BC STARTUP
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

This is a very long thread. @SamtLeslie asked to give the playbook for service companies so here it is. Follow it and you’ll get to 5M+ in a few years.

This is pure operations playbook.

No leadership, financial or HR discussion. Enjoy.

 Industry:
Doesn’t matter much. @sweatystartup has an awesome list of service industries on his website that will get the job done.
Trades:
If you are under 3M and in multiple trades you’re doing it wrong. I was there and it was a mess.

Businesses under 3M don’t have good system, managers, effective onboarding, training, hiring practices, or pricing methods. If you did then you’d be bigger.
Trades cont:
Multiple trades doubles that mess. Get your first business figured out then work on another.

I would recommend earliest 4M to add a second trade, if at all. Any earlier you’re splitting focus and treading water.

Focus Focus Focus.
Software:
If you’re using anything besides Servicetitan then please stop and go get Servicetitan. No other software even close to their capabilities.

It is 50% more expensive than other programs on the market while making you 100% better than any competitor not using it.
Marketing:
Radio, billboards, tv and postcards are cool and all but I see them as “density marketing”. Do it when you’re rolling at 4M.

Brand building is cool but your two truck brand doesn’t have the bandwidth. Go build your company, a culture and then drive brand.
Marketing cont:
Up to 4M blow your internet presence up. Aim for a thousand google reviews. Spend money on PPC and SEO. Pick up your phone when it rings. I use Scorpion and highly recommend.

I’ve seen people double marketing budget without enough CSRs in place to pickup. 🤔
Pricing:
Price yourself at a premium and use flat rate. I can honestly say I have no idea what my competitors charge.

I can also honestly say that their pricing is irrelevant to my pricing.
Pricing cont:
I eat their lunch all day long because we provide awesome service, our customers love us, we have hundreds of 5 star reviews and oh yeah - we pick up the phone.

Raise them annually.
Comp:
Pay your techs a lot. If you aren’t actively looking for a path to get your techs earning a lot then you’ll lose good techs.

Here’s the deal. Techs can make a lot. They know they can make a lot. Your competitors advertise that they pay techs a lot.
Comp cont:
They’ll either do it by working for you, a competitor or themselves.

Lots of ways to get here. I recommend an hourly + incentive approach. We regularly have techs topping $50/hour effective rate and if we didn’t we would lose them.
Career paths:
Becoming a manager is not a promotion. I see a lot of well meaning owners promoting their “best tech” to service/op manager. I am going to make an extreme statement and say that I have NEVER seen this be effective.
Career cont:
Not only did you just lose your best tech but you also hired someone who has probably never managed anyone to be your go-to manager.

This is too important of a position to promote someone who needs taught. Take your business seriously and hire an actual manager.
I am truly blessed to have incredible managers in my businesses. My businesses started taking off when I stopped trying to make techs managers.

It doesn’t make sense, I don’t know why I did it and certainly don’t know why people smarter than me do it.
Systems:
Go find a business system and follow it. There are a lot of them out there and it’s not just franchises.

It will shave years off your growth plan because it puts best practices into your biz early.
Benchmarking:
Find out your industry KPIs. This can be done through a business system, friends you know in the industry or asking Twitter.

If you don’t know what to aim for you’ll never hit it. I’ve SMB owners who dont know their avg ticket, GM or how they compare to industry.
Vehicles:
Around 10 vehicles look into commercial leasing. It makes growth dramatically easier.

I can email our fleet company and have a vehicle on my lot, shelved, wrapped in two weeks. (Soon they’ll do inventory too!). You’re not in the car business.
Inventory:
Tackle it early. It’s a pain in the ass later. I recommend inventorying trucks and investing in a software to track it. Lock the room, track those costs.

Kill it if you can. You shouldn’t be in the inventory business.
Healthcare:
Do it. Plus 401k and whatever else. Hard to grow a company if you don’t keep good people.

Hard to keep good people if you don’t give them a good place to work and make them not stress about their personal life.
Playbook:
Go buy a company doing 500k - 1M revenue and is super inefficient. More inefficient the better. Resist the urge to start something. You’ll spend a few years for no reason.

Pay whatever. I’m all about value but you’ll grow so fast it’s less relevant.
Immediately raise prices and put on flat rate.

Hire a call center to handle overflow and hire a new CSR, maybe 2. I can almost guarantee the one that came with the biz is grumpy and not a good CSR. That phone needs answered no matter what and customers need to love that voice.
Build a comp system for techs so they can ethically grow your business for you.

Put company on Servicetitan.
No. Housecall pro, jobber or any other discount CRM is not the same.
Yes. It is worth the price difference.
Yes. This decision is important and will hold you back later.
Call Scorpion. Get a new website and invest heavily in PPC, LSA, SEO and reviews. Anything else right now is unnecessary.
6% of revenue is a good start.
Join a biz system or find best practices for HR, hiring, onboarding, training and management. Nextstar, SGI, QSP, Service Roundtable. Tons out there. Don’t waste your time trying to build this - just pay them 10k a year and get rolling.

Every 6-8 techs hire a manager.
After all this you should have accidentally added between 50-100% to the top line in about 12 months. If you didn’t - reread the list. This list will get you to 5M. Farther if you live in a growing/developing city.

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The full Clubhouse session in text

Thread Continued

1/

Naval: The Boston ecosystem has always regretting that they've sort of lost these companies.

India has to make sure it doesn't lose as entrepreneurs. And the way to do that is to give them the freedom to innovate. Everyone should be an entrepreneur.

2/

Everyone has a phone should be able to get a job through the phone. There's one level beyond that, that comes after that, which is everyone has a phone, should be a creator for the phone. And that's what platforms are enabling.

3/

There's the old, famous New Yorker cartoon with a dog on the internet, on the computer and it says on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Well, yeah, on the internet, nobody knows who you are or where you are or what you are. All they care about is your output

4/

And that is incredibly liberating for a country that's so large and has such a good English speaking population, India can win, it just has to remove shackles.
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Joe Speiser \u26a1\ufe0f
Joe Speiser ⚡️...
@jspeiser
The dirty inside secret most first-time entrepreneurs don't know.

14 tools I use to steal from competitors, and build million-dollar businesses.

Housekeeping note:
Don't do anything that destroys your reputation. Copying what works is a simple & practical strategy, but don't cross any boundaries.

In this thread, I'll show you how to steal your competitors' traffic, product ideas, and customers in a 100% fair way.

1. Steal their social media traffic

Drop your competitors' url in https://t.co/n4squ8fjHh

It will tell you what % of their web traffic comes from which social media platform

Looks like this


Generally, this traffic will be from ads and not content. To steal their social traffic, you'll need to steal their ad strategy.

If they're getting their traffic from Facebook...

2. Steal their Facebook ads

Go to Facebook Ad Library and find ads that your competitor has been running for 6+ months.

All of these ads are likely profitable https://t.co/bgqtSOvAe2
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Jose Bermejo
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@josberco
https://t.co/l8WgaAnWg7 launch day!

🚨 Problem: You are losing time + money building before making your first sale + validate

💡Solution: A comprehensive #nocode @NotionHQ tool with 27 validation steps with scoring to help you validate and shortcut to your first sale

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2/
With 5 validation blocks, https://t.co/ePe7HTa9of will help you understand if your idea is viable:

- Validating The Market

- Validating The Problem

- Validating The Value Proposition

- Validating The GoToMarket

- Validating The Willingness To Pay / demand


3/
Have no idea on how to validate?

Easy: Follow the 27 validation checks into 5 validation blocks. One checklist by validation block.


4/
Not sure if a block is validated?

The validation scoring will help you know if a block is validated.

Check, score, validate and move to next block.


5/
What about the execution of every step?

I've got you. Inside every check, you'll find:
- Hands-on section (action items)
- Examples/cases
- Pro Tips
- Explanations and guides
- Questions to help you think and squeeze your brain!
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David Mullings
David Mullings
@davidmullings
A thread about building a company from scratch:

Building a startup and then attempting to scale is like designing then building a car that will need to eventually fly, even become a rocket ship.

You need to spend time sketching the initial design of the vehicle. 1/n

Almost no one will give you money to sketch. YOU are the likely only investor at that stage.

You can move quicker by finding something similar and then modifying that template for time period, market size, geography, experience and skills.

Then you have an MVP to build

MVP isn’t only for tech companies. Any company can build an MVP version of itself to test and iterate.

Now your likely investors include your family, maybe a friend or two who believe in your vision and mission while sharing the same values.

That is fuel to move the car forward

No one will give you fuel if you don’t have a car because you don’t need it.

You also won’t get enough fuel for the entire journey. You have to be willing to take a risk and start the journey anyway believing that you will secure more fuel along the way.

As you proceed on the journey, you get feedback, adjust your route, circle a few times, hit a dead-end and back up, but you keep going towards your destination - your next goal.

Along the way you secure more fuel from friends and family who start to like your progress
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Toroh Legborsi Emmanuel
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@emmanueltoroh
TODAY I WILL BE SHOWING YOU HOW TO CONVERT YOUR PHYSICAL SKILL TO A DIGITAL PRODUCT. part A

People ask me one question over and over: What is a digital product? And why should an entrepreneur focus on digital products instead of just their physical counterparts?

What Is a Product?

A product is any item that you can sell to someone else in exchange for cash or barter. It could be a piece of produce, an electronic gadget, or a comfy couch.
Until the Internet altered commerce for the better, a product was always a physical object or item.

The virtual world has opened up a new category of products (which will get into later).
The point, however, is that a product is something you sell. Most often, you ask. for money in exchange for the product. That’s how you earn a living.

What Is a Digital Product?

A digital product is any product you sell online that doesn’t have a physical form or substance. You can’t hold a website theme in your hand, smell an e-book, or taste a software program — Uber eats does come close though ; ).

Why Are Digital Products Preferable to Physical Products?

You might wonder why you would offer digital products instead of creating your own physical product. After all, physical products dominated commerce for hundreds of thousands of years.
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