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good afternoon i am paula fontana vice president of strategic programming initiatives with the national black mba association and it is my absolute pleasure to welcome you to our final installment of rethinking your business entrepreneurs webinar series brought to us by start co i would also like to thank and welcome our sponsor for today fi serve who will be part of this discussion we are incredibly excited about the partnership with both organizations realizing the need to provide more support to our entrepreneur membership base so i have the privilege of introducing two gentlemen today the first is marquis solomon with phi serve he is a senior training consultant he's been with the organization six years absolutely love his energy he is a published author a poet and a motivational speaker so i'm positive you will get a lot out of his discussion today his absolute favorite saying is it's a great day to be alive so you can tell just by that what type of energy he will be bringing to the discussion we also have andre folks with starco for the past 10 years he's been working to grow the technology startup ecosystem in the memphis area he leads change to build and operate new programs and resources for the inclusion of minorities women and students again a very dynamic discussion that we will have today let's kick things off right away with marquise otherwise known as solo thank you paula thank you paula pence i am so so so glad to be here folks this is an amazing opportunity and i hope that i'm able to give you guys some information that you'll be able to take back and think about so let's let's start off with who we are and when i say who we are i mean chryser you may have heard the name you may not necessarily know what it is that we do uh spicer who is spicer so fi serve is a fintech company guys we do financial technology specifically our origins are in merchant processing we're the number one merchant processing company in the world in more than 125 26 countries uh number one acquirer number one processor number one independent network all of those things sound wonderful but at the end of the day we partner with small to medium-sized businesses that's what we do we help businesses go from good to great one of the wonderful things about being here talking with you guys is that i get to talk to other entrepreneurs other black entrepreneurs about taking their businesses from good to great as for myself you heard paula tell you some things about me uh i'm i'm a consultant so i train our consultants how to go out and speak with businesses on how to be more efficient more productive and more successful in the day-to-day operations of their businesses as it says on the screen our aspiration as a company is to move money and information in ways that move the world now our purpose is to deliver superior value to our clients through leading targeted technology and innovation as well as an excellence in everything that we do so that means that we don't necessarily do things the old-fashioned ways or traditional ways we always want to be right there on the cutting edge this is important because most businesses today or most successful businesses operate in a digital landscape all right and so what we do is we help community environments build digital routes that connect them not only with their customers but with their peers so let's talk some more about phi surf here guys and we won't talk about them along because i want to get right down to my most important point what's in it for you but fiser is a company that believes in innovation this year alone will put over 500 million dollars in funded programs to support digital enabled agreement advanced risk management e-commerce and a cornucopia of other things that help business can transform from good business models to great business models now what do we do all right it's a lot of fancy words a lot of five and ten dollar words as as my my dad would say but when it comes down to it what do we do we go out and help small to medium-sized businesses in specific verticals address the issues that they deal with day-to-day whether it's cash management taxes state local and federal taxes inventory management keeping up with stock keeping up with employees we help them to digitize these processes so they can be more efficient and more productive we talk and consult with them about e-commerce and about being the best business that they can be we help bridge the digital gap between small and medium-sized businesses and business technologies so what do i mean by this we're all intimately familiar with our culture with black businesses and the struggles that they deal with from day to day one of those struggles is having a good understanding of what fintech means to their establishment whether it's the mom and pop restaurant that has the best barbecue in the city but may have some issues with making sure that they can keep a consistent inventory or it's the new candle and infant shop that has an amazing clientele but is unable to reach their client base on a consistent basis our job as a company and my job as a consultant is to make sure that we bridge that gap between the things that make them good and the things that make them great so let's talk about our clients our clients are small business owners what we found is that 49 of those small business owners started their business to turn a passion into a living i'm one of those individuals outside of the suit and tie guys i spend a lot of time behind the turning tables i'm a dj i'm a professional dj it's not necessarily the money that makes me do it it's the love of music the love of the sound and the rhythm and the way that people react when they hear that song that just brings back those memories it's that passion but without the right technology behind me it's harder to make a living off of the passion we found that 55 of all small business owners work 60 or more hours per week that that's what our client looks like 60 or more hours a week someone once told me that when you become an entrepreneur when you become self-employed you trade in a 40-hour a week job where you chase someone else's dream to 80 hours a week chasing your own journey and then the other statistic that i want to share with you guys is the one that's the most heartbreaking point is that 43 of business owners aren't able to take a vacation whether that be because they lack the staff to man their operation while they're out or because they don't trust the staff that they have there or that they just don't feel comfortable walking out of their doors and expecting to be open when they get back this is our client case this is who we deal with guys these are my customers these are your customers these are you so how do we do this how how do we go out into the business environment and and make impacts into small business lives we do this through our clover line of business solutions the clover station the clover station pro our clover mini our cloverflex even down to our clovergo and our online clover solutions we provide smart technology that allows our business owners to cut down on labor man hours and cost without sacrificing efficiency productivity or the excellence of your products we have an open platform architecture which means that we take the machines that you just saw infuse them with applications that deal directly with the issues that small businesses have whether it be inventory loyalty and rewards programs employee management analytics and insights marketing website development web ordering and accounting as well as gift cards all of these things are done on a smart platform we've designed it so that it works just like a cell phone a cell phone that we all have if you look to your left or your right right now your cell phone is within two feet of you guaranteed that's why we designed it the way that we did so that it would be a comfortable transition from old paper and pin techniques to new technology that takes these businesses into the next century our current app market has 202 million plus app downloads we've got 350 plus apps right now and over a thousand developers working directly with merchants to create applications that help better their business bottom line clover is the best thing out there for our merchants now let's talk about what that means for you guys what does that mean for the small business owner specifically what does that mean for the black small business owner as a community we've often been in a position where we're playing catch-up it's hard to put ourselves on a level playing field with say an amazon or mcdonald's or uh an ebanal massage problem all of these companies are larger companies that have access to programs and processes that the small business owner normally does not have access to folks fortunately we've designed our programs to fit the small immediate side we can give our small business owners the same level of support that we would give in amazon for mcdonald's the same analytics that they have in terms of their customers their competitors the demographics of those customers all of that information we put it together package it and provide it to our merchants a lot of these solutions come along with the sas plans that are already there so there's no additional cost what that means to you that means that now if you own a small restaurant or a small chain of restaurants we can help you to connect those restaurants we can help you to build up your customer base with loyalty programs we can help you manage your inventory and turn a process where you're spending three four hours a day two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon doing inventory and turn that into a 30 minute process we have we have applications in place that will allow you to project your sales for next week and next month and the month after that and then build a schedule based on those sales and the particular talents of your employees in a couple of minutes as opposed to spending two and three hours building out that schedule and then another hour and a half disseminating it amongst the staff and then another half a day answering the phone on waiting on the employees to call to get their schedules our job at pfizer is to help the small to meet inside business my job here is to make sure that i let you guys know that i'm here to answer any questions that you may have to providing you insight to consult to support our community because at the end of the day i'm advising employees at the end of the day i'm a citizen of atlanta but also at the end of the day first and foremost i'm a black man i'm a black entrepreneur and i care i care i want us to be successful as a community so what all this means is that we have the resources we have the talent we have the will we're here we are here guys a couple other things i want to share with you competitive advantage we make sure that we give our business owners the competitive advantage by making sure that they can accept payments anywhere that we create conversational commerce and we expand out on the things that they're doing to help them get from good to great currently guys we're supporting black and minority businesses in a major way we've invested 10 million dollars in making sure that small to medium-sized black-owned businesses will do well not only in this era that we're in now in terms of covert 19 and the pandemic but beyond that we've got our official black wall street initiative we're working with the national black chamber of commerce all right uh direct grants we got direct grants going to small and medium-sized businesses to make sure that they do well that's my uh that's my alarm folks telling me i've been talking for an awful long time that i'm gonna have to pass it over in a second and we've also got programs that serve as incubators and resource providers to make sure that everything that black businesses need that they have now normally we go to q a right now but instead of doing that we're going to wait because i love the uh the open air organic environment in which you guys answer questions what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna turn it over to andre now and he's gonna tell you about the amazing things that they're doing at starcraft andre are you ready are you with me andre let's give andre a second i think he's getting his uh his presentation cued up there yes andre i'm passing it over to you all right all right can you all hear me now i think all right i think we can all here okay thank you sorry about that i think we had a little technical difficulties there uh marquis thank you for your uh your your prelim there appreciated all the good information uh about fi serve and look forward to bringing you into the discussion here in a few moments um again my name is andre folks i'm with start co based in memphis tennessee paula thank you for the introduction earlier well we're going to hop right into it today we're going to be talking about sales process and and operational capacity and basically we're going to hop into some discussions on you know laying out a sales pipeline uh the client decision making process uh mapping and data mining your client journey and also looking at this operational capacity to support it we'll also get into some business development strategies that could be useful for you and your company that you're growing if you remember what we talked about last time was uh we really got into risk and competitive landscape and we had a few people join us um on our call a venture capitalist and also another startup company and we're going to do something similar again this time we have uh vijay harrell with trade lanes who will join us in a few minutes and we'll join marquis in a discussion that we'll have on some of these topics that we're talking about well one of the things i wanted to spend some time with you on is really starting to think through what your sales process is you know many times we're so focused on our product or service that we're building um that we we many times need a little bit of support on how do we actually bring it to market and how do we outline a process for doing that that can be successful and so what we want to spend a little time on first is how do you generate leads you know at the end of the day do you know the top two or three strategies that you can use to go direct to your customers to bring them into your sales pipeline you know whether that's using some form of a social media strategy whether that's direct email approach cold calling um you know buying email list using databases and repositories but we always want to be able to have what we feel are those top few scenarios that bring us to our customers and typically you'll go through some form of a prospecting phase and what i'm talking about today is more of a manual process but this still applies if you're building a piece of automated technology whether you have a virtual site or something along those lines and when you think this through if you're prospecting you're trying to reach the customer engage in them and hopefully get to a point where you can present your value proposition around your product or service and maybe that comes in the form of a meeting maybe that comes in the form of them clicking through your website to actually see the service and the value that's delivered but at some point you want to be able to make that pitch to them and then overall you're hoping to maybe gather some information from them that helps you better bring your solution to them you know whether you want to learn more about the business that you're selling on the actual customer you need some information from them but typically we want to gather some form of information so that way you can better assist them those of you who are familiar with selling on businesses or enterprises you definitely want to analyze this information so you can come up with some recommendations maybe you have a more customized approach because you have a core product or service but you want to tailor it to the needs of the actual business you're selling on and so that's why you analyze the information that they gave you so you can make sure that you're speaking to the needs that they have then overall there's some form of proposal or recommendation that you bring to them and and hopefully you work with them to hopefully have them say yes you know and they make a purchase with you i think this is all important we have to understand that you know it's important to lay out the pieces of your sales process whether it looks like this or not these are some common elements that you normally see and you want to work through this and you want to lay out the individual steps along the way you know how many emails did it take to actually get on the phone with the client how many phone calls did it actually take before you thought that you could give them a formal pitch at what point were you able to gather the appropriate information how long did it take for you to analyze and crunch that information then you had to put proposals together and then you had to set other meetings to hopefully have them purchase and come on board now the question is how long does that take do you have any idea how long your sales process is from the time that you started your marketing strategy to the time that you have a check in your hand or dollars in the account do you have a very simple sales process that's instantaneous someone walks into a store and buys something within 30 minutes or is it something that takes up to 12 months doing enterprise sales and working into big corporations or institutions do we have any idea have we ever thought about it you know many times when we review financials for investment we'll see that many times they'll show dollars starting on month one and then we'll ask them how long their sales process is and they'll tell us maybe three or four months so that means they haven't factored andre are still with us so it looks like we are having a few technical difficulties please stand by andre looks like you're back with us yeah apologies i'm not sure what's going on let me see if i can pick up where we where we left off all right there we go back like we never left okay great what i was speaking of before was really starting to see how your sales process could really kick off your financial forecast on the revenue side and i think one of the things that we want to think through is as we map out that sales process how much time money and resources have to be allocated to that sales process for you to be effective you know are you spending a lot of time going on meetings talking on the phone uh what materials do you need along the way do you need scripts for phone conversations and emails that you send do you need proposal information that's already crafted that you can customize these are things we want to be thinking about along the way that i think are very very important at the same time it doesn't just stop with mapping out the sales process we have to then think about the client decision making process and this is just as important there's so many times where we may map out a sales process but it doesn't speak or align to the client decision making process and there's many times we sell on clients and we wonder why they're not responding in the way that we hope that they would and this is where we have to understand they're receiving an inbound inquiry from you who's trying to do business with them as a vendor they look at it as a vendor pitch they might be getting dozens of vendor pitches on a daily basis and so we have to understand that we're not the only one that they're talking to at the same time maybe sometimes just sits on their desk and we've been calling on them and thinking everything is fine and maybe they haven't even thought about it for over a month you know at some point if they get interested they'll research you they'll vet you they'll look at your credentials they'll look at your website they'll see if it speaks to what you have been pitching them and we have to understand that they're going to do the screening of our company and then at one point they're going to decide do they elevate this or not do they bring this to other members of their team or other members of whoever is involved in making the purchase decision and at the same time we want to be understanding that maybe it's at that point that the true sales process actually begins for them and so here we are maybe we had the first meeting we sent them some information and we think that we're going to be able to close them or move them forward but maybe it sat on a desk for a month and we're peppering them with emails asking them to follow up when really maybe it didn't fit into their process and so i think this is important you have to really put yourself in the client's shoes and think through their steps of making the purchase decision for you how long does that process take for them and does that match up with the duration of your sales process many times it doesn't and at the same time who is the jury that we're selling on who all is involved in making the sale many times we're we're talking to what we call the champion someone who really gets what you do they're excited about it and they will talk about it internally at their business but there are other members of the jury there's sometimes what we call the economic buyer who is making the decision based on money do we have the money to invest in this how much is it going to cost what's the value we're going to get from it and then who is that person and do we need to talk to them at the same time maybe there's a saboteur that's part of the equation someone who is always selling against new ideas new opportunities and new vendors and do we need to be speaking with them and understanding how to work through this mix at the at the end of the day it has to be worth their time and it has to fit into their behavior as an institution making a decision the same goes for even something as simple as purchasing a plane ticket you know if you think about it do we purchase the plane ticket the first time we hop online to look at it do we confer with our spouse before making a vacation trip family members friends etc there's usually a decision process we go through before we make decisions and so we have to understand this if we're selling on whether it's a business or customers at large just a few things to to note um whenever you're laying out you know your sales process i think it's always important to understand what does it cost to acquire that customer you know i think many times we don't have that number and we're always having to go back and look into the data just to see where that is what are all the activities that you put into sales and marketing and onboarding of that particular customer do we understand what our lifetime value is how much money can we make off of that customer in our lifetime and we can't assume long assumptions around well we keep the client for 20 years we'll make that much money many times for a startup company we'll look at lifetime value over the first year or two you know what are your assumptions rooted in do you have past examples of clients that you can lean on to get some information and some data if not maybe you can start with some industry data anywhere we just need to begin for those of you who are already up and running does your sales speak to the return on investment that you generate you know there's a lot of you out there who are generating great return and value you have numbers to back it up but you're still selling as if you're an early stage company always make sure that your cell speaks to the actual real-time numbers you're delivering if you're delivering x amount of customer satisfaction let's talk about it if on average you have saved your clients x number of money let's talk about it and same thing for revenue when you're laying this out don't forget about churn or turnover we want to make sure we we factor that into our numbers think through your onboarding costs and then also once you bring clients on you then have to manage the relationship a lot of times we don't think about this we get them on board and then there's a servicing cost that come with it more importantly let's make sure we consider our bargaining power with our purchasers are they moving us all over the place on price or are we able to move them around a little bit and let's make sure we're not under charging there's many startups we've worked with who have very high closing rates and sometimes it's because maybe they're not charging as much maybe they could get away with charging more the other thing i want us to think about is as you lay out a sales process or pipeline how many prospects can be going through that pipeline at any given time this is where we'll see an issue in some of the financials we look at you know we can't work a thousand prospects at once only x number will move to close and each one requires an amount of labor and so we have to come up with a number how many can our sales team or us as individuals handle at any given time and then that forces us to start thinking through any economies of scale a few other things and then we'll start a discussion here with our guests a lot of times we look at a sale as a meeting and you can't have a sales pitch without a sales process so if you haven't mapped out the process we don't really have a cell yet all right and so what we want to do is set expectations early on in the process with the client even show them the process and try to keep them on path as best you can when they take you off the path you bring them back to the expectations that you set with them in the beginning get them to agree to the process then pursue it and don't mess it up at some point you have to make the ask you have to ask them for their business and so don't just assume that they understand and i would also be very leery of the term interesting you know so many times startups are are meeting with um potential clients and they're always like well this is interesting and this could be something we work on ask them to define what that means the other thing is know what your strengths are is it the product are you building a product or service that's just unbelievable and they have to have it is it the deal is the way that you're packing packaging the money around it just too good to pass up or is it the person do they really believe in you or your management team and getting the job done whatever your strengths are that should be resonating through your cell and as we mentioned before does it speak to the roi and what i mean by that is how are we going to generate revenue how are we going to generate better customer satisfaction and how are we going to cut costs or be more operationally efficient all right well wanted to open it up a little bit i think it's good to have a perspective from marquis with fiserv and i'm going to introduce vijay harrell of trade lanes because we have a startup on the line and you have a startup who's coming at it from the early stages and a mature financial services technology company who has a great world of experience and some of the systems that they've been deploying and so vijay i want to start with you um i would love it if you could just give everybody on the line a brief introduction introduction on trade lanes and then i'm also interested in the importance of having a sales process for your startup maybe you could just shed a little light on what what you all have seen on your end oh wait i think you're on mute there vj thanks andre great presentation uh you too marquise um thanks for having me everyone um so just a little bit about trade lanes we eliminate the manual paperwork needed to ship ocean containers uh we built our platform around the premise that uh whoever delivers to the customer on time wins the business it's the new discipline to win in global trade today and we call that trade delivery it's one part trade execution automation which is streamlining your process and then one part kind of providing an amazon like customer experience quick background on how we got started uh we were participating in the world's first ever logistics accelerator in memphis tennessee sponsored by fedex uh this is how i met andre he was a he started off not only was he helping to run the program but was a mentor to me and tr in the or and trailing our organization um we were doing something in air cargo actually is how we got into the fedex program but within two weeks of being there you know andre had introduced us to a lot of different people so we went to this mmbc i think it's uh minority business committee or something like that we met the small business that got a million dollar offer for their products they manufactured dock equipment there is a new warehouse in mexico that that it came from and this company had never shipped to mexico so they turned down a million dollars worth of sales because they didn't know how to do the export documents this blew my mind i'm thinking wait you turned down a million dollars because of some documents so we thought they got there's got to be a bigger problem here so about about four months later we met andre's brother danari he went to this company named louis drivers now at that time the only dreyfus i knew was the actress from seinfeld it turns out that dreyfuss had this problem too documentation was costing them a lot of money but more broadly something called trade execution automation that's when the light bulb went off i said wait a minute you're telling me a 30 billion dollar global ag merchant has the same problem as a 15 person manufacturer in memphis tennessee boom trade lanes is born i this is an unusual path to starting a company but i've been spent the next two years um traveling the midwest kind of couch surfing using airbnb singing down with trade execution teams one day a minimum one day per week watching what they did um mirroring interviewing taking notes and then designing a system that ultimately fit within a trade execution and you know when we it paid off because when we get our first customer now i think a faster path would have been hey go get a job doing trade execution for maybe six months or do an internship but i don't know sometimes i don't do things the easy way um uh when we get our first customers the largest ethanol producer in the world and i said why did you guys choose us at the time with three people um and just kind of about to become five six seven and um they said it's clear that you guys understand understand trade execution that you built this for people like us and teams like us but more importantly if we could take what is in our head and put it into a system it would be trade lanes so um our sales process came from that deep understanding of how this the the teams operate what i found when i was um spending all this time on site is that they would always pick up the phone no matter what because they always thought that there might be something wrong with their shipment so instead of doing emails we cold called because i knew that there was like a 90 chance that they would pick up the phone so we actually have like a 80 conversion rate on just cold calling now um the key was in the first couple of seconds they need to know that i was we were experts in trade execution not selling a software solution but an expert in this particular area and so after thousands of cold calls and over 400 interviews i was able to craft a message that within the first 15 seconds they knew that we were experts and that would lead to the next two minutes where we would talk about specific pain points and how we were solving them and then that would set up the first discovery call so our sales process was become an expert when you contact them share share something with them that makes you stand out that know that says hey these guys know what they're talking about and they're thinking about it differently and then use that to set up a first discovery call and then from the discovery call it's about um telling our story our narrative why we're different but then uh deep diving into them as to like what the root cause of their issues because every businesses root causes can be different even though they have the same pain points and then ensuring that when you set up a demo or walk through a potential solution that their pain points align with how you're presenting um a way to solve them and as long as that way to solve them aligns with the features that you're offering them um you're gonna have a really really good um engaging sales process and i think a bit less of a sales process and more of a customer buying experience because customers are buying and they're not being sold too i like that i like how you talked about it that's a nice little segway uh marquis and so i'm sure many of the things that you all have seen with some of the businesses you serve and maybe the lack of having a a process for for how they implement their business any any um light you want to shed on on how you all see things in terms of the businesses you work with not sure we can hear you you see here yeah i can't hear him either can you hear me now can you hear me now you got it oh absolutely actually i was i was on mute there so one of the things that vijay said that struck home that's very similar to spicer's philosophy in terms of dealing with customers is zeroing in on the customer needs you know we've all got a million people that are offering us a million solutions to a million things but if those solutions don't speak directly to that customer's need to that pain point then all of those solutions are for not the fact that you were able to zero in on on a need an industry uh a gap in that industry a value gap if you would and then be able to to take advantage of that and turn that into a lively uh and successful business is a testament uh to to to your business savvy so i i commend you there it but back to the point it's important that as business owners that you understand that you're only as as valuable to your customer as a solution to their issue you can have an amazing product you can be the the best service provider in the world but you've got to be able to sit down with that merchant discover what their actual need is and then draw a line that is a direct correlation between that need and your solution that need in your solution i'll give you an example my barber i know you guys look at my head and say what do you need a barber for right no but my barber who cuts my beard work in a shop for three four years and for that three or four years i went in there faithfully every other week and got my beer shrimp i sat there i played checkers i played the dozens i enjoyed the conversation the camaraderie but lo and behold around march the pandemic hit now when the pandemic hit my need for a haircut did not change i still needed a haircut but his ability to supply me with that that particular service went away because his shop closed one of my consultants that was in an earlier class had a conversation with my barber and understood what his need was that need being to be able to contact his customers to be able to make appointments and then to be able to see those customers in a way that was not endangering their safety once our state started to open up albeit too early i will say that too early because of that consultative conversation because they were able to understand each other listen to each other and consult and draw a line a direct correlation between a need and a solution my barber is now in an entirely different location he sees one person at a time only one person there but the solution that they were able to provide was him being able to take appointments online take payments online advertise and market to his specific customer base and do so it appears at a significant gain to his profit than what he was originally doing and again right back around to the issue it's about understanding the need and tying it to a specific specific solution back to you andrew well well thanks for that and that kind of begs a question here vj you know in terms of managing the relationship during the sales process right i mean you know you learn a lot over the years on on what works and what doesn't work you mind shedding any light on on how you manage relationships of these prospects and even beyond so where they became on board and became clients yeah um you know i i always you know what i think my first job was like making pizza or bagging groceries one of those two um um and i think it was actually bagging groceries in ingles in in tucker georgia right outside of it so um and i always remember from that from that retail experience or even just online experience if you make it hard for me to pay or just do what i want to do i'm not going to sign up for your service so i always think like that's my guiding like i want to make it easy for them to buy i want to make that easy as that process as easy as possible so um the uh the analogy i'll make is that i like we try to see ourselves as like han solo or yoda the star wars analogy um to um luke skywalker right we're giving our customer the lightsaber they need to take down the death star and whatever it takes to get there whether that's training whether they get to figure out some things on their own whether it's this you know whatever that is from the conversation that we have establishing ourselves as an expert you know having some understanding of what the challenges are but then really understanding how those specific challenges relate to their business and then providing like this new way you know the forces with you um we're guiding that conversation to a specific end goal the promised land um but it's their journey so making sure that we support them with whatever information that they need to get there and they're gonna do it on their own timeline and so um i think like that's probably the best analogy without getting into specifics that i can i can provide like we kind of see ourselves as as um as the uh as yoda to uh luke skywalker well that's that's good i like that and you know marquis i mean you all provide all types of technology for your clients and that factors into how you manage their relationships um any thoughts on um how you manage relationships and make sure you fit the needs that you were talking about there definitely definitely it it kind of centers on something that bj was talking about and that's client engagement it's necessary that you engage with your client we oftentimes start conversations off with the businesses that that we're able to partner with with a simple question what does this process look like for you what does your day-to-day process look like from the time you walk in the door to you leave tell us what that is tell that story for us so that we have a better understanding of what you're going through what your business is going through and how you're operating and once we gather information there we ask another question in the perfect world what would you like it to look like and then that gives you a good understanding of where they are right now and where they'd like to be that's how you discover where the gap is and how then you're able to tie specific solutions to that gap to those needs our clients are at their heart just like us they're people they've got wants they've got needs they've got things that keep them up at night and the best way to gain your your merchant's loyalty your clients loyalty is to understand those needs and to be empathetic in your conversations with them yeah i would i i would agree with that to add one more thing i mean in that story that we tell we tell that in a story form because that's why people go to movies and turn off their cell phone for three hours they want to be engaged so if you can tell that story from where they are today to where they want to be along with your solution as a lightsaber to get there and in in sales closing a sale is just the beginning of a relationship so we also have something called customer success that gets engaged once they say hey we want to move forward customer success that part of that that buying experience that customer experience is getting them customer success is dedicated to making our customers successful with our products and we want them involved early so that they understand our customers so not like before they sign the contract once they sign they're being onboarded and then once they're using the product of the service our success team is helping them become more successful and sometimes that can lead to cross-sells and upsells so uh just you know building on top of the points marquise is i think exactly what you're talking about getting them from where they are today to where they want to be and thinking of it as an entire experience that has sort of a loop back and you want to keep engaging them not only in the sales process but once they become a customer and make them a more successful customer let me um let me touch on a couple more slides and i want to come back to that to close out so give me um just one moment i want to come back to some of the systems and processes that i think you all are well aware that we need in terms of moving our businesses forward so let me move on here to a couple of slides um you know this is a business model canvas that we all know about an open source tool that breaks your business down into nine components i'm just going to focus on a couple here and that's right in the middle uh the value proposition that you are wanting to deliver to your customer segment on the right and then what channels are you going to use to do that channels being could be the way that you generate leads and the thing i want to look here is to the left hand side it mentions what are the key partners key activities and key resources you need to deliver that value proposition another way of looking at this is looking at an operating model canvas now many times we want to spend most of our time on our process our value delivery chain our bread and butter of how we deliver our product and service but many times these things surrounding it could either contribute to that process or slow us down what are our relationships with our suppliers how many locations do we have or do we have people in multiple locations that we have to manage what are the information systems we need to help this process what are the management systems we need to help this process and then how are our people organized so that we can be successful in this value delivery chain far too often we're not organizing these other elements and it is an inhibitor to this value delivery process and so it's vitally important that we understand better what are the systems the people the process and the organizations that we need vitally important here um you know we've kind of joined the two canvases together for those companies where this is applicable so you can kind of see this illustration i'm going to close out here and i want to come back to that in our discussion business development there are many of you out there who are trying to get off the ground and and start your business and maybe you don't have the the dollars or the resources um to to roll out expensive campaigns but there are some things you could be doing you know right now first and foremost if we know who our customer is do we have what we call a lead list you know do we have a list of 250 customers that we can put to paper that we can begin reaching out to in a variety of different formats have we built any centers of influences centers of influences are other companies or organizations or entities who have the same clientele as you but they're not your competition give you an example when i was in the financial services space as an advisor i worked with the state planners and mortgage brokers we had similar clientele but we weren't competition and we sent business back and forth to one another at the same time have we started to put together our forecast on revenue and expenses have we identified our key marketing channels do we have two or three of them that are very very specific have we mapped out our first sales process and are we asking for referrals on a regular basis the other thing is in the very beginning what content are you generating and how are you packaging it so that you are well received in your process of generating relationships at the end of the day the success of your business at the early stages is based on relationships and how you manage them and so these are just things that i would be working on generating my leads and putting them to paper and qualifying them building up centers of influences hopefully five to six that can support my business laying out some financial forecasting of what i think might happen generating content that shows that i'm an expert at my craft for my business understanding what my channels are to reach them and then asking for referrals as often as you possibly can but also doing it in a way that shows you are worthy of those referrals these are things that anybody can be doing it's hard work but you need to be allocating daily weekly and monthly time to be doing this this is not something that people many times enjoy doing unless you're in the sales field or the business development field but if you're starting a business you have to do these things and so i just wanted to kind of bring it back full circle with marquis and um and vijay you know one i'd love to just hear from both of you on the importance of the organization of your people processes and systems you know marquis you all provide systems to businesses without those systems they're doing things manually they're not getting it done it's affecting their bottom line why don't you start us off on the importance of having these systems and processes in place having solid systems and processes in place that make make the job easier but also make the job more efficient is this paramount i can't tell you the the amount of resources that we've seen lost because processes have not been streamlined they've not been kept up to date people are doing things by hand by pen and paper and although those are have in in the past been ways that you know we've had to deal with that that we've made as efficient as possible we're no longer in that time we're in the digital age i've seen people lose 15 20 in terms of shrink a day just by not having good processes in place so one of the things that that we do that we build upon is making sure that we help businesses do just that that we help them be as operationally sound as possible we do this through making sure that they've got good communication between locations uh whether those locations be physical locations whether it be a physical location a online location and a mobile location whether it be making sure that our content in terms of content because you mentioned content creation content creation and dissemination is also very important if you're going to be using social media then you should be putting out the same message across all of your platforms you want to be able to do this as efficiently as possible so we put systems in place to allow them to have one-click dissemination of all of that information you also want to make sure that you organize your customers people don't understand sometimes the value of a customer walking into your establishment and spending funds with you you should be trying to contact that customer uh yeah grab an email address a phone number something that would allow you to market because that's what we call a guaranteed customer they've already bought into your dream they're already there but if you don't have a system in place to record that information to take that data in then it's lost make sense andre it does it does and uh vijay we were just talking a little bit about the importance of the organization of people processes and systems in order to make your business run efficiently and and marquis was walking us through some of that from a fish perspective any thoughts on having the right information systems in place having the right processes in place and when you don't not good things typically happen any thoughts there yeah i mean um going from you know being a solo founder and then building a small team and then bring bringing in a leadership team you know we did everything from scratch so in the beginning it was google docs and and just you know team meetings and then as we grew uh we started to get systems that were suitable for our team size so you know uh having a crm and email tracking and and phone tracking we use something called pipe drive it's a crm where you can hook it up to your email to track you know what you send what people reply to calls and meetings that you have so you can see you know how many calls and meetings does it take to to get to a demo to get to you know a qualified prospect um you know what's our win rate you know what segments of the market so being able to capture all that information and then add certain things to it to say this customer was large this customer's medium this customer has you know these specific needs then you can start to see that data the first thing is tracking it and sometimes as an early stage company or even a small business you you won't know do you have more kind of have these resources in marketing departments um you know ours when we hire sales people they need to know they don't have a dedicated marketing department we don't have that well now we're starting to because we've raised enough cancelling more money and it feels great but before you had we had to have hunters they had to pick up the phone they had to figure out what they were going to talk about they had to you know everything was built on folks who wanted to own the process and make it better but definitely having identified where you can play as the owner of a new business you have to fill in the gap my people know there's nothing there's nothing i'm going to ask them to do that i wouldn't do myself and they'll tell that to me like hey i know that you wouldn't ask me to do that if you would do it yourself so i got that covered go do ceo stuff right and i think um that was a really weird transition for me to go from founder to ceo because i'm used to doing everything myself so i'm not used to saying something and people just doing it so i think that's also an important part of people processing systems as you're a small business or an early stage startup is realizing things evolve over time start with something that works don't try to get too sophisticated and and keep where you start to find the biggest frictions that's generally when you want to start looking at some systems to support it um where you know but find something that's easy to use and integrate with your your existing services andre let me give you another uh another nugget here one of the one of the areas that businesses typically have uh or challenged with is labor management labor management is is is the thorn in everyone's side because you got to have somebody there right dj said that they're getting ready to expand i think from four to six or seven is that where you guys are headed vj to like oh i was i was giving a little bit more historical where i think uh we went from uh like five people or six people last year to about 20 22 now and looks like we'll be at 30 by the end of the year perfect excellent excellent congratulations so normally maybe some of those some of those employees may be hourly employees one of the areas or processes that we see that that small to medium-sized businesses typically have a struggle with is labor for example your average employee clocks in five to ten minutes early and they may stay five to ten minutes late if it's unchecked and you're thinking oh it's just five minutes right it's just five minutes here five minutes there but if that employee is clocking in ten minutes early leaving ten minutes late that's 20 minutes times six employees that's 120 minutes a day times six days you could get up to 40 uh 20 to 40 hours a week that you're paying an additional pay outside of what you have scheduled for that will affect you because your process doesn't check for those things it doesn't have a system of checks and balances those small things add up and it will take take you to a situation where your your job of building your business it's harder than it has to be it's best to make sure that you've got those processes in place we actually have a really good system we have a really good system in place for that if you guys if you guys are having challenges with with managing the team in hr use something called gusto.comgusto.com it does both hourly and full-time employees you it integrates directly with quickbooks and i get a ceo financial report every friday on labor and my top financial metrics and so you can put in things in place to keep those limitations to to to manage those risks and i'm gonna highlight i'm going to hop in real quick guys uh where we've hit our time um we could talk probably for another hour on things i handed it over back to paula um so she can kind of close us out here yes absolutely and and i appreciate the robust discussion that that you all had as well as the great information that you provided to members andre starco thank you so much for uh providing your insights in this throughout the series for our members and then phi serve so glad to have you on board partnering with us as we continue to support entrepreneurs and their efforts so if i would love to know how you felt about the session you will see in the chat that there is a link to a survey we appreciate your feedback so much so that the first 25 people to complete the survey will enter in a chance to win an amazon gift card so do not delay and make sure that you are in the running for that gift card and then last but certainly not least we continue to provide not only year-round programming for our members but this year also our conference and career fair will be a virtual experience september 23rd through 25th you will see a link to that in the chat as well please register and we would love to have you enjoy the rest of your day be well