist because project management is key and managing up is key and being able to hold us accountable. So it's kind of project management. But if they can start to have a bit more of a handle of like the general flow of marketing and sales, like that's exciting to me as well because I want them to come and sort of be my right hand man or woman and really drive things to execution and work with my internal effectively agency of about eight to 10 people.
- [41:21]
Cody McGuffey
I have a question that's very interesting. How many people, how many people in your company right now? You said 85, is that correct?
- [41:29]
Yanni
Yes.
- [41:29]
Cody McGuffey
Is that made up of in the inter. What you consider internal folks? Right. Like full, full time employees or something like this? Like people that will dedicate themselves 40 hours a week to multiply me?
- [41:39]
Yanni
Yes, yes. We'd have like, we, we'd probably have close to maybe about 500 on, on payroll. That's inclusive of like some of the ongoing, you know, you know we, we handle payroll and healthcare and Social Security and HMO for clients of ours and we have a couple of different models but internally like reporting into our business and we have 25 management consultants in our consulting practice. We have 20 odd recruiters, we have 15 client success managers, we have a biz ops team of four. I have a marketing team of you know, two designers, a full time video product, all full time video production specialist, webflow developer, content writer, SEO specialist, project manager.
- [42:22]
Cody McGuffey
Wow.
- [42:23]
Yanni
Finance function, accounts payable, receivable, like that, that's sort of the.
- [42:27]
Cody McGuffey
Yeah. You're running an organization. I mean this is very impressive, Yanni. So congratulations first of all, like, be careful what you wish for. Yeah. Well, I know that there's downsides and upsides to everything, but I do understand the level of thinking that has to the level of evolution that needs to happen from an individual to get to be able to provide that many jobs. And then that's, it's a special thing. I don't take it lightly at all. I mean I consider myself very blessed to have 40 people full time dedicated to ever being our customers. And I mean these people rely on you in a lot of ways and you rely on them. It goes both ways and it's a beautiful thing. My question is this, how are you guys set up high level wise, meaning how many people? Let's just start with you. Are you the CEO? Founder. CEO? You're the co. Founder and CEO of Multiply Me, Is that correct?
- [43:19]
Yanni
Yes.
- [43:21]
Cody McGuffey
And how many people report to you as the CEO?
- [43:24]
Yanni
So, so how like how we are operating today is where I would say more focused on our accountabilities than we are our org chart in terms of delivery. And I say that because I have a co founder, I have two business partners and one of my business partners, Lippy and my co founder is our coo. And then we have Brandon who joined us a couple of years ago and you know, it's, it's an internal discussion that we're having. But you know, who is the rightful CEO? Does he fit the bill more than I do or vice versa? You know, so we're working our way through it and I think it's really important like to, as a takeaway for listeners like this is something you always have to perpetually assess and review and see where you fit. You know one of the things that I realized and where I sit to come back to your answer, who's reporting into me, My accountability really is attached to our revenue and our Branding and I would say like the strategic direction of the business at a, at a macro level. And so reporting into me is all those marketing and sale, you know, and our sales team will report into me that sort of roll up into revenue. So I've got about 12 people that like that report into me brand indirectly or directly?
- [44:47]
Cody McGuffey
Like are they directly into you? Correct. Okay, so you have 12 people that you have to do one on ones regularly with and check in and help them and coach them and build them up. Is that correct?
- [44:57]
Yanni
You know what? Not directly, not, not all of them directly. There's, there's four directs and then I would say the next layer down, I won't have a one on one with them, but I'll have sort of a reoccurring touch point. And I think just on that, you know, one of the, one of the challenging things as your business gets, you know, bigger and bigger is building the right reporting structures and mechanics that allow you to do it. You could one really good framework. You know, maybe this is less for the early stages, but for someone like you, Cody, if you're familiar with the entrepreneurial operating system eos, you know, it's a, to really, it's a really solid methodology to help you get sort of the visibility and clarity. But coming back to it, Lippy the coo, he's got the most people reporting into him or the most total team members that would roll up like he sits across our recruitment function, Brandon sits across our source, you know, our client success function, our finance function. And it sounds like you guys are.
- [46:00]
Cody McGuffey
Probably similar to a lot of organizations. And I like to bring this up because I didn't know this when I was first starting business. And I think it'd be useful to understand how a company is structured because it would just be helpful for me to be able to think as an early, early entrepreneur to understand where I can go. It helps me kind of visualize where, how it works kind of high, at a high level. And from what I'm hearing from you is you have, let's just call it just you for now, just as a CEO. CEO, you have.
- [46:29]
Yanni
Yep.
- [46:30]
Cody McGuffey
You probably have four people. You said you have four people report directly into you. These are like the ones that you're like trying to build them up and like you're just coaching them, probably weekly talking to them. And then those four people probably have another four people, three to four people reporting to each one of them. And then then there's another layer and as you grow, as you scale, you add another four people. Below each one of them. And that's why they call it middle management. If anybody that has a full time job, you're familiar with that term and this is kind of how an organization starts to scale itself. And then his co founder, Brandon. You said Brandon, right? He probably has, I'm guessing here, you correct me, four or five people reporting directly into him and then kind of the same structure. Four or five people and then four or five people.
- [47:15]
Yanni
Yeah, like to give the listeners sort of like even more clarity here. So we have our C suite, myself, Brandon and Lippy who are, you know each owners of the business. Then the next layer down is our senior leadership or you know, our senior leadership team which consists of about 10. So we have ahead of each of those functions we had client success, account management, you know, finance, marketing kind of will soon to be, you know that that rev UPS person that I'll bring in will likely step into sort of managing that seat to build more leverage in for me and so on, you know, and so on for each of the functions. And then like you said, each one of them will then have their reporting lines in their team. So just to come back to. And I think I'm glad that you sort of touched on this because it's more structured approach. When I was saying before that I had 12 people. Well I have two in the sales team that will directly report into me and then I have my project manager who really sits across sort of all of the relationships in the marketing team. And then I have my creative director who sits creating creative and elements. So I'm having one on ones with each of those four people a week which consists across two functions. And when you get really scaled up or when you do this correctly, I'll have one meeting with sales, one meeting with you know, one meeting with marketing, one like essentially and slowly but surely not be as involved. And a big part of being able to achieve that level of success is also having the right reporting metrics and insights and data which for us as well we have a function called business operations, biz ops that we're now starting to get that clarity inside of that you know, we look at our metrics each week, we understand where we're performing, we understand where we're not and when we. When you can derive that level of clarifiers and just personal relationships and how do I make this person better, how do I invest in them and their growth to you know, the pie for all of us.
- [49:21]
Cody McGuffey
It's beautiful man. We talked about a whole bunch of stuff. We went from like 0 to 1 to like 1 to 3. And then we also went from like 3 to 10 and like you have a team of 85 and reporting structure and organizational corporate type of discussions which is really fun. I want to learn. Maybe we could talk about this for the next three to five minutes is Multiply Me and I want to ask you one question. At what stage should someone listening to this in their business? At what stage do you think Multiply Me would fit for them to make their first, second, third, 10th higher and when, like why would they use Multiply Me versus Upwork or Fiverr in certain situations? Can you maybe like help people understand kind of what they need here?
- [50:05]
Yanni
Definitely, definitely. And I think the platforms that you, you mentioned are a really good sort of stepping stones to working with a Multiply Me. So for those who might not be familiar, Fiverr, it's very much like a gig economy. So you'll come in and you'll look for what can someone provide me? I can, I can create you five image creatives for Etsy or I can do your keyword research or it's sort of like mostly pre built is their model and you'll go and you'll search.
- [50:37]
Cody McGuffey
And be like oh that very transactional.
- [50:39]
Yanni
Exactly. I can drive this traffic to your Etsy store from externally or I can do all these things and it's going to be a fixed cost typically. So that's I would say like that's a really good starting point especially if they've got good reviews and it's really what you're looking for and the thing that's going to help your business. I would say the next level is going to be upwork where these are freelancers that are looking for opportunities. But you're putting a brief together, you're having to invest more time into thinking through like what do I need? Is it part time, project full time? What does that look like? And it's pay as you go. It can be hourly, it can be right. You can negotiate those, those aspects and again it comes back to where you sit. Multiply Me. How we're structured is that we're focused on placing full time talent into businesses. You know our model is really for people who are at that level where they've got a handle of their business. You know, they didn't start last week and they don't have any experience hiring or going through it. Like where we're going to be a more suited fit for someone who's maybe hired one or two people, maybe got it wrong or is really committed or has allocated budget to be able to afford, you know, 1500, 2000, two and a half thousand dollars a month to pay someone a full time salary. And for us like where I would say like our value proposition and the, and the difference that you'll find with us compared to these platforms or even sort of competitors of ours is that we're here to guide the process. So we want to make sure that we're also a lot of the things that I talked about like the understanding the role, understanding the needs, like we want to tease that out of you and help you make good decisions and even say to you we're not a fit or you're not ready for this role or that's not the role that's really going to necessarily be the highest value lever for you. Like we really invest heavily in helping people make good decisions or referring them to, you know, fiverr or upwork or Etsy and not Etsy, Fiverr or upwork or to a competitor even that might do, you know, part time work or more VA style work. Because for us we're about the long term relationship and about creating value for people and helping them through that journey. And so, you know, I think the biggest sort of marker of success when you talk about service businesses is that 60 odd percent of our growth comes from existing clients. So they'll hire one person and then two and then three and then four and then five and they'll grow a team with us. And that, and that's because it's, we're really not transactional about how we want to approach this and we just want to give really solid advice wherever you sit. If you have 10 employees at a BPO and you have experience, then we can cater to you and we can help you grow that team. If you have never done this before, then we are happy to invest the time to educate you through that process until it, it makes sense to you. So you know, in terms of coming to us and at what time I would say like, you know, you won't have started in the last three months with zero experience. Like we just won't be a fit. It's not worth your time to invest that until you've sort of figured out what your business is and where you're going and you have, you know, again, I don't want to see an experience that I called out before where someone is staking their whole business on it. Not, you know, not investing the time to work with the team member they've just hired and then trying to, you know, we want to help people, not harm them. And that's the most important thing to us.
- [54:17]
Cody McGuffey
At what revenue stage do typically most of your clients have when they come to you guys? I mean, are they. Like you already mentioned, it's not zero to one. So they're not just starting last week, but it sounds like they have to have some revenue. Well, your ideal customers, the people that are just like the 60% that are just happy with you guys and, and you're happy with them and you just serve them really well. Like what, how big are they? Revenue wise?
- [54:39]
Yanni
So I would say, I would say revenue wise from where it makes sense is, you know, the way you should think about it is you need to be able to afford between 12 and $20,000 a year to invest in this. That's actually gonna, So I would say like, don't be overstretching yourself. So that might look like, you know, again, I don't know what your profit. Like revenue can be a little bit risky. You need to have the margins in it. But you know, from a couple hundred, you know, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand dollars in profit of, of, of, of revenue, I would say and having the, having the profit, again, if you've got a product that's 80% margins, then you're, you're laughing. So that's what. But I would say like our, our, our ICP or you know, like we love building teams. So as you get to a million, 2 million, 3 million, 5 million, like obviously we can do a lot more with those businesses and we can, you know, they're already working with an agency. We can help them start to bring aspects in house or you know, we can do a lot more. I would say though, you know, the short of it, and I've just been working on our sort of goals and Persona, it's like 10 to 200 person businesses in the E Commerce space are really like, you know, our bread and butter because they've gone through that process of hiring, they've got an understanding for it and you know, we're going to help them with the remote. Not just finding, you know, the best talent you'll find in the Philippines, but also how do you onboard them correctly? We've got our own seven C's onboarding framework. How do you build management protocol? How do you like do all of the things that we've just learned over the years and we build this into our processes to help elevate business owners to really just make not just good decisions, but be better managers and elevate the Talent. Helping them with their soft skills as well, helping them be better with time management and managing up and the things that I talked about, like how do we, how do we make people better before they even start working with you is, is a big part of what we try and focus on.
- [56:39]
Cody McGuffey
I love that I have. I think this is perfect time to move into our last segment of the show, which is the rapid fire questions. Are you ready? What's your favorite business book?
- [56:52]
Yanni
Favorite business book? I would actually say the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is probably the business book that started all for Me by Stephen R. Covey. If you haven't read it, it's everything.
- [57:07]
Cody McGuffey
I love that. What's the one thing that you wish that you knew before starting your business?
- [57:16]
Yanni
Once did he wins a race? Be focused.
- [57:21]
Cody McGuffey
What's the worst business advice that you've ever received?
- [57:28]
Yanni
Do everything all at once. Just, just, just go for it.
- [57:32]
Cody McGuffey
Did somebody actually give you that advice?
- [57:35]
Yanni
I think like the, I think like the, the notion of like, well, because you can do something, you, you should do something. You know, I think like, I don't know that I've gotten that advice per se, but it's definitely as a young, hungry, you know, a younger hungry entrepreneur, it's definitely, you know, something that I thought, you know, you think you're like when you're a kid, you just think you're inventible.
- [58:01]
Cody McGuffey
I completely agree with that. I felt I'm constantly falling victim to this and I always, we always talk about focus a lot on the show because it's so close to my heart. And I do have this saying that I try to teach to my younger brother and my nephews and hopefully to my kids eventually as they get a little older. It's just because we can doesn't mean that we should. And that is pretty much exactly what you said. It's kind of like the curse of entrepreneur, the curse of the creator, the curse of the builder. Just because you can create something doesn't mean you should go and spend your time and focus on doing that thing. Love that. How many hours do you think that you work on your business every week?
- [58:41]
Yanni
It would vary. It would vary definitely. Since having now two kids, it's definitely reduced. But I think it's been a real force function to, to be more, more meticulous. I don't work over the weekends, so I mean the weeks here on Sunday to Thursday, which I'll never get used to. But you know, from Thursday afternoon circle 4:00 in the afternoon until Sunday morning, I typically Won't open my email. I would say about 40 hours a week. I'd be working today, probably telling you close to 16 to 18 hours a day.
- [59:20]
Cody McGuffey
And how much of that time is thinking about the business, thinking about the organizational structure, thinking about your team, any of that stuff over the weekend?
- [59:30]
Yanni
Not enough. I would say not enough. But we've built really healthy structures now. So we have now first half of the year, second half of the year planning that sets the tone for what projects we're going to work on to align the one year goal, the three year picture, the 10 year target, you know, and move us forward. So we have seven or eight objectives for the year and that's broken down into first half of the year goals across every function and second half of the year goals. So as part of that and in our budgeting, we then think through. So I think the answer, the real answer to that, Cody, is that we structure into when we think about, when we think about it, as opposed to having to sort of do it on the fly. Now we're quite organized.
- [60:22]
Cody McGuffey
I love that. Last question. If your family and your friends and your customers had to all get together and write an honest article about just you and about your traits and your characteristics without you knowing, without you being influential at all in this process, what do you think the things are that they would say?
- [60:46]
Yanni
The things that I would say in general or things that they would say that I'm like best at good and bad.
- [60:53]
Cody McGuffey
What would they say about you?
- [60:54]
Yanni
They, they would say I have an exceptional ability to, to connect and, and build relationship, that I'm very creative. And they would say, you know, that I would hope they would say I'm a good person and always have, you know, the best of intentions. I would say terrible when it comes to attention to detail finance and having like meticulous focus. And you know, I would say those are all things that, you know, you got to take the good with the bad.
- [61:29]
Cody McGuffey
I love that. Yanni, thank you for your time. Where can people find you? I know that you have a podcast and you have a YouTube channel and you have all kinds of places where people can find you if you can share those now.
- [61:44]
Yanni
Yeah, the best place is on LinkedIn. That's probably where I'm most active. You know, my, my personal, you know, Instagram is a lot less active these days, but that's also yon cause is, is where you can find me too. Or just email me y o n I@ either multiplyme mii.com or weareascala.com. i'm always happy to have a conversation I have. I'd say to anyone listening, you know, if anything has been of interest, you know, we have a lot of free resources on our website, from hundreds and hundreds of job descriptions to what you should be paying talent in the Philippines to the organ accountability chart and a whole host of just free resources. So check out our websites and hopefully there's some stuff there that's helpful.
- [62:36]
Cody McGuffey
Beautiful. And we will link for anybody listening to this or watching this on YouTube. We'll link to all of those links in the show notes and also in the description, depending on where you're watching this or listening to this. But Yanni, thank you so much for coming on, man. I think this has been a very interesting and reflective conversation for me to have with you and educational for me. So thank you.
- [62:56]
Yanni
Likewise. I've loved every minute of it. And yeah, when I start, when I get my podcast up and running again, I'd love to have you and host you.
- [63:06]
Cody McGuffey
Love to. More than happy to. Awesome, man. Talk to you soon.