Automate Your Agency

What would we do differently if starting over today?

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 22

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As leaders and entrepreneurs, there's a lot we learn the hard way, but out of all of those lessons, a few nuggets of hard-earned wisdom forever change the way we operate.

So that begs the question...

If you could start over and still know what you know now, how would you have built your business differently?

In this week's episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson reflect on lessons-learned throughout their own entrepreneurial journeys and reveal how they would alter their approach if given the chance to rewind and start all over.

Tune-in to learn the impact of:
🔹 Joining a Supportive Entrepreneurial or CEO Group 
🔹 Using Content Creation as a Sales Strategy
🔹 Hiring Help Much Sooner
🔹 And much more!

If you're looking for business advice that only 20 years of experience can bring, this is the episode for you!

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0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate youe Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations.

0:00:17 - (Micah): So, Alane, one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot lately is what would we do different if we started the business today? And it's interesting. I just got back from speaking at a conference, and it made me really start. Reminiscing is probably not the right word, but thinking back and doing a little retrospective on all of our adventures so far.

0:00:43 - (Alane): Yeah. So you're thinking for this business or our last business?

0:00:47 - (Micah): I mean, either one. One of the questions that I got asked at the conference was, what should I be doing now? And the playing field has changed so much. Even when we started this and definitely from when we started our last business.

0:01:02 - (Alane): Oh, yeah. Everything I feel like is a little bit harder and we're more saturated than ever on how many things we've got to get done.

0:01:11 - (Micah): Yeah. Yeah. So it caused me to really kind of reflect and think about the different things that I might do different. I was wondering what some of the things might be that you would do differently as well. I thought that'd be a good topic for this episode.

0:01:25 - (Alane): Yeah. I mean, a couple of things come to mind just because we were so young when we were building our last company. And one of the main things I think back that I think we did right in this company is joining other entrepreneur groups to not be so isolated. I think about that all the time, how we were young, running a large business for our age, and we were so isolated. We were honestly figuring out everything, and luckily we had each other. So we had different perspectives and we were going through it.

0:01:58 - (Alane): But I think we could have grown a lot more had we been a part of groups that are catered to, being around other entrepreneurs.

0:02:08 - (Micah): Yeah. Do you remember we had somebody come in at some point and they use the term working in a vacuum? And I think that has stuck with both of us for probably 15 years now.

0:02:20 - (Alane): Yes, we definitely were. And you did eventually join a CEO group, and there were benefits, but I think we should have shopped around and found a better fit for us. So that's one thing that I think has been really great for us this time. I don't feel so alone. And, you know, you start making decisions based on your Only your perspective, and it's. You're missing out on a lot of things.

0:02:48 - (Micah): And this is an awesome point that you're Bringing up because we're both in CEO groups right now, so, you know, I get to observe from the outside in for the one that you're in, and you get to do the same for the one that I'm in. It's been a really interesting experience. I'd say you've been in one longer in this business than me now, but maybe for our listeners, kind of, you know, I'm in me watching your journey. It's so interesting because you're in the Entrepreneurs Organization, which is eo, and you actually travel. Was it Arizona you went to to get trained on forum moderation?

0:03:29 - (Alane): Yeah, yeah, I was in Phoenix.

0:03:31 - (Micah): Yeah. Maybe it'd be worthwhile, kind of just sharing to the listeners some of those experiences since, I mean, it's. That's not an everyday experience that you get to go out and do. Even just joining a regular entrepreneur group or a CEO group.

0:03:47 - (Alane): Yeah, it's different. And if you're any, you know why it's different. But you're in these smaller groups. So EO Nashville is the one that I'm a part of, and there's 400 members, but you get put into other little smaller groups, six to eight people. And you're with peers, you are with other CEOs, and so you can't tell each other what to do. You can't, you know, give them a laundry list of, hey, this is what you need to be doing and meeting next time.

0:04:16 - (Alane): So you're with peers and with a lot of people that are very busy and are used to controlling everything. So when you're the moderator and you've got to lead your group, you have to come from it, from a different experience or a different mindset. And it is a place for your peers to be. And how do you have productive conversations and not try to control everything and not tell people what to do or what they should do.

0:04:43 - (Alane): And so when I went to moderator training and really started learning that it's not just things that apply to other CEO groups, it's things that apply to your personal life. You know, nobody that's going through a hard time in their personal lives life wants to be told what to do or what they should be doing. You need to be there as a confidant, as a friend, as an experienced person, maybe you had a similar one. And so as a moderator, you're learning how to cultivate that culture in your forum and making sure we're all on the same page because it's really easy. We're not used to having that perspective. So it's really easy to fall back into. Oh, you know what you should do or you know, what I would do in that situation instead of, you know, this, I did have that experience and this is what I did with what I had at the time.

0:05:31 - (Micah): I mean, even just from me watching from the kind of outside, just seeing your own personal growth through that journey so far has been outstanding. And I think it wasn't simultaneous, was it? It's been a couple of years now. But you also went through the 10,000 small business program.

0:05:49 - (Alane): Yeah, I, well, yes, I, so I went through that program in 2021. And for our listeners that aren't familiar with it, it's, it's 10,000 small business is the name of it. And it's put on by Goldman Sachs, their foundation. And so it's a free program for you have to be eligible and meet certain criteria. You have to go through an interview process and it is a very time consuming thing that you go through. But it's, I compare it to like a mini MBA is what you're going through. It's 12 weeks and you're in a cohort of other people.

0:06:27 - (Alane): And it's all different depending on if you're doing a local one, if your city has a local one, there's local ones all over, or you're doing the national program on how many people are in your cohort. But the curriculum's the same. So you're going through the same thing that everybody else has gone through. And it's a lot because you're managing your business, running it and also trying to get through this 12 week, very intense course. But oh my gosh, it's so good. And the lady that referred me, she told me it was the best thing she ever did for a business. And I would say the same about me going through it.

0:07:04 - (Alane): And so you're learning, but you're also with again, other entrepreneurs, other people that are going through it. And I mean, I can't speak highly enough of how the Goldman Sachs foundation has put together and worked with the local community college to put on this program because they just treat you so well. And when you're an alumni, there's 13,000 other business owners that have gone through it. And my greatest friends are graduates of that program.

0:07:33 - (Alane): They do so much for their alumni. I'm going to Philadelphia in two weeks for an alumni sales and marketing course that they're doing training on. And so I thought, you know, why not? I'm going to be around 80 other business owners that are traveling in for this and again, just like Ole Miss X continues to give back. And I love that I'm a part of that program.

0:07:56 - (Micah): All right, so one of the things that I see on my CEO group, I see that with 10,000 small businesses, I see that with EO is that you already have, not just you, but being part of the group. One of the things that, and I think this is, you know, I totally agree with you on, yes, 100%. Do it all over again. Start with groups like this because you already have that camaraderie, you already have that bond, you already, you're in the same program, you're going through the same thing.

0:08:23 - (Micah): And even if they're not potential clients or customers, there's still relationships for refer, like the ability to even refer business or acquire a new business or get ideas on how to do things is just over the top. Way better than working in a vacuum.

0:08:42 - (Alane): Yeah, yeah. And I remember too, a couple years ago, I really started advocating for you finding one that's a good fit for you. And so now you are a part of one. And it's just really good outside perspective, even for yourself because it gets you out of the day to day for the time when you're in your forum group or your meeting group because you meet once a month with your next level group and it makes you work on your business. It gives you time away from that day to day to think, okay, what are the things that are important? What is bubbling up right now?

0:09:18 - (Alane): What am I not seeing? Because I'm in it every day and you come back with good ideas. Such a good, fresh perspective on things.

0:09:27 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's an all day event when it's just a meeting and there's even events on top of that which force you to get out of that day to day rut. And I know you and I talk about the day to day rut quite a bit, not just on this podcast, but just in, in general and in life. Like, yeah, yeah. The more that we're doing the same thing every day, the harder it is to take a step back and go, oh, yeah, okay, what if we thought about this differently or I can acknowledge other points of views other than my own.

0:09:59 - (Micah): So. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with that. I mean, one of the things that I was just thinking as you were sharing your experiences with EO and 10KSB Alane, is that in the group that I'm in, we do a lot of exercises. So we'll fill out and do some thinking stuff before the meetings. And then when we're at the meeting, it's forcing us not even like presenting to everybody and like processing issues, but more internally.

0:10:28 - (Micah): We're answering questions that we wouldn't normally be asked. The facilitator is kind of working through and giving background and then all of a sudden it causes you to like jump out of that day to day thinking and go, oh yeah, there's like other stuff here that we need to be focused on. Or maybe it's not as bad as it actually feels or, you know, whatever the scenario is, it really helps kind of just kickstart your brain in different directions.

0:11:00 - (Alane): So joining a NEO group or a CEO group earlier in our business journey is what I would have changed. What? You had something that initiated this question, so I was wondering what you would change.

0:11:15 - (Micah): Yeah, I think content is the biggest one for me. I had the absolute hardest time. Like we're obviously talking about this on a podcast and this podcast generates us content and clients and leads and prospects. It gets us out of the day to day rut. There's a huge number of benefits I see with us doing this podcast almost immediately. But I came from a direct sales background. So in my first business, I cold called all day long and that meant it was predictable. I could make 100 calls and I knew down to a T that there's a certain percentage of those calls that would turn into an interested contact.

0:11:58 - (Micah): And I knew that a certain percentage of those interested contacts would turn into a proposal. And I knew that a certain percentage of the proposal, like et cetera, et cetera. So I was able to model my entire sales funnel. And that's I guess what I grew up with as an entrepreneur. With my first business, the second business that we worked on together, we fell into more business than we could handle. So we didn't have to do cold calling, we didn't have to do strong marketing, we didn't need content. And content marketing was only just kind of starting at that point. But with this business, man did I. I mean, you know, Alane, like I would be so frustrated.

0:12:40 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:12:40 - (Micah): And now that we're in it, and now that we're doing it, we're creating videos, we're active on LinkedIn, we're creating podcasts, we're presenting, both of us are presenting. And you're doing much better speaking than I am, but we're both getting out there and doing engagements of that sort and it's all generating content. And my biggest hurdle with all of this is like, why would I waste my time creating this content that I don't know is going to produce anything.

0:13:09 - (Alane): Yeah, that was really hard for us. You know, I think you came from it, from. I don't know why we would do this. We've got so much work to do, and I'm looking at it as I want to do it, but how do we get it done with everything that we need to get done? And we really had to make some shifts, and we knew. We knew we needed to change how we were doing sales because sales has changed. And so we eventually started carving out the time. And it's just like with anything, when you start doing it, you get a little bit better, you get a little bit faster.

0:13:42 - (Alane): And so, you know, not everything we do sticks or works with content. Like, we're. We're testing things, we're trying things, but it has gotten better and easier for us, and we figured out how to get it done and get it out there with everything else we've got to get done.

0:13:58 - (Micah): Yeah, I think what you just said is so important, too, because that's what I was dwelling on to go, why would we spend our time doing this? And not everything works. So how long do we have to wait for this? Two years? You know, you read stuff online and it's like, well, start content marketing today, because in three decades, you might get a return. Yeah, that's what it felt like. I was reading. Obviously, nobody's saying that, but, you know, that's. That's how my brain was interpreting it compared to direct sales, where it's like, make calls, get leads, get sales.

0:14:32 - (Micah): And I just wanted to. I spent what, two years going, let's figure out direct sales. And while there are still channels for that, the reality is that's not how people want to buy. People aren't going to answer phone calls. I mean, the only calls that I really answer are my parents, my son. Your phone calls. Like, everything else gets to go to voicemail. Like, if I don't recognize the number, I'm not answering it.

0:14:59 - (Micah): And I think that's the general consensus. So it's like everything really has changed. Starting content marketing, if we had started at the very beginning and made that part of our culture, instead of having a culture of just getting work done as fast as we can and focusing on that and then trying to put content on top of. I don't know, in it. On top. I don't know where we put content.

0:15:24 - (Alane): Yeah, yeah.

0:15:25 - (Micah): But if we would have started going, hey, our. Our culture, our model of this business is content. And it. I would say the one thing that. That I could share with the listeners. That took me forever to figure out. And it, it wasn't until we really started doing it and then we could see the results. Is that it? It's how people want to engage and want to buy. And I find myself doing the same thing. If I'm on YouTube and I find somebody sharing something super useful, then I subscribe to their YouTube page because I want to see more things useful and then they share something else and then they have a book and then they have, you know, an opportunity to meet with them or they have whatever it is, right?

0:16:14 - (Micah): That is the sales funnel now. That is the cold call to proposal to lead. You're just doing this all without actually meeting the people. And my slow ass brain took way too long to figure out that that's what we need to be doing. That's how we need to work it. We need to be sharing stuff like this so that people can actually listen to it and go, oh crap, they actually, they might be pretty cool to work with.

0:16:40 - (Micah): And then check out some of our other tools or our community or other podcast episodes and finally say, hey, can we book a meeting?

0:16:52 - (Alane): I know what's funny and not funny, of course about this is when we also do some direct sales, we reach out and cultivate some type of lead gen. We have episodes on it and the content that we're creating goes in to those direct sales methods to show that we're credible, to show that we know what we're talking about. So it's a piece that we were missing because without it, nobody knows who we are. And we needed it. Yeah, we needed it to show we do know what we're talking about.

0:17:26 - (Alane): And one thing I want to say on this, to tie it into what we do with helping companies build systems and processes, is when you're starting something new like content, it is hard because you don't know what you don't know. And sure, we know how to do automation, we know how to build a process, but we didn't know the process yet, so we had to drink our own Kool Aid and we did everything manually in the beginning to figure out what is the most important thing we need to do with our little tiny team for executing on this.

0:18:01 - (Alane): And then after a few weeks we said, okay, what did, what are we liking? What are we not? Let's take out this, let's put more emphasis on this in the process. And then, and now we're, we are, we've got some automation happening in ClickUp for podcast editing. Where what is going to happen? What, where Are we going to focus on putting content out YouTube and LinkedIn right now? You know, so before we jumped in and started automating, we were just manually doing things and now we've incorporated it automating into our web flow. So it creates a blog post with the episode every time it posts on Buzzfront. So now we've got those steps happening and we sure we've got a long way we're going to keep adding to this automation. Some of it is still doing, being done manually and that's just how it goes.

0:18:48 - (Micah): Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I mean, I could 100% echo that. I mean, plus we say that a lot with our clients is you gotta do things manually first before you start automating. So 100%. We've been drinking that Kool Aid to get this done. But yeah, that's my biggest one. Now there's one that I think we both agreed on and we executed on very well in this business, which is hire a VA first. Now this is one of the other topics that I spoke about recently and I think it's such an interesting topic because I have people come up to me after a presentation and they go, that really resonated.

0:19:25 - (Micah): I need to hire a VA now after hearing that VA being virtual assistant or an executive assistant or an admin assistant. But the concept being if you're starting out, there's so much value that you as a founder or co founder need to be focused on strategically, tactically. That isn't creating the next invoice, that isn't doing the time consuming stuff. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it.

0:19:55 - (Micah): And you could pay somebody for a lot less than your time is worth. And you know, we get into opportunity costs and different things like that. But hiring a VA to help delegate the time consuming stuff right out of the gates.

0:20:09 - (Alane): Yeah, game changing it is. Those little details too just burn me out when I, you know, when if we're doing these little things that we know aren't valuable for us to be doing, that we could easily outsource for a couple hours a day, a couple hours a week. Those couple hours add up over time and the value to time ratio, you know, what could I be working on to help move this business forward versus all these little things that have to get done that are administrative that we could have somebody else do. And that changes. That change is a mindset change because a lot of business owners feel like nobody else can do this. Only I can do this. I'm the best person at this I can tell you at this point, I am so comfortable in saying I am not good at everything and I do not need to control everything.

0:21:02 - (Alane): Please, anybody can take anything off my plate. Let me find the things that are burning me out the fastest, that I don't want to do that. I can delegate and I am happy to do that.

0:21:12 - (Micah): I think this is one of those things where I've, I've had to come a little your direction, and maybe you've come a little my direction in this, but when I 100%, I know you well, Alane, you're like, let's delegate it. Let's hire somebody, let's pay somebody. I don't want to do this. And I'm on the other end going, I don't want to spend any money on this. I'm just going to do it. And I think, you know, in talking with a bunch of different founders and co founders and business owners, right there is that spectrum. There's, there's that business owner type who's just like, I don't want to do any of the little stuff.

0:21:50 - (Micah): Please get this crap off my plate. And then there's the other ones who are like, closer to me. I'm going to do everything to a fault. And I think both sides on the extremes could be to a fault because you could spend more money than you're ready to spend and you could be spending way more time than you're ready to spend. So you got to find that, that balance in the middle. What are the right things to delegate? Are you set up for delegation? Do you have the systems to delegate?

0:22:18 - (Micah): But all of those at the very beginning of a business are so much easier to get started than they, you know, are being on the extremes. And I think with the last business, definitely my first business, I wasted so much time doing stuff I could delegate. It was ridiculous.

0:22:37 - (Alane): It's hard to let go. And I think to wrap this up on this one point is this is why I always say, even if you're a solopreneur, still put yourself in a project management system. Click up Monday Asana. Monday might be the easiest for you to get started with if you're by yourself. But if you can start documenting a process of what you do, delegating is already built in and you can assign to your executive assistant to do that task with a due date. And now you have accountability, you have something in place so they know what to do.

0:23:12 - (Alane): And it was already built a part of what you were doing. And then delegating is right there ready for you.

0:23:19 - (Micah): So there's one final topic that I think would be super interesting to jam on, which is getting the messaging right on this. And I see this with a lot of business owners. I see this with myself. And that's this whole concept of let's build first and then we'll figure the rest out later.

0:23:44 - (Alane): So, Maigo, let's. What if we do this? You brought up one of the things that we would have changed earlier on was not being so focused on building first. So why don't we make that our next episode and dive deeper into that?

0:23:59 - (Micah): Love it. Great compromise. All right, so those are three, three and a half things that we would do differently if we started today. The best part is, even if you're not starting today, those are still things that you can start implementing right away. So I really hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it was helpful. Leave us comments. Reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks again and we'll see you in the next episode.

0:24:26 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja. Com.

0:24:38 - (Micah): And join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:24:42 - (Alane): Bye for now.

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Alane Boyd

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Micah Johnson

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