There’s an art and a science to scaling your service business. A big part of it is learning to work on your business and not in your business. I discuss how to do that with my guest, Rick Elmore.

Rick Elmore is the Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, a technology company helping businesses build stronger relationships through automated handwritten communication powered by real pen and ink.

A former college and professional football player turned entrepreneur, Rick has combined his background in sales, marketing, and relationship-building to create one of the fastest-growing handwritten outreach platforms in the world.

We dive into topics including:

Rick’s early days in sales that lead to his multi-million-dollar discovery.

The importance of getting the right people in the right seats of your business.
How to work on your business instead of in your business.
Where and when Rick started working on his business instead of in his business.
Your life cycle as an entrepreneur from inception to scaling your business.
The importance of building an ecosystem of trust in your business and how to do it.
What you need to do next after you build the core team of your business.
How to scale your marketing initiatives.
How to keep your sanity when you’re scaling as an owner/operator.
The importance of discipline and how to develop it.
Why scaling is a lifelong journey that never ends.
The one thing, above all else, that you need to do to successfully scale your service business.

…and other golden nuggets of advice!

Rick’s Origin Story

Rick has a pretty unique background. He was an athlete growing up. He played college and professional sports, even though athletics didn’t come to naturally to him.

Athletics was something that Rick was able to be successful at because he was a hard worker and didn’t overextend himself. A lot of people discredit what you can get done in 10 years versus all the pressure they put on themselves to get done in a year. Rick had 15 years of experience working on not overextending himself before he became an entrepreneur.

Rick made it to the NFL in 2010, but he was an athlete for a long time before that. His first year in the NFL he was playing for the Cleveland Browns, and he was with one of the back office people. They showed me his draft profile and it said, “This guy plays above his potential, is an overachiever, and wins with effort.” Back then he used to think that was like a stab. But now, being 38 years old, Rick looks back and he believes that all of those were his strengths. He used that and leveraged his ability to keep working hard to push on and persevere through any of life’s problems.

Then five years in the NFL Rick went back and got his MBA. He was a typical B or C student; nothing special as he recalls. His mindset was that he was just there to memorize stuff and take tests. But he fell in love with learning because he was passionate about and interested in business. He wanted to learn how to start a business. He wanted to learn about what made businesses work even though he was completely green in the entrepreneurship space. When Rick went into sales that was one of the turning points in his life.

Life After Sports

Because he found something he was interested in, it became a lot easier to dedicate his life to it after sports. He had a marketing professor that said something that changed his life. About a year into his program, the professor said that handwritten mail had a 99% open rate.

Rick realized that if you got something in the mail, and it was handwritten, you were going to open it. He grew up in the nineties, when people used to write notes to their friends. It became a lost art over time. BUT there was no way to like do it efficiently at scale. It took Rick a lot of time to sit down and write a holiday card to each of his clients and put them in envelopes.

Rick started researching and there was a technology called a “pen plotter” out at that time. It had no paper feed, no technology behind it. He got it from China, built it and went to his friends and said “Hey, this is my idea. Can you help me?” He knew nothing about software, nothing about software integrations and software coding.

Rick’s a-HA! Business Scaling Moment

But he DID know that if his idea could be flushed out there would be an opportunity for a business because nobody else was doing it. Rick made it work. He created 500 handwritten notes using that simple handwriting robot and sent them out to clients and prospects. The response rate was amazing. Many of his clients and prospects were doctors and many of them responded to his note that it helped Rick bypass his $50,000 a month quota.

Rick made over $270,000 in sales. That was the most money he had ever made. He laughed because people think just because he was in NFL, that he made a lot of money, which is not true. Only about 1% of the athletes who go to the NFL make all the money that you think they do.

The CEO of his company took notice of the results Rick was getting. When he met Rick, he said “Keep doing whatever you’re doing. It’s working.” Rick figured if the CEO is noticing what he’s doing, it had to mean he was on to something.

**The Payoff for Scaling His Business the Right Way**

Rick says he was a football player and a sales and marketing guy who started a robotics/engineering automation business with zero experience. But he wouldn’t have been able to get to over $10 million in revenue, with multi-seven-figure a year runs in business, if he hadn’t gotten the right people in the right seats and built the right systems for scaling everything he was doing.

Rick says you can’t just focus on one thing. You must scale your marketing, get the leads, and then scale the team to close the leads. After that you must scale your production. And that was a process. Rick believes what most entrepreneurs do wrong is getting stuck working in their businesses instead of working on their businesses.

It was time for Rick to start working on his business.

That is just the beginning!

Watch or listen to the interview for the rest of the story and more golden nuggets of advice!

You can get my book here: “Idea Climbing: How to Create a Support System for Your Next Big Idea”

About My Guest

Idea Climbing Podcast Rick Elmore

Rick Elmore is the Founder and CEO of Simply Noted, a technology company helping businesses build stronger relationships through automated handwritten communication powered by real pen and ink.

Founded in 2018, Simply Noted helps companies scale authentic, personalized communication through proprietary technology that integrates handwritten notes into modern sales and marketing systems.

Under Rick’s leadership, the company has worked with businesses across industries including real estate, insurance, hospitality, nonprofit, franchise, and B2B organizations.

Before launching Simply Noted, Rick played football at the University of Arizona and spent time in the NFL before transitioning into medical sales and entrepreneurship. Today, he is known for his expertise in relationship-driven marketing, customer retention, and helping businesses stand out in an increasingly automated world.

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