Dave Braun
00:00:02
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the HireMyVA team and Business Building Podcast brought to you by Yoogozi.com and Victory. In this podcast and at HireMyVA, we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with Virtual Assistants without breaking the bank. Of course, that means your bank, the most important bank. I’m Dave Braun, and I’m here with Larry Broughton, my business partner with Yoogozi and HireMyVA and a great friend as well. What’s up, Larry?
Larry Broughton
00:00:27
Hello, handsome David. How are you?
Dave Braun
00:00:31
I’m doing great, man.
Larry Broughton
00:00:32
How’s your little grandchild? How’s he doing?
Dave Braun
00:00:35
He’s doing great. Yeah, he just saw Logan. Oh, man. He’s just a joy and a have so much fun. It’s crazy. I mean, I wish we could start with grandkids first. Why is that?
Larry Broughton
00:00:47
(laughs)
Dave Braun
00:00:48
Why can’t we do that?
Larry Broughton
00:00:50
Well, make sure that your two boys don’t hear this episode.
Dave Braun
00:00:54
Okay. So that’s gonna be a future episode, everybody. That’s the question I ask, why can’t we start with grandkids first?
Larry Broughton
00:01:01
I should have called your son’s boys. They are not boys. They are grown men.
Dave Braun
00:01:06
They are. They’re great guys.
Larry Broughton
00:01:07
It’s good to see you.
Dave Braun
00:01:08
Yeah, you too. We got a really cool question. Ready for this?
Larry Broughton
00:01:12
Oh, a cool question. All right. Bring it. What is it?
Dave Braun
00:01:16
Well, it is, what do I look for in a business development team? And most importantly, how do I hold them accountable?
Larry Broughton
00:01:28
All right.
Dave Braun
00:01:29
So it’s kind of a two-parter, right?
Larry Broughton
00:01:31
It’s a two-parter and they frankly are two different things. I think the second one, stand by. If you don’t have a business development team in your organization, stand by because that second part you can use for anyone, any relationship you have in your life, whether it’s a relationship, a friend relationship, a business partner, team member, whatever it is.
Dave Braun
00:01:56
And yourself. You may be your own business development team. Hold yourself accountable.
Larry Broughton
00:02:02
What? I was just on a mastermind call with the folks at Alignable this morning. And that was one of the questions, holding yourself accountable is one of those things that a lot of us don’t like to do.
Dave Braun
00:02:21
Nope.
Larry Broughton
00:02:23
Yeah. And we would just hold ourselves accountable for our own goals and for our own standards, how would our lives be different, Dave? So your question about business development, like what do we look for?
Dave Braun
00:02:38
Yeah, let’s talk about that. So the first part is like, what do we look for and the second part is, say, we’re doing it with somebody, even ourselves. How do we hold accountable?
Larry Broughton
00:02:47
Well, you know, maybe we gotta describe what is business development, first of all.
Dave Braun
00:02:52
Okay. I like that.
Larry Broughton
00:02:54
What do you think it is when somebody says business development in your brain? What comes to mind?
Dave Braun
00:03:00
Well, really I think what comes to mind—you could lump it together, a couple of things, but the way I like to think about it is what somebody taught me once is you think about, really there could be multiple stages, but think about the three stages of sales.
Larry Broughton
00:03:15
Yep.
Dave Braun
00:03:17
Actually let me back up. So think about the stages of lead generation first. Sales and then operations or fulfillment. So I look at business development as in those, in the lead generation/sales arena now where somebody might divide it up, it’s probably a little bit more, depending upon what you wanna do. My guess is it’d be more in the lead gen area, maybe crossing over into sales or lead gen/qualified lead gen. Yeah.
Larry Broughton
00:03:53
Yeah. And I’m glad we’re spending a moment on this because business development is a term that’s used pretty broadly. And you need to determine, are we talking about B2C, which is business to consumer—business to customer, or going B2B —business to business. Like in my organization, we’ve got both. And the hotel business, we’re trying to get guests, we call sales people, sales or it’s business development, where we’ve got someone actually going out and trying to raise large amounts of money in order to grow the organization. But either way, there are things you should be looking for. When you try to find someone who’s going to be representing you in your organization to the public. The public might be potential consumers, and might be potential partners. So to me, one of the things I’m always looking for, Dave is someone who has high—not just IQ, they don’t need to be geniuses, right?
Larry Broughton
00:04:56
But they need to be problem solvers, but they need to have high EQ as well. They really need to understand how to have a conversation with someone, how to connect with someone, right? How to have empathy with someone, how to read body language. There’s a lot of intangibles that go along with effective sales people or business development people because they gotta connect with people at all levels, whether it’s the president of the bank or the president of the organization, or it’s the gatekeeper at that organization, those are all very important things to look at as well as the things that you and I talk about all the time. We teach this in our victory mastermind program. And we’ve written articles about this as we’re not just looking for people with a lot of experience, that’s great, looking at their track record.
Larry Broughton
00:05:48
You know, what’s their experience. Have you done this before? But we’re always looking for someone who’s highly motivated, Dave. Who has the attitude, I get to go work with Dave today. Not like, oh, I gotta go work for Dave today. So they’re highly motivated. They want to do this. They got lots of integrity. Because this is one of those areas, Dave, when you’re talking about fundraising, you’re talking about setting prices, you’re talking about bringing in potential clients. They better have a lot of integrity, your potential clients, bankers, partners, whatever, better be able to trust this person. If they trust your business development person by virtue, they’re gonna trust—It says, I trust you as an organization. So motivation, integrity, and then, of course, capacity. This is the thing that oftentimes people forget. You want to have team members, particularly these folks, if they’re doing their job, guess what’s gonna happen to your organization?
Dave Braun
00:06:42
Yeah. It’s gonna grow.
Larry Broughton
00:06:46
And the worst thing you want is your business development team to be so good at raising, and getting leads that they can’t keep up with the growth that they’re creating.
Dave Braun
00:06:58
Yeah. They can’t be outta step with the rest of the company.
Larry Broughton
00:07:01
For sure. Yes. So those are some things that kind of come off the pointy tip of my head to start the conversation, Dave. So that’s a good place to start, I think, with those few rapid fire tips.
Dave Braun
00:07:16
Yeah, exactly. So obviously they’ve got to have some type of track record. Now, there’s a lot and—
Larry Broughton
00:07:24
Unless you’re willing to invest in them, cause you see some glimmer of capacity in them, but that gonna take a real investment.
Dave Braun
00:07:32
It’s gonna take an investment of time and it may be less dollars, but a little bit more of your time, but that might be a good thing for you to do because sometimes in business it’s one of the hardest things to do is to find like what you talked about, MIC motivation, integrity, capacity. If you have the right person, if they don’t have enough experience or a track record, it might be relatively not easy, but they may be able to generate, that you may be a great beta client for them and it may work out really, really well.
Dave Braun
00:08:06
Sometimes, trust is the most overriding, the highest important factor for somebody.
Larry Broughton
00:08:13
Yeah. I think that’s a really good point. One of the things you need to consider as well, particularly for seasoned Biz Dev people, whether it’s directors of sales or actually like, we’ve got in our organization, vice president of business development, his job is to go out and find, investors, financial partners, those types of things. Those people aren’t cheap.
Larry Broughton
00:08:37
Okay. And you need to keep that in mind. So the value that they bring has gotta align with your budget or at least your potential budget.
Dave Braun
00:08:47
Right.
Larry Broughton
00:08:48
So that’s really important. So I wouldn’t spend a whole lot of time talking to somebody. If someone’s gotta be making a half million dollars a year in a base salary, which is conceivable, if they’re gonna be blowing up your business by millions of dollars, if that’s not even in your realm, don’t talk to ’em unless it’s an information gathering, meeting, talk to somebody who doesn’t have as much experience. So make sure that the budgets are aligned. Now, there are a couple of ways to do this, Dave. You can pay a high base salary and a lower commission, or you can pay a lower base salary and a higher commission. I’ve never known a business development person or a salesperson worth their salt that has not wanted to have some kind of incentive plan that’s based on their production.
Larry Broughton
00:09:41
If you bump into a business development person or a sales person who doesn’t want a commission, I wouldn’t consider them unless they have a real answer for you. Like, they’re transparent, Dave, you know, I’ve been outta work for X number of years due to the pandemic and I need to support my family right now, you see my track record, here’s my list of references from people I’ve performed for in the past, both clients and employees. I need to have basically a guaranteed salary for three months or six months. And after that we can go on a draw or a commission basis. If someone is that direct with me, I’m much more open to hearing them than saying, Nope, I’ve gotta make name the number $80,000, $180,000 a year. And I’m good with that.
Dave Braun
01:10:31
Yeah. That makes sense. That it would be for a period of time.
Larry Broughton
01:10:36
Yeah. Because there is gonna be the ramp up. Even if you’ve got someone, Dave, who is the most experienced business development person that you’ve ever met in your industry, they’re not going to come in and turn on the switch and you’ve got revenue coming in the next day. It doesn’t happen that way. Now, if I’m interviewing someone and I ask them, okay, so where are you gonna get your business from? And they say, well, I’m gonna bring them from my former employer. I get really uneasy with that. Well, why, because it goes back to the integrity thing that we spoke about earlier. Now, if they’ve got clients that aren’t happy with your former employer, that’s one thing. But what happens when you know, Joe Blow candidate, we hire them and then we’ve got issues with them and they leave my organization.
Larry Broughton
01:11:24
What are they gonna do? They’re gonna go after my clients. I wanna know that they’ve got a pool where they can go fish and bring new business in. Again, if they got a former client that has followed them from place to place, you gotta think about that. But if it’s a client, they brought to their former employer and they’re just not happy there, their needs aren’t being met. That’s a different story. But if someone says, I’m gonna bring all my clients from all my past employers, I’ve passed on plenty of those people before.
Dave Braun
01:11:56
Yeah. That makes sense to do that. And I think one of the other things, you talk about budget, but there’s also got to be some kind of timeframe where you expect a payoff on this. In other words, you’re giving them a salary, at least part of it. But there’s gotta be a point where they’re really bringing in the business or fulfilling their promises to your organization. And like you said, you can’t expect it upfront, but you gotta have an agreement and said, Hey, you better be bringing something in somewhere along the way in a few months, maybe it ends up being too long. Maybe it’s a month. Maybe it’s too months, but there’s gotta be some type of movement, right?
Larry Broughton
01:12:47
Yes. That’s the thing. And it’s gonna just, you have to set your expectations up front and have a conversation during the interview process and then confirm it once they’re on board with you and say, Hey, during the interview process, here’s what we discussed. That I’m gonna expect you to start doing sales calls, biz dev calls, whatever, immediately on day one. And I’m gonna wanna start seeing your call log in your I meeting log immediately. And at some point you’re gonna talk them through this. Here’s what the sales process looks like. At some point I’m gonna be brought in to the introduction. The worst thing you can do, I think as a business owner is to have your business development person do the entire sales process, introduce them to your operations team or whatever the next step is. And you never, as the owner, never meet that person.
Larry Broughton
01:13:33
You wanna get them to start building loyalty to you and your organization more than the business development person. There’s a fine line. You need to start managing that relationship a little bit. But the way I’ve done is I need to start seeing sales calls and your call reports on a weekly basis. We need to start having form like real leads, where we start negotiating within four weeks. Now some of those are gonna fall away, but by the end of the 30 days, depending on how long, and how complex your business is, we need to see start seeing results by the end of the 90 days, like booking at least revenue in the pipeline. So like the revenue may not be materialized for six months, but it needs to be in the pipeline. Again, you might be a manufacturing organization and your production lead might be long, but if it’s a short lead, you might be able to see some revenue in those first 30 days. But I think that like six months, a year is too long. At what point do you say enough is enough? I’m paying the salary for a full year before you see results. To me, that’s too scary.
Dave Braun
01:14:46
Yeah. That makes sense.
Larry Broughton
01:14:48
Every business may vary. And if you have a question about this, reach out to Dave, or I, and we can talk specifically with you about your specific situation, but if you’ve got ideas on this and we’ve got a lot more to share with this, I can tell you I’ve got a bunch of things in my brain, but I want to hear from you guys too. How are you, what are you looking for when you’re looking for a business development person? Keep going, Dave, I’m sorry. Stepped on you there.
Dave Braun
01:15:17
No, no, no. What the question I had that came into my mind and this was, do you think that there’s any difference between that timeframe, between a regular normal for-profit business and a non-profit?
Larry Broughton
01:15:31
Yeah. Well, the only thing I would say is my experience with both being on nonprofit boards and donating to nonprofits is the budget cycle for the people with whom you are soliciting money from. Does that make sense?
Dave Braun01:15:48
Yeah. So I get this all the time. It turns, it gets to be December or January and people solicit us for donations. And we’ve already made all of our donation decisions back in September and October because our budgets need to be done finalized by November 15th.
Larry Broughton
01:16:07
So if you start approaching me around Christmas time to donate immediately, it’s like, so you’re gonna have to wait till the next year. Now, if you want, you can go ahead and do a meeting with me and you can try to get a commitment from me, but I can tell you in our organization when we had 20 hotels, there was a whole committee that this stuff would go through. So you need to know your industry. So basically I guess, Dave, to answer your question, how would I do that? Let’s get serious about this specific, I guess I would wanna start seeing commitment letters from post. They don’t need to give me the money now, but I need to see commitment letters from them. Yes, for the next budget season— $10,000 you’re gonna donate to whatever your nonprofit, might be.
Dave Braun
01:16:53
That’s that’s a great KPI right there.
Larry Broughton
01:16:56
Yeah. So what are your thoughts on that? You asked the question and I know that your bride has been in nonprofit for a lot of years. What’s her experience with that? Or what do you think?
Dave Braun
01:17:09
It’s been very tough for them to get good business development people or let let’s see. So the reason I pause on this is because I don’t know if the people are good or if they are just hamstrung somehow by the organization, but it’s been difficult. They’ve run through some of the nonprofits that I know they’ve run through a lot of business dev folks. And I don’t know if that’s because they’re not being in help to be introduced to other people because when you’re a nonprofit and you’re a new business development person, you hopefully have some relationships with other companies at that point, but you may have already been using them to get donations to another company. So, it’s still gonna take a little bit of time in connecting.
Larry Broughton
01:18:07
We may wanna either do a podcast on this or do a work or action guide or something for nonprofits on this. I can think of a bunch of ways to do this by holding fundraisers, and asking for referral leads from your current donors. There are a bunch of ways to do this. And I can think of a couple of boards that I’ve sat on where I’ve always questioned. Like we’re not being very efficient in our fundraising efforts. So well—
Dave Braun
01:18:36
And while a lot of times in a nonprofit, I guess the last thing I’ll say is a lot of times in the nonprofit bring somebody new in they’ve they’ve gotta have either have some relationships established, but a lot of times I think what they need is to have just a quick introduction. In other words, like you being the CEO, bring your biz dev team or somebody, your biz dev person and introduce ’em to some of the people that you already know, and then they can go work those leads to get that relationship going. So anyway—
Larry Broughton
01:19:06
Yeah. Dave, it feels like we’re starting to transition into the accountability part of this, but before we switch gears, I also wanna recommend that when you’re vetting a candidate for business development, directors of sales or whatever it is that you consider, actually doing a little bit of internet research on these people, whether it’s an independent person that you’re hiring or a business development company, there are biz dev companies, you can look ’em up. BDCs is what the acronym goes by. Get references, not the ones that they give you. But go on, look at their LinkedIn reviews. Look at their Google reviews. Look at other review sites that are out there. Look at articles that have been written. I would type in biz dev company, the name of the company and add the word fraud to it or fake and see what comes up. Now, keep in mind for a while there in the, what timeframe was it? Early two thousands. There were a lot of businesses that were writing negative reviews about other businesses. And then a lot of these sites, which is really bad karma, don’t do that. And a lot of review sites cracked down on that once they realized what was happening, they started finding IP addresses on this, it can be traced. So don’t do that kind of stuff. But if it’s an individual, look at their LinkedIn profile, what are people saying about them, how are they commenting on other people’s posts, and see whether they’re gonna be a good cultural fit.
Dave Braun
02:20:51
Yeah. That makes sense. And they should have a bunch of stuff out there when you Google ’em, there should be a bunch of stuff that you can find.
Larry Broughton
02:20:58
You would hope so. Right.
Dave Braun
02:21:00
Well, unless you’re gonna be their first beta client or something, then that might be different. Well, you said this was a good time to transition to how do you hold them accountable? So what do you think Larry, what’s one of the most important things you think?
Larry Broughton
02:21:14
Well, when you’d mentioned this, I don’t remember whether it’s an article or it wasn’t a book. It might have been a book summary. And I’m sorry if somebody knows the name of this concept, please send us a message. Cause I don’t like to take other people’s ideas and pretend it’s my own. I like to give attribution when I can, and this is not my idea, but it did resonate with me and they called it the accountability dial. And it’s like, imagine a dial on your oven, the old kind, not the digital, but a dial on a thermostat or a dial on your oven or something like that. And it broke it down like this. So just imagine, you know, low, if you’re listening to this, what I’m doing is I’ve got a little dial I’m turning.
Larry Broughton
02:22:01
Near the top is—
Dave Braun
02:22:02
Near and air in.
Larry Broughton
02:22:03
The air is kind of cool or low heat. And as you turn down clockwise, the more clockwise you go, the higher the heat goes. And so let me see if I get these. I don’t remember exactly how many were there, it might have been—there are five that come to mind. So the lowest heat is the mention. Then the next one is the invitation. The next one is the conversation. The next one is setting boundaries or the boundary. And then finally was the limit. Like we’re done. Now, let me go back. And I think that was it; mention, invitation, conversation, boundary, and limit. Yes, that’s it. So the first one is this, Dave like you’re passing each other in the hall. It’s just a short kind of comment or feedback. Hey, Dave, I noticed that your TPS reports haven’t been getting distributed on time, is everything okay? That’s just a mention, water cooler kind of stuff.
Larry Broughton
02:23:06
The next one is kind of the invitation, which is more of a informal chat where you say, Hey, Dave, you know, I’ve mentioned those TPS reports, not getting out on time a few times. There’s a pattern starting to happen here. What’s going on? The next one is the conversation. This is the— do you ever get a call from your bride, Dave, we need to talk.
Larry Broughton
02:23:39
This is the, we need to talk. All right, Dave, these TPS reports and you not getting them on time is really impacting the effectiveness of the entire team here. We have to sit down and discuss this and resolve why these aren’t getting out on time. The next one is the boundary. This is where, you know, the heat really starts to turn up. Dave, if the delinquency and the tardiness of these TPS reports don’t change, we’re gonna have to consider whatever, you know, making a significant change in this department or whatever your consequence is. And then the limit is your limit. And you say, Dave, we’ve had so many conversations about these TPS reports. This is your final warning. So let me lay this out for you. If this doesn’t change and I have to have one more conversation with you, whatever you do in your organization, we’re setting you free. We’re terminating the agreement, whatever it is. Does that make sense? I loved that kind of visual of the mention, the invitation, the conversation, the boundary, and the limit. What this comes down to though, Dave is communication. And this is the thing that you and I have found in leadership. How many leaders are ineffective because they’re afraid to have these difficult conversations
Larry Broughton
02:25:11
What I love about this is that it starts out really easy breezy. The problem is people stuff it because they don’t like having difficult conversations. And what they do is they jump from zero to boundary. It’s really hard to have that conversation. If it’s, you’ve been internalizing it the entire time and then I gotta hold you accountable. But if it’s easy breezy in the beginning about dementia, Hey, it’s on my radar. I see that you’re not meeting our expectations. Those TPS reports need to get done and you ratchet it up. It makes having that, that communication, these difficult conversations, much more, it’s easier, more effective, you’re acting like a leader, you’re gonna be treated like the leader that you are. So that’s kind of my take on the whole accountability thing.
Dave Braun
02:26:00
That’s really, really cool. We need to come up with an acronym for that.
Larry Broughton
02:26:04
If anybody knows where that came from, let me know. We could probably Google search it, but I don’t remember where I saw it.
Dave Braun
02:26:13
Well, I think we could turn that into a whole other episode is like, how do you start having conversations with somebody that is not performing the way that you want? I love those five steps.
Larry Broughton
02:26:28
Yeah, me too. And so I do wanna give attribution to whoever it was that came up with that.
Larry Broughton
02:26:34
The name Dave comes to mind for some reason, not Dave Braun. But yeah.
Dave Braun
02:26:39
You know what Larry, what’s interesting is that we’ve been working together for a long time now. I never heard you say that before that way, never. Like, thinking, imaging it as a dial, you know, like an oven and turning it up and these are actual fire.
Larry Broughton
02:26:56
Well, this is something I read early on in COVID. I do remember that. So it’s been within the last couple of years.
Dave Braun
02:27:03
Okay.
Larry Broughton
02:27:04
So whether it’s been out there for a dozen years or not, I don’t—
Dave Braun
02:27:09
We gotta come up with an acronym and do a separate podcast on it. Let’s do that. Okay. Note taken. All right. Some more accountable stuff. So let’s get into a few other things. I think one of the things that we’ve heard of some folks who’ve actually maybe paid some people up front.
Dave Braun
02:27:30
And that we shouldn’t do that.
Larry Broughton
02:27:34
Well, if it’s a team member, you’re gonna wait till your payroll to do it. I mean, if you’re actually bringing them on board, if it is a BDC, a business development company, no. Do not pay them front. Now, they may want a retainer, a small retainer up front, but you don’t pay them the entire thing up front. I get that it’s a professional services organization. So for them to do work for you, yes, there are gonna be occurring costs that you need to cover. But let’s say that the agreement is that their contract is $25,000 and they’re gonna be working with you for six months. You don’t pay them $25,000 on day one for six months of work. What’s their incentive now to start working month one, two and three.
Larry Broughton
02:28:23
Their financial incentive. Right?
Dave Braun
02:28:25
Yeah. Now, so two things with that, Larry one is we’re we’re not talking about $500. We’re talking about no multi thousands of dollars. So anything that’s multi-thousands of dollars, you are not gonna pay everything up front if you’re getting a remodel on your home or if you’re getting a very expensive website, right?
Larry Broughton
02:28:43
You say that as if, but I do know people who have Dave.
Larry Broughton
02:28:48
Yeah. So do you.
Dave Braun
02:28:51
Normally, we should.
Larry Broughton
02:28:52
Don’t make me say.
Dave Braun
02:28:54
I won’t but at least there are some guidelines there. So think about it in those terms. And when you hire, say you hire a team member or new team member, do you pay them their first two weeks of salary? The day that they start? You may give ’em a signing bonus. That’s fine. And you only need to do that to attract them. And depending upon the environment you do that, but you don’t pay them until they’ve worked for you. You’ve seen some stuff happen.
Larry Broughton
02:29:24
Yeah. And so again, if it’s a BDC business development company, you may have to pay them a little bit or some, maybe even 25 to 50% to start. But then there are benchmarks along the way that they have to hit. And especially if it’s a BDC, I think, especially if it’s a BDC, you have to have conversations where you define what your expectations are, but hopefully you’ve had the conversation before you’ve hired them and you ask them for this price. What can I expect from you to be bringing to me? Because it’s easy to hold them accountable if they said it, Dave, you told me that you expected to bring in a hundred thousand dollars in the first month. And we’ve got a thousand dollars, help me understand, what’s the problem here. Where are we falling short? Are we not providing you the tools? Are we not opening up our calendars enough? You have to have those conversations. As soon as you expect that they are not gonna be hitting benchmarks. It’s time to have those mentions that we talked about earlier then those invitations. Don’t wait until you get to the end of the contract or halfway through the contract or day number, 89 of the 90 day probationary period to have these conversations
Larry Broughton
03:30:38
Be courageous, my friends.
Dave Braun
03:30:40
Yeah. And going into it, the company, whoever you’re hiring should be able to provide you those KPIs or what the benchmarks should be. But then before you have that conversation, you better be having a few in your mind as well. Because they could just be, hopefully not, but if you don’t want ’em to be snowing you, but they could not be doing the right KPIs or what you expect.
Larry Broughton
03:31:03
Yeah. A way to make this so that you don’t have to dig so deep into your courage well is to have regularly preferably weekly updates and conversations about progress.
Larry Broughton
03:31:18
And that doesn’t mean for the rest of your relationship. You have to have weekly conversations. But certainly during the early days of the relationship, whether it’s a team member, an employee of yours, or a BDC, that’s on retainer, you know, once they have a proven track record and it’s very predictable, how much they’re coming in, you probably don’t need to meet with them on a weekly basis. Or at least, let’s say it was a half-hour conversation before. Maybe it’s just a 10-minute checkup, anything I need to be aware of. Cause at this point, you’re gonna have KPIs and you’re gonna be tracking them and you’re gonna be able to see, hopefully some of those KPIs are actually leading indicators. So you can see, Hey, this is starting to dip. You know, if that leading indicator starts to dip, you think, well, gosh, we gotta tweak something here so that we start seeing more, better performance into the future. Hope that makes some sense.
Dave Braun
03:32:09
Yeah. So, that’s a good point is whenever you’re having KPIs on anything, you really should be mixing leading and lagging.
Larry Broughton
03:32:18
Yeah. So Dave, what’s it leading indicator, and what’s a lagging indicator?
Dave Braun
03:32:21
Well, a lagging indicator says it’s kind of looking at the past and saying here’s what’s happened. And here is the value of what’s happened. A leading indicator is something that says we do enough of this or it hits this certain amount. We expect a certain result in the future. So that’s a leading indicator.
Larry Broughton
03:32:43
The number of successful sales calls you have—it’s a leading indicator. Financial performance is a lagging indicator. There are some that are both leading and lagging indicators. Client satisfaction scores, for instance, say, oh, we really screwed up this past transaction that we had with this client. So why is that a leading indicator though, Dave? Because if you have too many of those and word starts getting out, you stop getting clients in the future. So if you’ve got— so like in the hotel industry, for instance, I think across the industry, let’s just pick a number. I’m pretty sure it’s 80% guest satisfaction scores across the industry. If you have 88% guest satisfaction, word of mouth is gonna travel that you’re really providing an exceptional experience. If it’s 68%, word’s gonna get out and you can expect, I’m gonna have to be cracking that whip.
Larry Broughton
03:33:42
That’s a bad analogy. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. You’re gonna have to be nose to the grindstone, getting more sales efforts, fixing whatever it is that people are complaining about reading those really nasty reviews and taking an action plan to fix those things so that you get your scores closer to the industry average and hopefully exceeding the industry average. Cause I can tell you like one of the things that we do right now when we’re going out and talking to potential and future investors is I show them, here are our guest satisfaction scores compared to the industry. Here are our market penetration scores. Here’s our team member satisfaction scores. And when it’s quantifiable, they say, yeah, all right, this is an organization that’s going someplace. Makes sense?
Dave Braun
03:34:25
Yeah. Totally makes sense. So in summary, both leading and lagging indicators are important for your KPIs in all aspects of your life and your business.
Larry Broughton
03:34:38
Yeah.
Dave Braun
03:34:39
Okay. And then I guess maybe one of the other tips that we’ve got is, regardless of the timeframe and when everything is supposed to happen in your KPIs, we talked about if they’re gonna give you a whole bunch of business, hopefully, they’ve got some experience. They should be helping you in suggesting some systems that will enable them to be successful. And that for you to be successful in handling the new business, you may have to come up with a different system if they’re bringing in leads where they can automatically put them something on your calendar or a new CRM, or it’s like, hey—
Larry Broughton
03:35:18
Lead gen software.
Dave Braun
03:35:20
Yeah. Stuff like that.
Larry Broughton
03:35:21
Email—
Dave Braun
03:35:22
And then you, as the business owner need to start being ready, that to be able to handle all that extra business. So you gotta get your systems in place, you gotta step it up on your SOPs, your team, all that kind of stuff.
Larry Broughton
03:35:36
Well, I would say that I would hope that that those conversations happened before you brought the BDC or the biz dev person onto the organization or into the organization. That’s what I’m always expecting to have. If I’m hiring a quality business development person, I’m expecting them to say, okay, what tools do you currently have? How are you currently doing it? How effective have the past folks been in this role? And I would say, tell me, what do you do? What do you need in order to be effective at this? If I’m gonna be investing this money in you, what do you need to be effective? When that person starts, let’s say, well, I only use Salesforce and I have found Salesforce to be better than all the others that are out there. And you think, well, gosh, I’m been wanting to switch to Salesforce or whatever it is and I’ve got this really cheap version and keep missing follow-ups with my clients, maybe it’s time to invest in it. Maybe get Salesforce on board before that person even joins the team. This takes an investment of time, energy emotions, for sure.
Dave Braun
03:36:46
Yeah. So really count the cost. If you’re gonna hire a business development person or a team or an outside company, it’s not just the cost of them. There’s gonna be some ancillary costs around it.
Larry Broughton
03:36:58
Well, yeah. And I would say that I would congratulate you if you’re at that point in your business where you’re considering bringing a BDC or a Biz dev person into your team, congratulations, that means you’re growing. Generally, it’s the founder, CEO, and business owner that does this in the beginning. And start realizing, man, it’s very difficult for me to do that and run my business at the same time, I need to start bringing on experts that are bolder and brighter than I am, who have more experience in this area than I am. Cause now it’s probably the time where you’re starting to realize you can’t be the master of every function in your business. You have to bring on people who are smarter than you are in specific tasks. So congratulations on that.
Dave Braun
03:37:44
Yep. Bring ’em on that are smarter, but you’ve always gotta, still be willing to hold ’em accountable.
Larry Broughton
03:37:49
Of course. Well, that’s where you will Excel as a CEO. You know, if you do nothing else and you are an effective communicator as a CEO and leader, you’ll be head shoulders above a lot of these, I’m getting texts literally before you and I got on this from a friend of mine who is dealing with a boss or a leader. And I said, well, sounds more like a boss than a leader who uses yelling and threats as a management technique. And she was saying how he doesn’t communicate, you know, it just, he gets to a tipping point and he explodes. Communicate effectively, folks. This is why I love this dial approach I was talking about earlier, mention, invitation, conversation, boundary, and limit. That’s what I was saying at the start of this call is that even if you’re not ready to hire a business development person now, the accountability part is the really important part.
Dave Braun
03:38:52
Yep. Absolutely.
Larry Broughton
03:38:55
Awesome.
Dave Braun
03:38:56
Anything else, sir?
Larry Broughton
03:38:57
I’m about to lose my voice.
Dave Braun
03:38:59
Yeah. Going into this question, I was thinking, well, let’s see, we probably won’t talk too long about it, but man, we really went longer than we thought.
Larry Broughton
03:39:11
No, I think it’s good value.
Dave Braun
03:39:12
It was good. Well, thank you everybody for joining us today. And remember, building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom and where to help you with our Course and Community. And obviously, our White Glove Service, where we find a Rockstar VA for you. So three things we’d love for you to do right now. And we’d really, really appreciate it. Number one, subscribe to this podcast if you haven’t already done so, either on your iPhone or Android phone and then on YouTube by hitting the subscribe button that’s there and then click on the little bell next to it to get reminders. And then number two, give us a rating, preferably five stars, and leave a comment below this video. As Larry talked about, leave something about your experience with biz dev or a KPI that you think you need to make sure that they do anything, anything, because it’ll help us to get the word out and other people will be able to learn from you as well. And then number three, go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our Course and Community and our White Glove Service and get our free checklist to learn what you need to do to properly prepare for hire and thrive with a Virtual Assistant. And remember though, even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with Virtual Assistants. Larry and I have helped a lot of folks and we wanna help you too. So just go to Hiremyva.com for more information.
Larry Broughton
04:40:27
Hey, we love doing this for you guys, we love interacting with you. We love getting your questions and your comments. Keep those coming, but do yourself a favor. Do the world of favor. Go do something significant today. God bless you. God keep you. God hold you. I’ll see you next time.
Dave Braun
04:40:41
Okay. Bye, everybody.
