Morning all,
I’m headed off to Italy in a couple of days and wanted to take the opportunity to reflect upon the team that has come together.
When I say team – there are now two people that have arisen amongst the troops that I think are capable of producing for the agency.
This is Lydia and Gary. Lydia is running the Email and LinkedIn side of the business and Gary is running the sales side of the business. Outside of these two, in Chill, Anusharee, and Carlos I believe we’ve got three people who intend on sticking around and growing with the company.
That would effectively give us the ‘permanent team’ that the lead generation side of the business has always needed – and in hindsight, I think that has been the actual challenge.
When I look back historically at some of the ‘players’ who’ve been effective within the team – the problem has largely been that they’ve not been permanent members of the business.
Adam was often unavailable as he’s a student as well as working at Pearl Lemon. Prishani came but had multiple personal problems, Skylar, Phillip, Sam all ultimately got job offers as a consequence of the programme which was a lot higher than the salary I could afford at the time.
Then there were others, Isabella who left, Marianna whose leaving now, Tenny is also heading off to do his masters.
It wasn’t without trying to retain some of these people – but the reality of a part of the placement programme bringing in students means that they can’t always stay full time after they finish.
Of course, the programme does have its success stories in Pearl, Lydia (Tenny also!), Kaushal and Akhila – who I think all began as students. But on the lead generation side, it’s suffered.
Now all of the people who are in ‘revenue-producing roles’ are now only folks who are able to go full-time potentially after 6-12 months.
Many of them right now are full-time.
And this is making all the difference as now – the intense training I’ve provided over the last 3 months is beginning to pay off.
Lydia has grown in her role as both the operations director and client relationship manager. Macky & Kristel are both learning as quickly as they can so that they are able to get on client calls and manage client relationships.
They both have the month of August to learn what they need to learn so that in September they can start getting on client calls and producing value.
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And the consistent feedback we get from clients as to what needs to change, what needs to improve is proving useful as well – especially from an American as well as a British client in terms of the expectations.
I’ve just discovered the world of triple line dialling – something that I never knew of before I was told that such a thing exists by our American client. That you can call up to 3-lines at a time.
This is something that Mojo does – I’ve not yet used it as it’s specifically geared towards the American real estate market – but I’m on the hunt for something that works in that fashion.
But our sophistication with Crazy Call grows as we have uncovered the ability to send emails via this power dialer.
In any event – I’ll come to the mechanics of how the team has been built – and the irony is that it’s quite simple:
- Finding smart, full-time, reliable people
- Investing in heavy training for them
- Making sure that all of that training is actually recorded so that others can benefit from the training
- Giving them live client exposure so that they learn from client requests as well
- Continually reviewing their work so that any time there’s any opportunity for improvements – this happens
This is ultimately what’s happening – and what we’re doing continuously in a loop until my ability to add value keeps diminishing as the team keeps improving and it functions to a decent enough degree independently.
The timing of the team being able to deliver is perfect as in 3 days I’ll be on a plane headed to Italy and I feel as confident as I’m able to that the team we have in place will be able to deliver.
We’ve got 1-2 new people coming on board that I’m looking forward to getting to know and that I hope will be able to progress and deliver over the coming months – as I’m sure they will – but what’s great now – is that in a worst-case scenario if they didn’t – the foundations are here.
