Ready to Grow? Stress-Testing Your Business for Success with Paul Guyon

Catharine O'Leary: Hey everyone. Welcome back to kickstart conversation. I'm your host, Catharine O'Leary. And today I'm very excited to have my good friend Paul Guyon as my guest. Paul is an interesting lad. He and I have had a couple of discussions. And he's a business growth expert who empowers authors, entrepreneurs and small business owners. He's the founder of the lead machine group coaching program, and bridges the gap between online lead generation and business expansion. So he is also the host of lead machine growth show, which I was recently on and it's a it was a blast. So I encourage everyone to go off and subscribe to the podcast, lead machine growth show. And that's all about actionable strategies for inspiring trailblazers. So what I like about Paul is that his core principle is always about balance, and to truly scale. You know, there are those moments when we talk about, you know, Game Changing massive leaps. But there's also moments when you just got to kind of hold them and be bold and be confident in what you're doing. So welcome, Paul, to kickstart the conversation.

Well, yes, Catharine, thank you so much. The quiz queen in the house. Yeah. We did have a nice chat on the show. A couple of recently, few weeks ago, I guess it was, but thanks for inviting me. I appreciate it. And yes, there is a balance. We're going to be talking today about the start to scale blueprint. Excellent. Yeah. And so that's really something that we had to we actually we did it. You know, this was years ago, when I was working with the airlines. And I'll tell you about that in a minute. But I just recently documented it. Because I've been doing it for so long. And I went gosh, what am I going to talk with Catherine about? Oh, I know what I'm going to talk about. And so, so this is recent, recent, this is fresh off the off the presses. But I've been doing it for 30 years. So I love that.

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah, I love that hot off the presses, folks. You heard it here first, you know, breaking news. So let's let's talk a little bit about this start scale blueprint. Can you can you break down those the balance between those incremental actions and those giant massive leaps? Because I think that as entrepreneurs as we grow, we always think that they have to be this massive leaps. And sometimes it's just the day by day stuff, or sometimes it's, you know, we get so stuck in the day by day stuff that we forget to take the big leap. So it's, I think it's a little bit of both, but I would love to hear your thoughts on that. Well, it

is a balance. And since I'm I'm into music, I'm a drummer, I like the metaphor of the rhythm to growth, I mean, a business, especially for solo entrepreneurs, it's it's all about you, and it's about, you know that there's, there's a balance between your life and between, between your business, but there's, it's like a song, there's a melody, there's a chorus of the verse, there's a structure to it. And there's a beat that that underlies the whole thing. And there are moments when the soloist takes over. And there's soaring highs, and then there's quiet. And so I think of the business in that in that way, just because it's fun for me to do that. And since I love music so much, and it's just part of my soul. So like you said, balance is the key. And knowing when to leap is extremely important. And let me break that down for you. And first of all, this is a framework for growth, there are a number of components to it. And there are a number of ways that you can figure out oh, what should I be working on? And we'll get to that. But by way of story, I'm working with a client who is doing a 12 month long SEO strategy. They recently re rebuilt their their website. And it wasn't ranking as well as they'd like, beautiful website. And they they actually doing content marketing, which they weren't doing before. And so they were doing a lot of things, right. And so this SEO strategy is an incremental action, that we're just doing little small tweaks over time. Okay. It's just like, when you when you you're driving through your neighborhood, and there's a pond in the springtime and there's there's water, it's nice, shimmering water, it's clear. And then all of a sudden, one day you drive by, and then boob. There's lily pads all over the surface of the water. Now those lily pads didn't grow overnight. They incrementally grew. They grew every little bit of day, just a little teeny bit under the surface. And so that's what this SEO project is they're doing these little, little tiny corrections, fixing things that are that are relevant to the technology and the keywords and all that. Well. They had recently they had an opera tunity, which was a huge PR push, which would have flooded their, their potentially flooded their website with traffic. And I advised them to let's get the conversions down, let's get the metrics down, let's know what our conversion rates are based on this project. So that when we do scale, because we can't, we can scale whenever we want just we need, we'll just go pay for for advertising. And we can scale then. And so they took my advice, and they're focusing on, they're going to continue with the project. And they're going to work on focusing, getting those conversions. Right. So they weren't ready to leap yet. But they're doing all the things necessary to take care to take advantage of that leap when they're ready. Now, entrepreneurs don't listen necessarily like that it was hard to swallow that because it would have been, you know, prestigious, and you know, the CEO didn't, didn't really understand until we broke it down for him, it said, Yeah, you'd be wasting your money and your time. And the team's time the team has the resources we have are limited. And they're focusing on these tasks here. And that's preparing for growth. And we're already seeing actually I was looking at earlier today, we're seeing a double in the in the traffic that we're getting year over year, and the downloads for the request for quote, and that's almost doubled. And so the revenue was they're looking at doubling their revenue from their wet for their website, year over year. And so they're going in that right direction. So the CEO is happy with that. But you know, they're a little disappointed, because they, it would have been a feather in their cap to be to be to do this PR thing.

Catharine O'Leary: But those those opportunities will come around again, right. So that that's the thing is that, like, it's one thing to like everyone talks about scaling, and like, you know, the the you got to scale, you got to scale and I get that. But when you don't have the foundation behind you, you end up with a lot of duct tape and bubble gum in the back office. And that breaks, right. And then you have a poor customer experience or client experience. I mean, there's there's such a thing as scaling too fast, I think.

Exactly. And I think I might have lost my job over that 15 years ago. Because that leads into the next part of this, this discussion is Yeah, scaling too fast. Number one, you burn out your employees. Number two, you can lose customer loyalty, you can lose customers, you can lose supplier loyalty, you can damage your reputation. Those are all soft things, but they're they're real bottom line results in effective negative effect on all those things. And you know, with your reputation, I mean, that's, that's everything for us for an entrepreneur as your reputation. Yeah. So you you've got to know when to leap. So getting on to that is the methodology for knowing when to leap, and knowing what to work on what to scale? How do I know what to scale? Well, I have a process, I have two, two methodologies. One is for startups. Or for when there's new, there's new, a new product or service is called Sam. And it simply simplify, automate, measure and manage. But a lot of times you don't know what to simplify what to measure. And then there's mass, which is measure, automate, simplify and sustain. So if you're, if you're a business, who's already got service delivery, you've already got some mature processes, and you're trying to take it to the next level. Before you can really make an improvement in your processes, you have to you have to measure first you have to establish that baseline measurement, so that you know that whatever process it is that you're that you're working on, you can actually improve it. Right. So let's get back to Sam though, because Oh, and there's one thing I wanted to mention, how do you know what to work on? You use what I call the 10x method. It's a process stress test. Okay? And what you do is, you imagine that you have 10 times the amount of business that you have today. And then you examine your business processes, service delivery, lead generation, fulfillment, customer service, shipping and receiving purchasing all those things that make up your business, no matter what it is, this works for every business. And you say, Well, where are the stresses going to be? If I have 10x The business hear it. You know, it's easy to manage that so Oh, gosh, I'm doing all my all my invoicing by hand, I've got to I've got to do something there. I might have to invest in some software. I might have to to hire a administrative assistant, or all those kinds of things, so that that stress test tells you what to work on. So back in the, in the 90s, I was working for a company, a logistics company, and the salesperson was looking for business, looking for different innovative ways. We were delivering pharmaceutical samples to pharmaceutical sales reps, and we had a process, we had a process where we would ship truckloads of the samples, and we have to prove chain of custody because they're controlled substances and all of that. And, and then we we bring them into a market to a vendor, a mom and pop vendor would warehouse it and make appointments and deliver it to the sales rep. Well, anyways, that was pretty mature process. My salesperson had a friend who worked for American Airlines, and they had a problem. You ever, ever traveled? You ever lose your bag? Yeah. Okay, so you, you get onto the baggage service, or hey, you lost my bag. Well imagine Delta Airlines was was our first customer. They had, you know, 60 stations, they call in stations, airports. And they had Mom and Pop vendors coming to get the bags and make deliveries, and they would invoice the airlines. And each one of them, you know, there were hundreds of invoices every week. And there was no, there was no auditing of rates, there was no performance measurements, there was no operational efficiencies, who knew who was the vendor of the week, whoever brought the pizza to the lift station man manager was was who was in business. So what we did is we looked at that process, and we said, how can we run this? How can we help them streamline this process without managing every single delivery? Right? We said, well, we need to manage by exception, which we were already doing. We need to simplify the rates, so we could audit the rates easily. So we simplified the rates. We we established zones around based on zip codes around each, each city. And we went in negotiated with vendors. And we we vetted the vendors. We taught them how we wanted to do business, we made sure they had the insurance, they had uniforms, they had signage, they had had badges and all that stuff. And then the vendors would then go, whenever whenever they would go to the airport, pick up the bags, and they would have a ticket, which had is called the baggage delivery order. They would use that to make the delivery, then they would go to our system online. And they'd say we deliver to 30321, which is the zip code of the address with the where they made that delivery, in our rate with our system automatically rated. So that's a $22 delivery. So boom, it was rated. So imagine this, we had this going on in 12 cities for Delta Airlines. And the first invoice that we did was 600,000. But there was only one invoice. There wasn't hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of invoices that they had to wade through which cost them about $48 per invoice to process by the way. So we were saving them millions of dollars. We gave them better service. We manage all the vendors, we manage their performance, we manage the invoicing, we paid them all. It was all electronic, there was no paper involved except for that baggage, that baggage delivery order. So we simplified the process. We automated it. We've had an online system so they could check in the deliveries. All the transactions were audited, the rates were on file, they could if they charged a different rate. We had to approve it, our logistics analysts would approve that rate before we pay them. And we would audit them. And so and then we would sweep the whole system. And every two weeks we'd given given an invoice. Right? So we grew that our first invoice was 600,000 for two weeks. We grew that to United to American to US Airways, Delta Airlines, Air France, and so on and so on for in four years. We went to 40 million in annual sales to the airlines just by using that process. And so then, and this is this is where it really gets exciting, is we took that that invoice audit and payment process. And we moved it over to our other business line for the pharmaceuticals. And so now we are auditing all of their rates. So we were saying, you know, and we were working with Pfizer and Merck and Eli Lilly giants, and we were doing the same thing. So we had we had this huge scale. And we had this very few people were needed to run it because it was all automated. So we had 4040 or $50 million in revenue. No, with a dozen people running it.

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah, that's genius. Yeah,

that is genius. And the cool thing is, it's called logic track. It was a system that I built. When I was in my back in my programming days, it's still in use. So if you've ever, if you've ever traveled on one of the major airlines and you've lost a bag, one of our vendors, of course, we don't, I don't work for that company anymore. And they sent sold that off. And they took Logitech with them. But one of our vendors was likely made that delivery.

Catharine O'Leary: So I understand how that works for like a really large corporation, how does that same process work for a solopreneur?

Good, good question. So another of my clients. There, they were about 12 team of 12 people or so. And when I started working with them, the sales department was always complaining that the art department was never on time. And I said, Well, what is on time? How long does it take? How long should should it take? And so we started measuring it. This was in 2005. Well, we started measuring it. And we discovered that they were in the 80s in the mid 80s. And so what we did is we looked at the processes that were delivering the scheduling, the the preflighting of the the design, and we improve the way that salespeople communicated with what kind of design that they needed. And so we're able to know what processes were affecting that on time performance. And some of some of it was staffing. And so that's, that's one way that we use in that we use the mass product for that, or methodology for that. Because if we had to start somewhere, we needed a starting place. So that that works for any size business, any size business, when you have if you want to improve something, you have to measure it first. And then once you measure measure, you can say, well, this is my baseline, you take that 10x stress test and say okay, well, what are my processes of for delivery, or service delivery, what what what would break, if I'm a solo entrepreneur, let's take a podcaster. For instance, a podcaster has to make appointments has to get guests on their show, they have to edit the audio and the video, they have to put their commercials on it, they have to post it to their website, they have to promote it, they you know, if they're if they're doing content marketing, they need to break that up into slice and slice and dice that into a bunch of different different pieces of content to to to promote their business. So there's a huge bottlenecks there. So when you examine that process, what most likely the entrepreneur, the thing that lights them up, is what we're doing right now we're talking about how we can improve other people's lives in our own lives. And so that's what lights me up. That's what I want to be doing, I want to be coaching, and I want to be, you know, having these kinds of discussions because they're valuable. So all that other stuff, as a as a solo entrepreneur, those are things that if I systematize them, I can outsource them. And that's where when, when you when you realize that I was just on a podcast yesterday, and the guy was very creative, but he was able to systematize he created 300 songs in six months. And he took that, that discipline and that system, it is systematization skill that he had, and he applied it to a business and now he has a podcast agency that does that production side of, of the podcasts for people and there are a lot of businesses like that, that that take those things off the plate so that the solo entrepreneur can focus on what lights them up, and what you know, what, where they can actually have the most impact with with their audience.

Catharine O'Leary: And so does this this process that you take that you coach people through then is that helping them understand exactly where they should be offloading or what incremental actions it should be taking, like, where to focus? Hey, you know what, it's time for the big leap. Let's let's talk about that. Is that is that the coaching that you're doing?

The coaching that I'm doing in Yes, that's part of it. The coaching that I'm doing is To help them take advantage of to build lead magnets, or actually lead machines that can take advantage of and get them leads online so that most of my most of my clients are coaches. And so what their, what their desire is to get them to get someone to do a session with them, or download their lead magnet. So they download their lead magnet. And then the next, the next thing they do is they offer a free session, or a quiz, or whatever that might be to get them into their world. And so I help them build those lead machines. And most of my clients really, really don't understand the technology that's needed in the marketing messaging that's needed to, to make that happen. So they, they're stuck. They, they know they need it, you know, they're either they're just starting out, they've already they've already had some success. And they've got some clients, they want to scale, they want to have a group coaching program, they're already doing one on one, but it's hard to fill that group, it's hard to get people to come to their webinars, because they don't have have those chops down yet. And the technology is usually the biggest stumbling block.

Catharine O'Leary: So I love that. Yeah, because because I think there are two, there are two sides of the same coin for marketing. There's the there's the creative kind of copywriting and, you know, graphic design, and that, you know, that kind of that engagement side of things. But then there is the other side that a lot of people forget about and this is where the rubber hits the road really is the measurement side is the A B testing is the data work is like measure it and benchmark it and make it and then optimize it. And that's like everyone's so focused on getting the right words, and you know, doing all this like clever stuff, if you will. And they're not as focused on on getting into like, where in my funnel? Am I losing people? And how can I close that gap? And or, you know, Can Can this ad be performing better? Well, you don't know that until you test something else against it right, so on. So I love that you're kind of taking that, that kind of the measurement side of things, and that, you know, the technology side of things to fill out what a lot of people think marketing is,

yeah, and in that part of it really is incremental, I call it the power of incremental action. And think of the lily pads, that metaphor, the lily pads. If you if you take deliberate action every day to towards that goal, you're going to have a massive result at some point. And so don't get discouraged when you know, you've got to go through and yes, you've got to, you've got to know how many people have been to your website. And you need to know how many people downloaded in took certain actions, and you need to know that number. And you need to know what kind of revenue that's representing to your business, you have to know those numbers. And it takes time. And sometimes you do go off and you do pay and do some paid ads, or you do some guest blogging or you guest on a podcast, and to get a surge of traffic. So you can so you have enough visits to your website. So you can measure that. Sometimes you have to do that incrementally and say, Okay, I'm not ready to mass, I'm doing a pilot, I'm doing a pilot here to test out my lead magnet and my conversion rates indicate Okay, now oh hates working, I've got a 5% on that. Now I can I can reliably, you know, scale that up, or start start sending traffic to that offer.

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah, you don't want to turn the faucet on something that's not actually converting. Right. Right.

And so and that's a huge mistake that so many people make, and they you know, they don't, they don't know who their customers are, or they don't really they're not really solving the right problem. Or, you know, there's, there's a lot of there's a lot of incremental looping that needs to happen to get that right. And that can be frustrating.

Catharine O'Leary: It can be frustrating, but you know, like, like entrepreneurs that are that I talked to and that it's it's a marathon, it's not a sprint? Yeah. And that requires you to like, you're constantly looking at, like, am I talking to my ideal client, because as you grow, and your business grows, you might actually be moving your ideal client, you know, like that avatar that you know, the messaging and so on you, you learn as you go, so you should always be going back and saying, you know, like, not every day but like, you know, on a regular basis going back and doing a stress test on some of the assumptions that you've made for sure. Yeah, so excellent. Well, what I love what I love to do in the last kind of five minutes of our of our talk here is just kind of brainstorm a little bit of a quiz for your business your business And what I would love to do is talk about almost like a not market readiness score, but like Mark, like a marketing technology score, like, you know, what, what is your what is your readiness, like your measurement readiness? It's not the right words, because that's not like, that's not what people want at 3am wake up thinking, right? They don't wake up thinking at 3am Oh, my gosh, how do I get? How do I optimize my marketing?

How about ready to scale, assess your coaching business with a 10? S 10x process stress test?

Catharine O'Leary: It's a little long, it's a little long, but I like it. I like it. So what's your stress test score? You know, something like that? Yeah. And then you could you could take people through a couple of questions to say, What process do you have already in place? You know, where are you struggling? And then you can offer a couple of different solutions for you know, maybe it's a high medium low kind of scoring system, or, you know, a, you know, this part of you're like, you know, the front end, middle end, or the front end, middle or, you know, back end of your marketing, so that you could you could actually target people with, oh, you know, what, you know, yeah, we need to talk because you need before you start to put money behind this. This is what a lot of people do, they put money behind paid ads, and their system isn't ready for it. And so you don't get the return on investment because your conversions aren't right. And so before you do that, you need to stress test your your system. I love that.

Yeah. And so are you ready? Your scale? Ready? Are you is your coaching business scale? Ready? what's your what's your, what's your gross scale? Score?

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah, or Yeah, your scalability, quotient or something like that?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you were gonna ask me, I knew you're gonna ask me that question. And since I was just documenting this, this process, I thought, You know what, people people could use a workbook, but I hadn't thought of a quiz. So that's brilliant.

Catharine O'Leary: That's and then then then the, each of the results could be customized to each of your customers actual needs, so you're meeting them where they're at. Right, so you're not offering, you know, an advanced solution to somebody that needs, you know, a little bit more hand holding at the front end.

Yeah, and, you know, I have a list of potential processes, but those are more for every business has, you know, you've got to pay the bills, you've got to, you've got to get clients, you've got to, you got to fire clients, you've got to take customer service, you've got to, you know, you got to go to the bank, you've got to you've got to report, there's a bunch of processes that every business should have, even though even if you're only a solo entrepreneur, but there are some core processes that I think that people are super, super interested in lead generation is one of them. Absolutely. And which is why i i picked lead generation for my topic, and for my the topic of my show, and and so that might be a real big focus.

Catharine O'Leary: So it just happens to be the topic of your free gift. So tell us a little more about your free gift.

Oh, what was the free gift was

Catharine O'Leary: join the lead magnet magic challenge and say goodbye. I knew struggles and hello to attracting your ideal clients, which sounds like I wrote this to be honest. So tell us a little bit more about that.

Well, sure, it's five days, it's 10 to 15 minutes a day, we have really easy to, to do. Takeaways each day so you're so you're making some progress towards first we identify the audience and we look at their what problems they might be having, what what you can solve. And then we talk about what would be an ideal Lead Magnet, a checklist or a resource guide are usually the the most simple things, but depends on where you're at. And then we talked about the the seven elements of a landing page with a good we build headlines, we build bullet points, and we take you through that whole process. And then then we once we have all that, then we look at email marketing. So we need to deliver the lead magnet, we need to follow up we have to have a follow up message and we need to make an offer so there's a thank you page and an offer. And then we put it all together with the technology that you need. And we do that all in five days.

Catharine O'Leary: Wow. Because and this I love this because a lead magnet is more than just the checklist more than just the like it's not it's more than just the ebook or the PDF. There's a whole bunch of stuff at the behind the scenes that you really have to have right because a lead magnet that doesn't go anywhere. Just like like nobody's gonna do anything with it like it It leads them to a dead end, then they're stuck. So you gotta have, you gotta have that, you know, the email deliverability, you've got to have the landing page is huge. So like being able to, to really understand what the landing page needs to look like is, that's, that's like a whole course onto its own. Or several courses. So I love that. So anyone who's listening, those, that link will be in the show notes. And I encourage you to absolutely take advantage of that, because that's a lot of information in five days. So that that's awesome. And thank you, Paul, for being with us. Today. And just any final words on on for the audience today?

Well, thank you again, life is a balance businesses a balance, I think you need to know when to leap, and when to when to do incremental action. I think the superpower of entrepreneurs is incremental action entrepreneurs, the ones who are successful, they do the things that people other people who aren't successful don't want to do. And it's hard. It's it's, it's, it can be lonely, people won't understand you. But if you keep chipping away at doing those little things, eventually you'll have that success and you got to believe in it. You've just you just got to keep you got to keep at it because entrepreneur, being an entrepreneur is one of the most rewarding things I think that I've ever done. And I think I think your your, your audience probably feels that same way. So keep at it. And and faith and action go hand in hand. So you know, keep the pedal to the metal.

Catharine O'Leary: I love that keep the pedal to the metal. Well, thank you so much, Paul. And I agree entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. But once you're in there, you'll get you'll get the bug and you'll get hooked. So anyway, thank you everyone for listening to us at kickstart the conversation yet again. Can we do talk with you next week. Bye bye bye bye