Unlocking Revenue Growth with EOS | Kyle Mealy | Ep 190

Kyle Mealy  00:00

I can drag the horse to water. I can put the cup in its hoof, but it doesn't mean it's going to drink the thing. So have as much as you want, take as much as you want, because heck, in the internet will figure it out anyway. Chatgpt will take it anyway. So I might as well put my name behind it and give something really valuable, and then you'll call me. If they can fail 1000 times and get a little bit better on each fail, they're going to be great. I'm going to take 70 terrible swings to get one good swing. So I think that's kind of where that has shown up for me.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:36

Welcome to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. I'm your host, Debra Chantry Taylor and I am passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead their ideal lives by creating better businesses.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:54

I'm a certified EOS implementer, an FBA accredited family business advisor and a business owner. Myself with several business interests. I work with established business owners and their leadership teams to help them live their ideal entrepreneurial life using Eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. My guests come onto the show to authentically share the highs and lows of creating a successful business and how they turn things around in their business to create a better business and a better life. Today's guest started life as a lab manager, just like me, before moving into revenue generation. Every business that he has worked with has doubled its revenue, and he has 30 years of martial arts experience, and he uses these principles in his business today is going to share a different way for visionaries and integrators to fill the s/m seat in their business, and the benefits that will have for the revenue of the business. Kyle mealy is a fractional chief revenue officer who is also the founder of next level coaching. They provide fractional CRO services to businesses. So welcome to the show, Kyle, lovely to have you here today.

Kyle Mealy  01:57

Oh, I'm so grateful to be here. Thanks for having me, Debra.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  02:00

We've just made a chat, as we always do before we come on these podcasts, and Kyle was sharing his story with me. Would you like to share with the listeners your story of how you got to be where you are today?

Kyle Mealy  02:13

I would. I'll just say, you know, my story is kind of a funny one, but really it has led me to really help visionaries and integrators and small business owners think differently about marketing and sales and, you know, drive the ROI they're dreaming of and each of the steps in my road to get here has added another key component that allows me to do that. So we were joking, and I'm like, You're never going to believe where I started. And I said, lab manager, and you're like, that was me. It was my first job out of out of college or university, and that was true for me, but as it relates to where I got to where I am now.

I learned about analytics. I learned about QA, quality assurance and quality control of data. I learned about systems and operating and standard operating procedures. And then I also learned, like, leadership the hard way. I was the youngest person in the facility of like 15 people, and they were all at minimum, 23 years my senior. And now I was, you know, in some degrees, their boss. So I had to, like, really figure out how to earn respect quick and deliver results my boss, you know, we had done really well in a in the first year and a half, we had actually won the lab of the year for our industry. And my boss came to me, goes, Kyle, you're fantastic. If you keep doing what you're doing, in 10 years, you can have my job. And at that moment, I died like I deeply died, because that's just not going to work for me. It's not who I am. Anybody who knows me knows that's the truth.

And so I took a right turn in a very interesting way. I had been doing martial arts for about 30 years, and the person I earned my black belt with when I was nine was running a school near where I was now living. And I had been kind of, you know, working with him a little bit, teaching on the side, and he was like, come teach. Come teach with me. Come run the school with me. He saw that I could do the systems in the process. He saw that I could teach really well. And so I said, okay, and we I started working full time running a karate school.

Kyle Mealy  04:13

Now we did some pretty cool things. It wasn't your typical, you know, dingy Dojo is the joke we would use. We were much more than that. And because of the way he taught me kind of how to be an entrepreneur and how to think like an entrepreneur, we did things like great game of business. We were one of the first karate schools in the entire country, one of the first three actually, to earn a million in revenue out of a single location. And when I had met him, he was making about 60,000 a year, working 60 hours a week. And in very short order, he was working about six hours a week, making, well, you know, multiple hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year. We had a staff of my, you know, my team was, like 27 at one point, I was kind of running as the integrator. I didn't know I was kind of running the integrator. In fact, near the end we were, we were using level 10 meetings. And I, we had scorecards that I didn't really know, and we were doing really well. Everybody was happy.

And he sat me down and goes, Kyle, in 10 years, if you keep doing what you're doing, you can take over the schools, and anybody's following along and kept with me on this long story goes, well, Kyle's moving on. So I did, and at that point, I'd really fall in love with marketing and sales, and because that's what the owner of the grocery school was actually really good at. He really understand marketing and sales. And so I kind of fall in love with it. Had to learn it well. And so I took it to a digital marketing agency. There was one of their first sales and marketing hires. They had been stuck at about 3 million for a few years. They were running on EOS. And that was when I first really realized what EOS looked like. They've been doing, you know, pretty much to the T and all of a sudden we started to really grow.

And so I applied everything I learned up into that point, and we went 4 million, 5 million, and then we were going to clear seven and a half or 7 million right as I left. Why did I leave? Well, they wanted to focus on bigger business, and I fell in love a small business. I had been talking at speaking at EOS conference, talking about marketing and sales for so long that I had kind of decided that I needed to stay there and love and work with those businesses. So that's what I do now. I do fractional Chief Revenue Officer, which is not like the sales flavour of Chief Revenue Officer. That's why I put small business in front of it, because I it, because I really think we have to think about marketing and sales as a combined resource, a revenue seat.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  06:29

That’s really interesting. I mean, I haven't really heard of that much before, and I think it's a really interesting way of approaching as I actually come from a sales and marketing background, and I always believe that the two can't be separated and such. They've got to work really, really closely together. But you can work for large organisations where they literally start to silo these and it gives the opportunity for sales to go. Marketing don't give us good leads, and marketing can kind of go sales don't convert our leads. And so you can really have a challenge around trying to balance that. And so when often we see the sales and marketing seat in an EOS accountability chart, you kind of go wonder how they're going to fill that. Because it is, it is quite an unusual combination. If you looked at corporate world as an example.

Kyle Mealy  07:09

Well, I would say this, right? It's the only one in EOS where there's a slash between it, right? That's really it doesn't make sense. So I would say, you know, in my vision for my business, is that businesses running on EOS make it revenue. Just write revenue in there and have one revenue leader. Now it does maybe scale differently at a certain size, but for EOS is target market we're kind of then it kind of maybe makes more sense. But you know, the cost of hiring a true marketing and sales exec has gotten really, really, really expensive for the businesses I tend to work with, and so they can have one or the other be, rarely both. And so that was the problem I saw and I wanted to solve. And to your point about the, you know, the marketing bickering with the sales and sales and marketing. And yes, there are plenty that make it work, and it's a beautiful thing.

But you know where I really wanted to go down this road was I saw businesses trying to run like enterprise with having this siloed marketing, siloed sales, and it wasn't working. And that's when I kind of came up with the idea that my business is like Moneyball for marketing and sales. Now if you're not familiar with Moneyball, it's this incredible book. You have to be a baseball fan. I know you're out in Australia and New Zealand area. So maybe not, as you know big but Moneyball is this idea that there was a small market team, the Oakland Athletics, and then there's the big market team, the New York Yankees. Most people know them, and their payroll was many times what the athletics were. And so at that point, people were doing it all the old school baseball way, which is you look at the per the player and you say, Oh, they're good at swinging. We'll give them a chance with these. Oakland Athletics did is they looked at the pure metrics of the game. They looked deep at them numbers, and built a team of kind of broken pieces together, and they ended up winning 100 games, which in the major leagues is unbelievable. That was the year they, they had the longest win streak in in season in history, using this, you know, cheap team built entirely on metrics. And that's, that's exactly my poach, my approach. They say, I'm the duct tape and popsicle sticks guy.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  09:20

I love it. I absolutely love it. Okay, it's interesting. Actually, I was just thinking, as you were saying, that EOS worldwide, as in the actual head office, based over in the US, they actually have a Revenue Officer.

Kyle Mealy  09:30

Where do you think I got the idea?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  09:33

Yeah, okay, there you go. Well, that's cool.

Kyle Mealy  09:37

That makes so much sense.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  09:38

Oh, perfect. Okay, so tell me a little bit about because I think, I think the fractional thing is something that I know. It's huge in the US. It's not quite so big in Australia and New Zealand. And I think people have become used to having, like, a fractional CFO. That's something that most people are quite comfortable with. I think people are just starting to think about, could we have a fractional integrator? But tell me about, you know, a fraction. Or CRO what does that really look like, and what's the benefit of it, as opposed to having hiring somebody internally, or either hiring somebody or raising somebody up internally?

Kyle Mealy  10:09

Well, I'll think, I'll say it kind of two different ways. You know? Why I started my businesses at each of the businesses I was in, what had, what happened was I really got things under control. We were growing healthy, and the CEO, the visionary, the leader, was really happy where things were. And we kind of cleared this big hurdle, right? We broke through some plateau, and now we're kind of, you know, trying to maintain the status quo. And there are people like me who that is boring, that is like, abhorrent to us, and want to go fast and want to keep breaking new boundaries. And so what fractional allows someone like me to do, and this is kind of sitting on the fractional and explaining it to someone else. Why this would be good, is like I get to wake up every day and try and break a new boundary. And I'm not just sitting there, kind of keeping a machine going, collecting a pay check. I'm going in there and having to earn my keep every time and I have to be laser precise with my efforts and really be focused on driving every inch of ROI because I'm there for such a short amount of time for an intense, passionate dude like me, that's like breathing, that's like, what I wake up for. The other part of it is, is the expertise, right? This isn't my first time doing this. I've helped a lot of businesses. And so I'm not coming in and kind of figuring it out. You're not paying someone who's maybe, you know, fresh out of university do this, or has done this one other time. We've now done this multiple times. And so I'm coming in with a playbook, I'm coming in with a plan, I'm coming in with a proven model, and I'm inserting it into your business dynamically and efficiently. So what you're really getting is you're paying for someone who can go much, much faster than you could normally get, even in full time. So it's my perspective.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  11:51

Perfect. So they hit the ground running. So that's what fractional is all about. Actually, it's, I mean, somebody is hugely experienced who can actually hit the ground running, who's going to do it in a fraction of the time, but you don't when you don't need a full time person. So then, what kind of if you did decide to go down that route, what kind of support would you need, sort of within the organisation to support that fractional CRO?

Kyle Mealy  12:12

Yeah, why? I love small business. I said this duct tape and popsicle sticks before is like, I I never wanted to be a consultant with a deck, and say, here's what you should do. Because, like, if I could show my hands, if my keyboard was dirty, my hands would show it like, I wish. I wish it was like the old days with the old ink blotter, because my hands would be black from all the I like getting my hands dirty, right? And so I think fractional, you know what? I think the common term would be consultant. It's like, No, I don't want to be a consultant. I want to be part of the part of the solution. So I always think about scaffolding. The word I use is scaffolding, and so I might do some of the heavy lifting in in like, raise up the business for a little bit on my back. Now, what I've done is I've built an internal team. So we've got a pretty healthy team behind me, both of marketing people and other CROs who do the work that we do.

But what I can do is I can hand off the marketing playbook I've already built to maybe build that custom landing page for this campaign. Hand it to them. They can build it faster than anybody. For me, it's part of the retainer to go get this up and running, hand it back to the client. Well, if I do my job right, that, you know, landing page or that campaign is going to drive a new level of revenue. And in that new level of revenue, and in my model that I've built, we know exactly how much of that, you know, new revenue can be profitably, fiscally responsibly, applied back into marketing and sales. So then it's up to me to determine what's the next right resource for your team. And so then I add that piece, and now we've scaffolded your team a little bit, and then I might incrementally move it up, move you up. And that's where the scaffolding idea came from. But I've got all kinds of different team sizes that we worked with. You know? I've got one team where it's too offshore for the US, offshore South American part time marketing and sales coordinators. So they do a lot of the heavy lifting. I've got a, you know, a really large industrial client with, you know, global salespeople all over, and marketing resources all over. And so we're kind of stitching all those pieces together and then finding right what? What's the right next move for them?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  14:25

Perfect, love it. Okay, so what do you reckon the biggest mistake people make when they're using EOS, they're doing the accountability chart, and they go with the S/M, kind of seat? What do you think the biggest mistakes people make?

Kyle Mealy  14:35

Well, I think, I think there's this, like, really common pattern that happens. And so people talk about, you know, we should, you know, fill the seat. Well, first off, let's make it revenue, because really, you need somebody who understands marketing and sales in the Myer, modern buying journey, it's a little different if it's pure E, com or B to C, like it is all kind of marketing. But I would, I would dare so. Say, argue that you know your customer success, your on page experience, or your you know behind your paywall experience needs to be operated by someone like a customer success seat, and that's kind of become sales and ecom. But let's put that over here and just make it simple.

The simple thing is, have a revenue leader and then stop thinking sales first, because that's the old playbook. I think what a lot of visionaries do when they're trying to get themselves out of the sales seat is they say, I'm going to hire a salesperson. And they hire a, you know, a 5045, in the US 60,000 person say, I'm going to find someone who's really hungry. I'm going to give them a big commission and pay them low salary, give them a laptop and say, Go get them Tiger. And in the meantime, that CEO, that visionary, is not answering all those cold calls or those LinkedIn emails, but they're out there telling their salesperson, go do that. And then when it fails, they blame the salesperson. And so I think that is probably the number one. The second is the, you know, go hire the marketing coordinator. Usually it's the it's the relative or family friend nearest to you that is the most tech savvy or on social and then that person doesn't, you know, sure, they make great graphics and they put up your, you know, happy anniversary to your team member post, but that you're not driving any ROI you know you're laughing because you know exactly.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  16:25

I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm just, I'm just sitting here thinking, I think a lot of the clients that I've gone through the OS process with that that has happened in the beginning, because it's, you don't know any different, right? And so if you don't know any different, that's what you do.

Kyle Mealy  16:35

And then the third is you hire an expensive agency for a specific tactic, and that's, that's that, to me, is it means you don't understand your numbers. And so I think about not just doing, you know, being strategic before the tactic. I actually think about the language. If you want to change your thinking, you have to change your language. And so that's why I'm so you know, if you keep hearing me, and I'm not doing it unintentionally, I keep saying marketing and sales, not sales and marketing. I'm not putting sales in front. So if we change our language and start thinking in terms of we need more revenue, not just sales, and we know that, say revenue is marketing and sales, we start to then think about the numbers. And the numbers are, how many qualified leads are you driving in? How do you know where they're coming from? How many visitors to your website, and how are you measuring all the little steps in between? And if you're not measuring those and you're just throwing tactics to get more sales, that's when you run into huge prompts. So those are the big three. That's where I usually get called. And

Debra Chantry-Taylor  17:33

I think I'm just sitting here also thinking about our own businesses. I mean, I've got, I've actually got a degree in Marketing, and I know all this stuff, but I think that when you're running a business as the visionary or as an integrator, you're often just so busy doing other stuff that even though your specialty expertise might have been in that way, way back, it's not, I mean, I don't think anybody in our business truly looks at numbers in that way. So it's a bit of wake up call.

Kyle Mealy  17:56

Well, I call it the label in the jar problem, and it's why I do my own program for myself, and I have one of my CROs being my CRO, not me, and so the label in the jar. Problem is it's really hard to read the label when I'm inside the jar. And so I tend to over complicate our marketing and sales process, if you let me at it, because I have so much I want to share. I have so many cool ideas, and I have so many things that I think would be great. And what I usually find when I come in with really wise, you know, visionaries and CEOs who really understand marketing, dangerously understand marketing, is they've complexified and made it so hard to understand and so over the top that I end up having to come in and cut and simplify and it's just, it's and I laugh because I'm them. I know that's why I do my own stuff. I drink my own champagne.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  18:49

Okay, course, we talked about some of the mistakes people make. Let's talk about some of the things people can do, you know, to improve their overall revenue, if you like. Is there any, I mean, I know that it's what you do for them, but it's right for people listening on this. Is there anything they can do to sort of sanity check what they're doing, maybe get a bit of finger on the pulse and see what's really going on?

Kyle Mealy  19:10

Yeah, I think in you know, I live breathe, they spend a lot of time in the EOS community. So I don't say this lightly, but in general, there's a lot of noise around marketing and sales scorecards. You know, salespeople have one cardio card. Marketing has one scorecard, and what is the leadership team actually looking at? And when you put the lens of revenue under it, you can have a much more effective scorecard. And so, what I teach my clients, and it's diagnostic tool, and it's, I give it away free, and I'm a very weird marketer. There's no email to get this. Like, I'm not going to trade email from you. Just like, I want everybody to have it because, like, then their business runs better, and if their business runs better, there's more opportunity for people and selfishly, like, yeah, you can know all the answers. It's like, you can know that your car. Broken and making that noise, but it doesn't mean you know how to fix it.

So you'll still call me like, there's my selfish part. I'll just, you know, humbly admit it, but I call it the revenue cascade. And so most businesses running on us that I know of and that have come across now, obviously there's plenty that are crushing it, so like there's but there are some who don't have this knowledge, or I haven't seen this, so they'll track, you know, maybe from marketing, it'll be how many people visited their website. Okay, I would call that traditionally, a vanity metric. The second is leads, and then the third is deals, one or closed or new revenue, or new business, whatever. And there's usually some variation thereof, but not a lot in what revenue cascade is. It really rips those open, those numbers apart, and says, from the moment somebody interacts with your brand, that we can measure that could be LinkedIn impressions, that could be website impressions, whatever, all the way down to when the dollar is collected, wherever that is, think of it as like a big waterfall, and every stage, people fall off a little bit more until they get to the signed, you know, the bottom line, where the dollar comes.

Kyle Mealy  21:06

And so, you know, we want to look at the interest stage. We want to know how many people are on the key conversion page for your website. We want to know how many people are, you know, hitting your LinkedIn page, or, you know, opening that newsletter that you send out. You can track all of those things. And so what I look for is, what's the ratio of people visiting your website to doing the thing you want them to do, or visiting the page you want them to visit? Most people don't even know what I'm talking about this point, which is why you know whatever you can have it go, try and diagnose it. The next step is, how many people are actually getting to your contact form? What are they doing? There are tools we can look at to see how they're like interacting with your fill out a form.

Or how many people are sending you a LinkedIn message saying, Hey, I saw your great thought leadership. I want to learn more. And then we can look at Discovery call. We can look at, you know, what do you do after that? Are you just giving them a quote after a call and hoping, like, what are you doing after that? Are you giving them some sort of assessment? Are you presenting the solution to them. And when you understand the drop offs there, you can do some amazing things. And that's what Rev cascade teaches you to do, is go look at all those numbers, and then you can make really surgical moves. This is what I'm saying. Before you get to tactics on where you need the increase in marketing or sales. It's like what a lot of visitors will come in and say, All right, our number of website visitors is low. It's red. We need to go spend money on marketing. And it's like, maybe you're already spending the wrong money on marketing. Maybe you're just bringing the wrong users to your website because they're not clicking the page or going to the page you need. You're missing a page on your website. If we fix that, this might all go away, and it could be a, you know, a 20 minute landing page design. And so that's what I really, really dive into, is those.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  22:45

Yeah, I used to teach marketing at the Marketing Association over here in New Zealand, and I was teaching digital marketing strength long, long time ago, but things have changed since then. But it was, it was the whole thing about you've actually got to get your conversion rate better before you start pumping more things into the funnel, right? Because if you just keep pumping things with the funnel, you don't change the conversion rate. You don't change the conversion rate. You've wasted all that stuff. But you have to, in order to increase your conversion rate, you have to understand your customer and what they're actually wanting to do. And, yeah, it was just, isn't I mean, I think the basics are still, you know, still there, but I'm sure the technology has changed. It's just about being smart. It's about using data wisely, right?

Kyle Mealy  23:22

I'd say it, instead of applying, anybody who really looks under the hood is I'm not doing anything crazy, I think I've just packaged it in a way that's very consumable, and it's applicable to both sales and marketing at the same time. And so, yeah, it's definitely kind of digital marketing, 101 and kind of user experience, 101, but apply globally to the whole revenue department. So, like one example, I ran the revenue cascade on a client. Actually, it's funny. It was a fractional integrator client, which is very and their sales conversion rate was low. And that was so that was the first thing. It was like, We got to solve that, because if you move your sales conversion rate up by double, which is just maybe going from 10% to 20% and you have a high ticket item for every 10 that comes down that channel, you're getting two instead of one. You double your business very quickly. That way, it's like the math is really simple there. I think we can all do that in, you know, and I don't have to be a genius to know we're selling to visionaries. And the proposal was a document, a Word document, so we changed that. We made pretty pictures. And guess what? It worked better that maybe it's not, not sure there's more to it than that, but I think it's the it's this, it's kind of the same story I keep doing for anybody we work with is there's usually a pretty clear indicator of where we need to invest some time and energy and just test and then let it run through. And if you improve in a bunch of different areas where, wherever you're closest to the dollar, you're going to start making money.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  25:00

Yep, perfect. Okay. So it's funny, isn't it, because you said to talk about simplifying. And I think we, as humans, we tend to overcomplicate everything. And of course, the longer a business has been going for, usually, the more complex it has become, because we haven't looked at it and gone. Are we doing it as simple as we possibly can? It's obviously one of the things we teach through EOS around the business. The same principles apply to your revenue as well.

Kyle Mealy  25:21

I usually so when a team will introduce that I'm coming on, or I'm at my first town hall, or quarterly, you know, all hands meeting after a quarterly, one of my slides presenting myself is, hey, you're going to hear me talk about three things all the time, and you're going to get tired of me talking about these things. And it's, number one is simplify. Number two is measure, and then number three is margin. If we don't know how much money we're making, if we don't know what you know, the key intersections of all the interactions with our buyers are, we're not going to win. And by now, we've probably gummied up the works with all the 4000 different things we've tried before. So let's start clean and simple and work backwards from margin. And this is where I'm kind of a weird marketer and salesperson is like, I, I think more like a CFO than I do, you know, a CMO sometimes, because I'm like, I'm gonna, we're gonna go look at what's the cheapest way to pull this off. Like, what's the least amount of spend I can do? Like, so I'm a cut first, not people, but like, why do we need this tech? We can do this ourselves. Get rid of that. And that's very different for most people.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  26:27

Yeah, absolutely. Now, you said right in the beginning that you know you've got, you had 30 years of martial art experience, and you apply those same principles to business. So tell me, what is it you learned from your 30 years of martial arts that you bring into your business at Kim, and if you like.

Kyle Mealy  26:43

I get bored every three years. It's kind of been this pattern in my career, which is very funny, right? It's a weird number, and it's been true. It's why my vision is to sell my business within three years, because I figure out I'll get bored. And what I've started learning about myself as I've gotten older is I kind of figure things out, and once the challenge is gone, I kind of get bored, and then that's not good for me. Nobody wins when I'm bored because I'm annoying. So I stuck with martial arts for a long time. What was different about that? Right? So there was something different there. Well, there was always another level. There's always another level of challenge. And so I bring that kind of iterative, goal oriented, chasing improvement process to what I do. So I'm okay with in, you know, I used to teach this to the staff. It's like, it's okay for a white belt to fail. It's okay for a little, you know, we would call little gold belts to fail, because if they can fail 1000 times and get a little bit better on each fail, they're going to be great.

And so I just think I fell in love with the idea that I can't be perfect at martial arts. I can't be perfect at marketing and sales. I'm going to fail a lot. But in martial arts and all the places I've trained, there's always a mirror, and I can always see how I was doing, and how good my technique was, or worse, wasn't. And marketing and sales does that. When you look at it from data, you can see how good you are. You can see where you failed. And so I'm like, oh, I want to chase perfection. I want to chase a higher ROI. I want to chase that next one. And, you know, I always joke I've done, you know, probably the number of kicks I've done in my life is absurd, but I can tell you, I know, like, the number of times when I was like, I think that was the best kick I've ever done that was with that might have been the closest to perfect. And so people equate it more to golf. A lot of people equate it to golf. It's like, I'm terrible at golf because I'm a karate guy, so I want to hit it really hard and make you cry. But every once in a while I hit the ball and it's right, and I'm like, Oh, I'm going to come back and do it again. I'm going to take 70 terrible swings to get one good swing. So I think that's kind of where that has shown up for me.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  28:54

Yeah, that’s really good, really cool. And I think you're right. I mean, it's sort of your the way that you're approaching marketing. I think it's a way that I used to approach it too. It is really about return on investment and making sure that we're actually these things are working for a lot of people. Actually, I was really fascinated when I first came to New Zealand, when I first joined the Marketing Association. I remember going along to a lot of the marketing association events, and there were all these kind of marketing people who'd been in marketing for a long time, and I'd start asking, because I'd always run my own business, and I'd always been very careful about what I spend. And I spend. And I was always looking at things and saying, Does this make sense? And not saying that everything has to delete, has to lead to direct ROI, obviously, you have to have integrated campaigns that help with our brand awareness too.

But in general terms, I wanted to know, if I spent $1 how much would I actually get back for spending that dollar? And you know, was I achieving the business goals? And a lot of these marketers just did not have that same sense of return on investment. They were always looking at, you know, what cool stuff can we do and how do we do, you know, TV campaigns, because that's really cool, and we enjoy doing it. And I was always really horrified. It was, Oh, my goodness, people are wasting money. And when I went into my first actual corporate role over here in New Zealand. It was actually an insurance company, and I had a $3 million marketing budget, and I took this $3 million marketing budget and kind of went, we're spending all this money, and I don't even actually know what it's doing for us. So I started to get into the real granular stuff and work out what was producing what and what was really working. And I managed to turn it around so well that they actually ended up giving me $9 million of marketing in my second year, because I showed them, if they spent this much, they could get this much, and everything we were doing had a some kind of measurable or some understanding of what it was doing for us. And I think there's a lot of marketers out there who just don't think like that.

Kyle Mealy  30:34

Yeah, I don't. I love marketers like I consider myself one, but I, I will say this. I think marketing has become such a huge industry, more than it ever was, right? We there were. There were not a lot of tools in the toolbox before the digital revolution, like there were. There's less with digital now. There's so many different channels. There's so many different mediums. And the truth is, it takes a lot of know how to move all the levers in all those different machines. And so I think I've come across marketers who love the machine and love manipulating the machine more than they love driving business. And so I think that that's a It's not that they and yes, you can make the numbers go higher in the machine with more money.

But I think there's, there is this disconnect from reality, from some marketers to like, oh, but if we spend Joe's paycheck and we don't get it back, Joe's going home, kind of a harsh reality. But it's just, I think, yeah, I think that's sometimes the case. And yeah, I really try to not, you know, invite. I treat every dollar like it's my own. And so if I'm not willing to spend it, then I wouldn't do it on someone else. So I've kind of built this little safeguard for me where I can look at a company and be like, yeah, proportionally, we're spending. I'm spending way more than you, because on the same tactic, because the stuff I'm doing for myself is the stuff I want you to do because it works, not pulling out a new playbook for you, because, like, we're different, we're not perfect.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  32:09

Okay, so gonna ask you then three top tips. What would you say to people listening to the podcast? What are the three things they can do to start moving the needle on their business?

Kyle Mealy  32:19

Change the language. Start thinking revenue before sales. And if you have to do it in a perfect order, it's marketing plus sales equals revenue. Number two, take advantage of the revenue cascade. It's going to give you new metrics to measure new ways of thinking about your because if you really think about it, you've got a marketing funnel and a sales pipeline. You might as well stack them on top of each other. And I think the third one is, understand the who of your seat, right? So who? Who's the right person to put in the seat, not the how. And so that's kind of where you run into that we need more people on our website. We'll do the we'll spend money to get to the website. That's the how, who's architecting that?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  33:03

Who? Not how, one of Dan Sullivan's books, isn't it? But so, yeah, great.

Kyle Mealy  33:07

Oh yeah. Well, he's way smarter than me, so I'm going to borrow that credit all day. Like, dude, be like, do that. He said.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  33:12

I love his stuff, I like, I do it. So it's always great. It always gives you some insight. Okay, that's really great. So we'll put the link, obviously, to the revenue cascade tool in the thing. Now tell me you're also writing a book, or you finish writing a book, haven't you? You've got a book that's about to come out. It's,

Kyle Mealy  33:26

it's been like I thought it was ready a year ago, and I so funny, all right, because I'm referencing who, not how, I'll do it. I'm not really good at the writing thing. I'm good at the talking. So I actually invested it in a ghost writer to finish it, because it was, it was just not my special gift. I tried. And so there's a manuscript sitting there. It's in my inbox. So I'm in the process of doing the book marketing program, and I wish I could say it's there, but it's like so close. I can't, I can't come back to the timeline now, because I keep having to move in, but I know it's there.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  34:03

So tell just be I mean, tell us what the book is actually about. What are you sharing in terms of that book?

Kyle Mealy  34:08

It's the whole philosophy. It's literally all the secrets and the Ghost Writer. A couple of mentors asked me, Why are you giving it all away? I go, Well, okay, it's totally selfish. Because I can explain it. I can tell you it all. I can drag the horse to water. I can put the cup in its hoof, but it doesn't mean it's going to drink the thing. So have as much as you want, take as much as you want, because heck, in the internet will figure it out anyway. Chatgpt will take it anyway. So I might as well put my name behind it and give something really valuable, and then you’ll call me.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  34:41

And if you think about it, I mean, that is exactly what the traction book does for EOS, right? I mean, if you, if you really want to run EOS on your own, you can read the traction book, and everything is in there on how to do it. And yet, you know, people go away and they read the book, and they go, this is fantastic, and then they do nothing with it. So which is why I get a job as an Implementer.

Kyle Mealy  35:01

Yeah, when she asked me, Well, what do you want this book to be? Like, what's an example? I'm like, I literally said traction. I'm like, it's a genius. You think you can do it yourself, and then you need it, and then you realize, like, you can do it pretty good. And I've been in self-implemented businesses, and then I've been with one, with an implementer. It's like, well, it's a horse of a different colour.  I get why there's implementers like that. That wasn't just some idea that was there, the real reason something.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  35:25

Now, Now you’ve got me going to go down that track just for a moment, because it is really interesting. Because, yes, you absolutely can do anything yourself, and you're right. You can write a book, and somebody come, no doubt, take that, if they really wanted to, and do it. But the self implementation of EOS versus somebody with an input. You've seen both sides of that. What do you think the fundamental differences are?

Kyle Mealy  35:44

It’s the label in the jar problem at the end of the day, who's really steering that meeting? Now, occasionally there's a really strong integrator, but they because they don't really understand that nuance. They're not knee deep into rocket fuel or not having that conversation with an outside force to define the visionary and integrated role. Usually it ends up being the CEO who's driving it. And bless CEO, as far as I am one of them, I should not be in charge of implementation down the hill of all these big systems that you know EOS has in its tool, like, you don't want me making sure quarterly conversations happen like, I'm going to be like, you're great. Yeah. So it's like, you're kind of like, it's funny, right? But, but you only know that when somebody outside comes in and says, Did you realize what your label says? And it's not because I'm trying to put you in the jar of just helping you recognize what this is.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  36:37

And so the same would apply to bringing you into the business too. Right at the end of the day, you're it's so much easier, isn't it? I mean, I love being an implementer, because I love business. I love really helping businesses to get better at it, but it is just a little bit easier for us, because we are not absolutely in the weeds day in day out. We're there to kind of facilitate the bigger conversations, and it frees up the team to really be involved in what they should be involved in, which is not running meetings and trying to lentils in.

Kyle Mealy  37:05

You know, it's tough when an integrator is facilitating an integrator, and I just don't think they always get their full, their full power that way. So I love seeing implementers be, you know, more, in that facilitator seat and they're, they're bringing different experiences, right? An implementer might have, you know, 10 to 30 clients. It's a lot. There's a lot of experience you're not leveraging.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  37:26

Yeah, absolutely true. Beautiful. Hey, look. Thank you for that. That's really great. Really enjoyed speaking with you. Really love your methodology. I'm actually going to go and look at the revenue cascade thing myself and see because a builder's house, you know, an ex marketer who who really doesn't do anything particularly well in their own business. You might be getting a call from me soon saying, Hey, Kyle, come and help me. But you've shared a lot of really good knowledge and information there. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. Well, thanks, Debra. I

Kyle Mealy  37:52

Well, thanks Debra. I appreciate you being here. Wonderful.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  37:54

And just for the listeners, we will have links to all of those things in the in the notes, so you can get to the revenue cascade, you can get to Kyle's site. You can find out all the information there. Okay. Thank you very much. Have a good rest of your evening.

Kyle Mealy     38:09

Thanks.