Systems And Culture For A Scalable Business With Mike Callahan

It’s been some interesting times. We’re doing this in early to mid-April 2020, still in the COVID-19 pandemic where it’s not quite business as usual. It’s more like business as unusual. I’m sure all of us will remember this time for a long time to come. My guest is special. His name is Mike Callahan. He’s from Simple Growth. I’ll let him tell you more about that here momentarily.

Mike and I have known each other for a few years now. Let me tell you a little bit about him. He spent twenty years in the lawn care and snow removal industry, and then he created a turnkey solution that revolutionized his own business that he now teaches to others. He has a software program platform that helps service businesses. Mike’s a friend of Elite Entrepreneurs and a seven-figure business owner. We look forward to learning tons of insights from you, Mike. Welcome to the show.

Thanks. I appreciate you having me on the show here as well. The Elite family there has been instrumental not only in my first business but in my second business here as we scale to the seven-figure mark and beyond.

Tell us a little bit about not only what you do with Simple Growth but how they might learn more about you or connect with you at the front end of our interview.

Simple Growth, in its early beginnings, was never a business. As you mentioned, we were in the lawn care and landscape industry as well as snow removal in Upstate New York. It was my journey through automating and doing some of the other things that we’re going to talk about with the Elite program that allowed us to take that seven-figure business and continue to evolve, scale and build a leadership team. As that journey in the original business went on, I realized that one of my buddies who was in technology, after having a conversation with him, that there wasn’t anybody in the service vertical or service industry, whether it’s lawn care, home cleaning, and cost control, that had automated a business and had a turnkey solution.

Believe it or not, in 2020, it is still a cutting-edge technology in sales and marketing as far as automating and automating solutions. What we did a few years ago was we started a business that provides turnkey marketing and sales automation for service industries, then we’ve gone in and automated employee recruiting, training, and onboarding, and then something we call repetitive tasks. Those were the three main growth hurdles to breaking that seven-figure market well beyond the lawn care business and pretty much any business that we’ve found that we’ve worked with, no matter the industry. Our mission here is to help service business owners take their life back from their business by creating turnkey solutions and automating the business.

Systems And Culture: Our mission is to help service business owners take their lives back from their businesses by creating turnkey solutions and automating them.

It sounded to me that you help people get and keep customers and great team members and then automate some of the repetitive tasks in the business. You developed that for your own business, and now you get to share it with others, which is an amazing thing that entrepreneurs get to do when you create something of value and you have a broader audience now to benefit from the value you created. It’s pretty awesome.

Let’s learn from you as a seven-figure business owner. You grew a business to seven figures plus, hit that $1 million mark, and probably celebrated like most of us do when we get there and we go, “We’ve arrived.” Whether or not you called yourself elite, you know that we call you elite because not very many businesses ever get to $1 million in revenue. You look around and you see, “This isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.” There are new challenges that happen as you continue to grow and you run into new hurdles.

There might be a little bit of a revenue ceiling that happens between $1 million and $3 million. As a seven-figure business owner, we’re going to tap into your genius here. We’re going to mine it for some gold so that our readers can learn from the actual things that you learned and experienced. Once you hit that $1 million plus mark, whether it surprised you or not, what did you find were some of the challenges that started to hit you as you were growing as a business?

As we approached that million mark, it was a ways back in the lawn care business. To be honest, we didn’t celebrate it. One of the sicknesses of an entrepreneur is we get to a sports analogy. You get to the goal or the finish line. Before you get there, you start looking at the next goal. You don’t take the time to savor it. Anybody reading who is about to break that $1 million marker has to savor it because you definitely are elite. There are only maybe 5% to 7% on the stats of businesses in all industries breaking million. One of the things that surprised me was the fact that we had this sales machine, and we figured out the marketing and sales.

To get to that mark, we broke some hurdles, but now that we have broken that million mark, the challenges were a little bit different. You may have a team of 12 or 15, and maybe you’re up to 20 or 30 employees at this point, depending on the industry and peak season we had, at least that. The issue was how we create a culture to drive this business in. The first thing was we realized we didn’t have a culture at all. That’s where the Elite family and program came in because, at that point, I wasn’t necessarily in the day-to-day grind of more working on it and not in it, as Michael Gerber would say.

Several of our seasonal employees from the summer were good workers. We wanted to keep them year-round. They would never come back the following summer if they weren’t doing snow removal. Eventually, I jumped back in the trenches and said, “Why are you guys leaving? How come you’re not coming back for the following year? Is it the company?” They’re like, “No, the company is great.” Next thing, “Is it the gentleman running the business?”

Paul, who was running Callahan’s Lawn Care, at that point, for the most part, joined me on our Elite trips. They said, “No, Paul’s a good guy. We like Paul.” I said, “Is it the pay?” The response I got back pretty much immediately was like, “No, the pay is good. It is better than most of the people around here are paying, but all it is is a paycheck.” That was the biggest slap in the face at that point that we had built a business to scale. We built a sales process. We built a process to get the jobs done through delegation and not dragging the owner into a day-to-day grind. We hadn’t built a process around retaining our employees and building a culture in a rallying cry.

Culture is a fuzzy word sometimes. Sometimes it gets a bad rap and gets thrown around. I like the angle you’re taking here where they saw it as a paycheck like they could get a paycheck somewhere else. If they were actively employed already somewhere else with a paycheck, why would they jump back and forth? Talk more about what you mean by a culture being part of something more than just a paycheck.

As we started to talk about the internal stakeholders of the business, the key owners in that, and then we brought in some of the field staff, we started talking about, “What do we stand for? What’s the purpose of Callahan’s Lawn Care outside of providing great lawn care and snow removal?” There were certain things that we loved to do in the community. One of the examples was right before the winter on Veterans Day, we used to give away free snowplowing. In a raffle, people would submit a veteran’s name, either a family or friend member, and we would go on Facebook Live and raffle off free snow removal. We thought that was important and part of our culture was to give back to the community. People gave out for us.

Several things like that were a rallying cry. Our employees and team members stood behind that, but we didn’t include our field staff and technicians in that. They didn’t have any prior ownership of that. One of the biggest things that we thought about and came up with was that we wanted to provide people with the lifestyle they desired. It was interesting because as we looked at that, it was not only for our external clients, but our internal clients, our employees, and team members, where if their goal was to work from 8:00 to 5:00 or 7:00 to 3:00, whatever that was time span, we paid them on a piece rate pay system. They were paid on the budgeted hours, not the hours they worked.

[bctt tweet=”One of the biggest things that we thought about and came up with was that we wanted to provide people with the lifestyle they desired.” via=”no”]

If they worked harder and smarter with some quality constraints, they potentially get paid for a 10-hour or 8-hour day. If their goal and the lifestyle they desired was to spend more time with their friends and family and get out of work at an earlier time, we enabled them and empowered them to do that by providing great service and working efficiently with quality.

On the flip side of that, we would give our external clients or customers the lifestyle they also desire. If they didn’t want to worry about maintaining a landscape throughout the summer and spend time going to their child’s baseball game per se, they had that ability to not have to worry about their landscape and we gave them the lifestyle they desired. The culture was more of what we stand for and how we, as a team, provide that to our clients as well as our employees on the team.

When we started that common rallying and that cry, we were starting to get a good 3 to 5 years out of these key players that we wanted to keep around. Every business has turnover, but the key folks that we wanted with 3 to 5 years was an instrumental change because, normally, every season or every other season, we were creating our crews. It created gaps of consistency, and we’d have to go out and retrain all these crews. Having that common railing cry in almost a common mission for our internal employees and our external clients helps significantly.

Forgive me. I don’t mean this demeaning in any way, but for a lawn care business, you got people who are seasonal. They’re there working from late spring through the summer and early fall. What you’re saying is that the key to keeping those people engaged was something more like a higher purpose, a rallying cry, something that they could all connect to and say, “I want to be part of that. That’s an identity I can get behind.”

It was interesting because a lot of the other industry consultants that I’m friends with and had been for a while when I first proposed this thought I was nuts that you could get a “technician” in a lawn care company that’s out mowing grass or weed whacking out all day. That level of employee would never connect anything like that.

It costs maybe a company picnic with a few root beers or actual beers on a holiday like Labor Day or something. It was pretty much the only way you were going to be able to connect with those folks. After working and digging in the trenches with these folks for the last many years, I knew that the people that we wanted could and would align with that. That was the key to success. Up to this point, it had never been even a thought that could work in a service business.

You’re no longer in that business because you’re running Simple Growth full-time. Is it Simple Growth Systems or just Simple Growth?

It’s Simple Growth. The website is SimpleGrowthSystems.com. There’s a bit of confusion there.

If you think back to Callahan’s Lawn Care, what would you say is the purpose that people rallied behind? You guys created a purpose.

It was just to give people the lifestyle they desired and how we attain that. For the external client and the internal client was that purpose, that rallying call. Until we did that and then aligned with some of the community service and things we were doing, there was no identity. It was people who were coming to work doing their jobs, but they weren’t emotionally and physically invested in the company. It had become more than just a business or a job.

I heard you talk about this idea of giving people a lifestyle they want and how that connected with your internal clients or your team members and also the external clients. How much of a process was it for you to get down a fairly succinct statement like, “We want to give people the lifestyle that they want or help them get the lifestyle they want?” However, the exact words went, it’s fairly short. How long of a process did it take for you to get to something like that?

It’s something that simple. It took quite a while. We went out to an Elite Forum. It’s the first process, and then we graduated into Elite Momentum. Elite Forum concentrated on that significantly. We were, in addition, a certified partner with Infusionsoft at that time. We spent 7 or 8 hours one day at PartnerCon with an abbreviated version of Elite Forum. You probably are 5 or 6 hours there, then I flew out with the other gentleman running the lawn care company at that time to the proper Elite Forum out in Phoenix there, Chandler-Gilbert.

We spent two days refining that. That was the beginning of it. It took several days after that offsite to hone that down. We had an idea of what we wanted, but refining it down to that simple statement was not a quick or would seemingly easy process because we wanted to make sure we had some buy-in from the team back home. It wasn’t like we went out to Phoenix for a few days and came back and imposed this. We did get with pretty much the whole entire company, talked about it, and helped refine the statement that we had originally.

I’m glad that you said that because the best leaders do that. It’s funny. If you try to create a statement that’s going to pull everybody in and engage their hearts and minds at new levels that you couldn’t before when it was a job, or if you do that on your own or with 1 or 2 other key members and then go back to everybody and say, “Here it is,” you miss the point. You got to go back and enroll them in the process of co-creating this thing that now they can feel great ownership for because they were part of making it.

You did a great job of enrolling the team in the process. Because of that, it had the intended result, which was now people are excited about what we do because it’s just not cutting grass, cleaning up a sidewalk, spraying wheat killer, or plowing snow. You’re helping people get the lifestyle they want. That’s the key. Good work on that.

It was that ownership part. It had to be from the ground up, especially given the industry, but no matter the industry, it’s extremely important because if it’s imposed, it’s not going to work. These folks felt ownership. They almost felt pride in it. It wasn’t about, “Mike says we need to walk around the back of the house and make sure the back of the patio’s blown off with the grass clippings and lawn mowing.” They wanted to do it because they were taking pride in it. They wanted to make sure that they were fulfilling that vision or purpose that we had put together.

That’s powerful. I love that you were able to go create that one and you’re willing to share that with others. I wanted to draw that out because helping people get the lifestyle they want. It might sound generic or simplistic to somebody else reading this, but what you’re telling me is that for you and your team, it not only became the rallying cry that brought more connection and ownership by everyone involved, but it also did a ton for your business from a financial health standpoint because you didn’t have the same turnover challenges. You didn’t have to retrain everybody every year. There were lots of hiring and onboarding costs that you were able to avoid by connecting with your team in a much more powerful way.

It’s not only that with that piece rate pay system. If you’re looking at it at a production rate, check with your local laws and that. It’s good because it went along with that ownership. Just by doing that, we put a lot more money in our employees’ pockets. Their average per-hour wage went up because they were working less hours, and you paid more. When we dialed that in and got clear about what our purpose was, we ended up netting an extra $1,300 per week per crew over about a 40-week season without changing a person on the crew or a piece of equipment. It was a straight bottom-line profit per crew. That was an instrumental bottom-line return on investment for doing this as well.

I’m always trying to help people understand the real financial value that they get when they do this work because some people might see it as a little touchy-feely. Let’s be clear. It’s not like the only thing that you did was to empower the team with a great purpose that they could all buy into and own. That is a core component of all of this. There was other work around a shared mission and mission strategies about how we’re going to go achieve that mission. There was also, I imagine, strategic planning, a quarterly planning and execution process that we shared with you at Elite Forum. There’s more that goes with it, but the very center of it all is this core purpose. It has some real financial gain if you do it right.

I’m glad you mentioned the quarterly planning because that was something I hoped you’d bring up because that was the next huge instrumental thing. I don’t want to say we were running blindly to break that seven-figure mark, but we had our head down and we would do our budgeting and projection for the year. One of the things is you guys talked about Jim Collins’ BHAG or Big Hairy Audacious Goal. That is that goal that’s farther out 10 or 15 years or whatever you may define that is, and then we broke those down into yearly goals, then quarterly, and then down to our big three where we could track accountability. It went nicely along with our piece rate pay and production and quality control. It gave us a process in almost a framework to plug some of the existing things that we were doing, but they weren’t structured and standard.

That’s something from day one with Simple Growth when we started that we did that strategic planning. A lot of our workforce is remote. We’ll fly them in for all the remote workers once a quarter to do those quarterly planning and then yearend planning. That has been instrumental in the new business to have an accelerated mad dash at that purpose, the quarterly goal planning, and the yearly planning, the BHAG. You don’t know where you’re going unless you’ve mapped it out. Unless you’re holding yourself accountable daily, monthly, quarterly, and especially yearly, then there’s no way you’re going to get there.

I wasn’t trying to transition you into quarterly planning, but since we’re here because you serve a lot of businesses with Simple Growth Systems, you’re not just running your own business. You still are running a business, but you are now enabling other people to grow their businesses. You see a lot of people hitting some of the challenges that we get to see. Once they hit $1 million in revenue, somewhere between $2 million or $3 million, they usually hit some a ceiling. In my opinion, a lot of it has to do with not having this planning and execution rhythm that you talked about. What do you see in companies that you serve now who don’t have this planning and execution? How do they stumble? What happens to them?

We’ve been fortunate enough with Simple Growth that some of our smallest clients are at stage $1 million, $250,000, to $500,000. The lion’s share of our client base is either seven figures or greater all the way up. Our largest clients are between $19 million and $20 million a year in annual revenue. It’s been given a blessing. I’ve been able to get under the hood of what the challenges are and what we’re seeing. Not necessarily with the quarterly planning but it backs into it is very interesting that I don’t want to say most businesses get to $1 million by chance because they’re doing a lot of things right. The scariest thing that I see with a lot of folks is they don’t have an actual budget.

They don’t know their operating costs and their production rates. They don’t have a financial sense. They don’t teach that stuff after five years of college on how to run a business or set it up. Entrepreneurship can be a very lonely place. You feel like you’re on an island until you find something like Elite, these other mastermind groups, or programs. The convoluted answer to that is the first thing that I see is if you don’t at seven figures or above have a budget, it’s going to be hard to continue to grow the business.

You need to know your cost per hour break even when it costs you to operate fully loaded with your fixed general administrative costs and your variable costs. It sounds crazy, but a lot of these folks still don’t have a dollar-per-man-hour revenue goal. How much money do we want to generate per billable hour per person? Those are enlightening things. It’s pretty hard to project out 10 or 15 years budgetary-wise if you at least don’t know your financials.

You said it well earlier when you said a lot of businesses that are getting to $1 million just do that by keeping their heads down. It’s not like they’re clueless about running a business. They’ve created a real viable business, but they’ve been heads down at getting the next customer, serving the next customer, and trying to build the systems to do that in a repeatable way that they haven’t always built the financial discipline that you’re talking about because they’ve managed that from a cashflow standpoint or, “As long as I have enough money in the bank to cover my immediate bills.”

It’s pretty basic a lot of times. That’s no offense to all of you great entrepreneurs out there. It’s an acknowledgment. Sometimes we go as simple as, “As long as I have more coming in than I have more going out, then I’m in a good place.” You have to know the numbers better as Mike’s pointed out. Certainly, post $1 million, ideally even sooner.

I’m sure you can resonate with this. We’re not on a pedestal here preaching. This got me. I had always been a numbers person. I went through a divorce many years ago. It was a game changer because that’s when I found automation. That’s how I went from 100 a week down to 3 to 5 hours a week and then an absentee owner of 30 days a pop. Through that life-changing event, I got back into becoming a nightclub DJ and more of the social scene that I had been to when I was married. I had always run my daily and weekly numbers so I knew where we were at. I was running my business from my bank account balance. If we had, at that point, $100,000 of liquid cash in the checking account, that was the magic number.

Within $10,000 to $15,000 either way, probably north of $100,000, that was the benchmark that I always saw in that cashflow account. Because of everything that was going on, I didn’t run the numbers the way I should have. That number of $100,000, give or take, was there pretty much every week. It never alerted me to think something was wrong. We built such a process and system in the office to collect payments quickly and an overdue automated process that would take care of overdue invoices through automation that by the time I got to November, December, the end of the season, and the summer part of the business had shut down and we’re transitioning into the winter, lo and behold, I realized I had lost $70,000 that summer because I wasn’t doing what I’ve always been doing.

It made us successful financially. To heed the warning that I’d like to share from that experience, if you’re not running those numbers on a daily and weekly basis actual versus budget, you can get yourself and your family in trouble very quickly. Now, we were fortunate enough to have a good cash reserve and use a process through Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First that we did have enough ample cash in the cash war chest.

Systems And Culture: If you’re not running those numbers on a daily and weekly basis, actual versus budget, you can get yourself in trouble very quickly.

We were able to stay liquid and go through that winter. Thank God it was probably the best winter we’ve ever had profit-wise, so we were able to survive it. It’s scary. If you’re not watching those things, with no emotion, you can get yourself in trouble quickly. That’s where a lot of the businesses that break that seven-figure mark, if they’ve done it by pure grind and determination but don’t have financial systems in place, that’s where you can get hurt very quickly. You’re not dealing with small receivables or overhead at that point.

You can get upside down pretty fast. You talked about the importance of some foundational elements. As you know, I call that setting the vision. That’s where purpose, values, and mission come into play, mission strategies, and all of that foundational stuff, but then you also talked about systems for getting and keeping customers, attracting and onboarding the best talent, and for your financials. Everything you’ve talked about is building a system to help you lead and build a business. What it boils down to it, without being too simplistic here, is this is all about building the next system that your business needs to continue to go forward.

You may have hit on it. I don’t want to say the last and final system, but the next challenge as you’re going to scale that multimillion-dollar business and beyond is creating a leadership team or a process in the system that can replicate what you as the solo business owner, CEO, or founder is because what we found, and we’re quickly approaching with Simple Growth here, is that from the top-down leadership and reinforcing all the things we’ve built in the past has to be delegated through other people in the different managers or figureheads in the business, depending on the business. If it’s a flat organization or not, things may vary. At the end of the day, you need the people to be there.

At Callahan’s, when I would leave at 30 days at pop and be an absentee owner, I needed that leadership to still be there on a daily basis to reinforce what we’d originally started. Maybe me being the sole leader of the business. That was a defining thing that, “If I’m leaving here for 30 days, that position that I fill as the leader needs to still be there and reinforced on a daily basis for things to continue to work the way they’re working.”

Everybody reading this would get a sense of the fact that you’re an expert in automating processes and systems, especially around customer acquisition, onboarding new people, and repetitive tasks. That’s what you do with Simple Growth Systems. What we’re talking about now isn’t something that you automate.

It’s more like you have to install in your business a way of doing things like the Callahan way for your lawn care business, for how we lead and do all the people, processes, and systems. A lot of that can’t be automated, but it can be systematized, meaning, “We can have a way. This is how we do these things. We use the purpose, values, and mission as core anchor points for how we do things around here. We hire and train leaders who are going to represent that way consistently,” so that there’s a very predictable experience that you’re maintaining inside of your company.

That’s exactly what I was talking about because when I first pulled out, it didn’t necessarily instill in the leadership team that we needed to continue to portray all those things that you talked about. There was a bit of a void and a gap from it. It got weak. I had to get back and reengage with that leadership team and make sure that from the top down, consistently, at each level, we were portraying that.

That’s the trick. Well done on making that a reality in your last business and your current business quickly. You’ll be right back in that space in no time. I appreciate your willingness to come on and share some of these lessons with some of our readers.

I appreciate everything you’ve done for us. Knock on the lawn care industry because I still love it and we’re still working with a lot of folks in the service industry, but one of the misconceptions I thought was that when we got out of the service-related industry, things people-wise would be a little bit easier in Software as a Service or SaaS. I can’t get into the details of some of the benches we’ve got, but let’s put it this way. It’s an extremely advanced bench that you wouldn’t think that you would potentially ever have some of the issues you’d have with your workflow from a service industry as far as your team.

The problems are a little bit different. I don’t exactly know how I would say it, but I guess people problems are people problems. When you get down to it, no matter your industry, or the type of employee you have, far as whether they’re working behind a computer or out in the field, at the end of the day, there is a commonality. You need to, in my opinion, at least, approach it the same. When the naysayer said, “This can’t be done in a service industry. When you go out to Elite, you’re nuts. You’re wasting your money,” I’m glad I took that leap of faith with Elite because it did work. It’s interesting. The things I learned at the service business are the same exact things in the software as a service business.

People are people. You need to have that common rallying cry, that mission, vision, values, and no matter the business, if they’re the right fit in your business, strategic planning is something that everybody’s going to want to be part of depending on the level of engagement with their job or job title or position. I’m thankful for what you guys did for us and allowed us to do that in the first business.

If you’re reading this, no matter your industry, whether you do it with Elite, you do it on your own or whatever that case may be, don’t come in with the attitude that, “My business or my industry is different. My people are different.” At the end of the day, we’re all the same. People are people and these things need to be done no matter the industry and the business.

I probably couldn’t have said that any better, but I’ll add from my chair. As you know, because you met with and worked with some of these other businesses we had in the Elite Momentum community when you were still actively involved there, it didn’t matter if it was a manufacturing business, a software business, B2C or B2B. We’ve served hundreds of businesses over the last many years. They’re from all over the place and all types of businesses. The bottom line is the business building work that you must do if you want to continue to scale post $1 million is very similar regardless of the business type.

You experienced it in a more traditional service business where you’re going to people’s homes and providing a service or people’s place of business. Now you’re experiencing something similar in a software business. They’re the same principles, the same steps to take. The model might be slightly different, but people are people. The challenges are predictable and solutions are knowable. You got to do the work. You’ve done it beautifully. I appreciate your example of how you’ve done that and sharing some of that with us.

I appreciate it. That roadmap is a roadmap no matter the industry. If anybody needs to reach out or they have any questions, feel free to reach out to me personally. I’m happy to chat about our journey to a million and beyond and our process with Elite as well. I want to thank you and the Elite team for everything you’ve done for us and given us that executable roadmap for the first company and now the second company. We would never have been able to do what we’re doing without that roadmap.

In Q1 2019, we grew by 467%, and then we grew an additional 35% or 36% on top of that Q1 in 2020. Those growth hurdles and the challenges that you learn about there, if you know what they look like as you’re about to hit them, they’re a lot easier to handle and overcome. If we didn’t know and had that in our back pocket from already previously seeing those different hurdles that we took 4 to 5 years in the original business, we’re hitting them every 4 to 5 months. It’s been a wild rollercoaster, but without that framework in the road, I don’t think we would’ve been able to do what we’re doing now. Thank you.

That underscores how much we appreciate you taking some valuable time. Let’s make sure one more time that people know how to contact you, reach out to you via social and go to your website for your business. How can people learn more?

We are very focused. It’s a service business only for marketing and sales automation, among other things. It is SimpleGrowthSystems.com. We can be reached out as well on Facebook if you do it. We’re heavy in the content game. No matter the business of the industry, we’re producing 5 to 7 how-to videos to run and scale a business to that seven-figure mark and beyond. We’re in the mindset of abundance. We’re probably educating our competition and future competition, but there’s enough work out there for all of us.

You said 5 to 7 videos. How often are you cranking those out?

Pretty much daily. The algorithm is favoring Facebook Live. A great resource, if anybody hasn’t read, is the book called They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. He was on a product called HubSpot at the time. We were on Infusionsoft. By no means comparing myself to Marcus, but we were doing this in the lawn care business as well. The same thing as Marcus, but it’s something that we learned probably many years ago, called Lifecycle Marketing with Clate Mask, the CEO of Infusionsoft, now Keap, and Scott Martineau. That was very instrumental. Being around that ecosystem, learning that, and implementing Lifecycle Marketing in the business was great, then we had the same approach as Marcus Sheridan. When your consumer asks a question, you answer it.

They Ask, You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today’s Digital Consumer

Marcus had a bit of a different spin with SEO, but the premise of it is we make a daily video at least five times a week. We answer the questions that our consumer asks us on a regular basis. We take that from Facebook Live. We download it and get a transcript from several different versions out on the internet. One is Rev. We get a text transcript of the video. We upload that to YouTube with the transcript, and then we take the video and the transcript and have our webmaster put that on our website for SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

You’ve got 2 or 3, almost 4 different places now. We’re putting it on as well as Instagram with a condensed version. The idea is when the consumer asks a question, that is the actual title of the video. When somebody goes in and says, “How do I automate my lawn care business?” We should be there right and center because we’ve got probably close to 400 to 500 videos out there.

That’s great stuff. We could have a whole other conversation about that, but we won’t for now. Thank you so much for sharing some of your actual experience and insights growing past that $1 million mark, some of the keys for our readers to either be aware of as they’re approaching that or to seriously consider because it’s right in their face and they do not know what to do. All it feels like to them is overwhelmed and, “How come nobody else on the team cares about this as much as I do? How come I can’t get away from my business?” and all the things that they experienced from a pain standpoint. You shared some of the insights that would help them get over that. I truly appreciate it.

I appreciate it. Thanks for having us on.

Have a great week, Mike. For readers, we’re going to continue to bring you great guests like Mike Callahan. Check out his website, SimpleGrowthSystems.com, especially if you’re in the service business. He’s got some great automated growth tools there. We’ll keep bringing great guests. Please share, rate us, review us, and keep reading. Thank you.

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