Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And, today, we're going to talk about how to step away from your business so it grows on its own. Neil, what are your thoughts around this topic?

Neil Patel: Yeah, the biggest thing that I ended up learning when it comes to stepping away from your business so it grows on its own is you need a funnel. I don't care what kind of business you have, everyone has some sort of a funnel, and, if you can take your marketing funnel and fine tune it, you can constantly make income. Whether you're there or whether you stepped away, you can generate income. And you can use tools like ClickFunnels to end up building a funnel, but let me give you example of what I mean by this. There's a lot of people out there who sell info products. You can take a funnel in which you take Facebook traffic, you get them to register for a webinar that's quote, unquote "recorded", they watch it, you educate them, and, within there, you make a pitch for them to buy your e-book, or course, or whatever it may be, and then, once they buy, you have income coming in, right?
I've also seen other funnels, or even software companies that are similar. You're taking Google AdWord traffic, or YouTube, or even Facebook traffic again, and you're driving them for a webinar registration, you're educating them on something, and whatever that something is, it has to be related to your software, and then you pitch them on how they can do this a lot easier by just using your software. You offer them a special pricing on the webinar, they buy. Once they buy, [inaudible 00:01:49] income, and it's made up for your ad costs plus more, you then also upsell and downsell them into other products, such as more software, or coaching, or services, right, whatever you decide that you want to upsell them into. And by having a funnel and it can keep going, you can end up generating more and more income.
One of my buddies, [inaudible 00:02:07], does a funnel, which he does YouTube traffic to a book, so he's giving away a book for the cost of shipping, and then, from there, he's selling you on all his other products and services. So you funnel could be whatever, and the more intricate you get, and the more products and offerings that you have, the easier it is to step away from your business, because all you have to do is just drive new visitors, and you can do that through paid ads.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and some of you are probably thinking, "Well, that's great. There's products that Neil's talking about, there's software and all of that, but what about service business?" I still think it's the same concept. You have to have a funnel that's going on, especially for your ... It still works for services business, right? So when I'm gone, for example, with the marketing agency, we have traffic coming in, we have leads coming in, we have an entire process, and you can call it a funnel too, where lead opts in, SDR jumps on it, and then we have a discovery call to go to a proposal, and then they end up becoming a client, right, and then they end up being serviced by our team. There's a lot steps and a lot of moving parts involved, which makes services businesses more of a pain in the butt, but that's not to say it's not a pain in the butt for these other businesses. What I would say is, if you're running a services based business, or you're just getting started, when you're hiring people, it's not just you're just trying to take things of your plate, right?
Yeah, it's important to take things off your plate, but you got to make sure that you bring on the right people, and it all starts with a really solid training process, right? People really don't like talking about training, but just think about it. When you hire someone, you don't want them to just jump into ... A lot of people just hire someone to just take things off their back and they want to throw them into the fire immediately. I like throwing people to the fire, but I prefer that they learn, especially for the first two to four weeks or so. Just learn about the culture, learn how we operate, learn how people are. I even write down all my shortcomings as me as a manager and me as a leader, and then I send that over to them, so they know everything about how the company is, they get to each lunch with people, they feel like they're at home, right, and then, that way, they're going operate better, because they feel more at home. Versus, you just throw them into the fire and they feel scared.
So I would say put together a training process. Week one, here's what you need to do. Two, three, four. It's exactly what I'm doing for two new people that are joining next week, and then you're going to be able to operate easier, because you are able to trust people, knowing that they're the right people to help you take care of things while you're gone.

Neil Patel: Yeah, and when it comes to stepping away from the business, I like hiring people who are good to go from day one. And, as Eric mentioned, there's a training process. Just because you hired someone who worked for your competitors, doesn't mean they're going to know exactly what to do for your business, even if it's very similar. I like hiring people from competitors or within my industry, because there's a much quicker learning curve, and there's a lot higher chance that they'll succeed versus fail, right, because, even when you hire, it doesn't mean that your problems are solved. A lot of people don't work out, you have to fire, and then you have to go find new people, and, sometimes, it's a process, and it may take a few times before you get the right person for that role that you're looking to fulfill, but, if you hire people with industry experience, it'll cost a bit more money, but they're going to be much better, which will make it easier for you to step away from your business and still watch it grow.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and then the other thing I'll add too is you have to make sure that you have a timeline too, right? So, for myself, in the next 365 days, let's say I want to be able to step away from the business completely. I want to be out of the day to day for example, right? Well, then you need to set up what that timeline looks like. You start with the 365 days and work backwards from that, and say, "Okay, here are the exact things that need to happen. Here's the issues right now. Here's what we need to do to get to the goal," and, ultimately, try to make sure that your business is able to run on its own without you. Here's a line that I got recently. Forgot who I got it from, but someone told me that, "Hey, you don't have a business until it can grow on its own without you." Right, so I'm going to repeat that again. You don't have a business until it can grow on its own without you. And that's something that's really compelling, right, so just think about that.
If you can start to set this goal up in place, I mean, this is right before the new year. Think about this, take a couple of days or so, map out what you need to do, bullet point it all out, even map out what went well for the year and what sucked, and then map out what you need to do, and you'll be fine. Neil?

Neil Patel: The last thing I ended up learning for this whole process, because I have an agency similar to Eric, and, with my agency, I'm not there day to day, but what I learned from this whole process is, if people aren't incentivized and motivated with the same things that you're motivated with, it's going to be really hard for the business to keep growing when you're not there every single day. And what I mean by this is, I'm very financially motivated, right, and a lot of entrepreneurs are as well. If your goal is to make your business continually grow, which, typically, means more revenue, and profit more importantly, you have to find managers and people who are willing to take lead and be compensated through bonuses if they hit specific numbers. If they're not held accountable to a specific number each quarter, each month, and there's not some incentive for them to hit it, they're less likely to hit it. If you step away from your business and everyone who's running it has no incentive to make it grow, it's not going to grow that fast, compared to if people were compensated based on hitting certain revenue and profit milestones.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and so one thing that you can take, and I definitely recommend that you research this and just don't take what we say at face value, just set up some kind of bonus structure. Neil and I were just actually talking about this on the phone on the way to the studio. If you're going to set a bonus up, maybe the bonus is, if you're able to hit all your goals, you're going to get a 20% additional on top of your salary, and, if you can really blow it out of the water, you can make 40%. So, for example, if someone's making 100, they can make 120, right, or they can make 140. And then you set it for the end of the year ... I actually got this from my operations guy. People stay longer ... And this is not to ... Ideally, you want to build a great culture, right, but people will also stay longer just to hit those bonuses, and they might stay even longer. I think he ended up staying at one of his companies for years and years just because that bonus structure was in place, so, yeah, just think about it.
You have to make sure that you align people and incentivize them at the same time.

Neil Patel: Yeah, and just make sure your bonuses reset, so even if someone hits their number, you don't make it where they always get the bonus. Each year you're coming up, or each quarter, whatever, maybe you're coming up with new bonus numbers, and they have to be realistic, so whatever the goals are, and make sure that they reset, because, if they don't reset, then the person doesn't continually have more incentive to keep growing.

Eric Siu: Great. So, that's it for today, but, before we go, we have another podcast we want to tell you about that's called Problem Solvers. There's a really cool episode on there about Burrow, which is the quote, unquote "Dollar Shave Club for couches". And how they launch and run a ton of pricing experiments to ultimately win market share. So, all you have to do to go listen is just go to singlegrain.com/solve, and let us know what you think. So, that's it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow.

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