If anybody out there is looking for business guidance, business, coaching, helping assistance in finding their men. I don't know that there's anybody else that I know in this space that I would give a, a higher recommendation to as good as we are managing Google ads, horrible managing businesses. One of the things that we see a lot in businesses is people are focusing on the growth, but if you don't have the systems behind it, if you really don't have a handle on your operat, All that growth is gonna fizzle cause you can't deliver on it. And I think the thing that we hear consistently is as a leader, they're overwhelmed by the numbers that they're trying to track. They might have 20, 30 different kinds of metrics and it's like a deer in a headlights kind of thing. There's so much there that they don't know where to focus and, and drive it. And what we see with entrepreneurs. Oftentimes they're so focused on what their, their top line is, what their revenue is. Cause that's some sort of badge of success. Yeah. Revenue's a vanity metric. Hey, it's custom with your daily Google news, and today I'm actually really excited to traverse outside of Google. Just a little bit and talk maybe more about how to. Improve the efficiency of your business, probably your agency. Cuz I think most of our, viewers are agency owners as good as we are managing Google ads with horrible managing businesses, which I think tends to be more true as the business grows in scales. And so I've got some friends of mine that I would consider to be mentors they've been super helpful for as long as I've known them actually just with really, really solid advice. So I'm really excited to welcome Tom and Karen of K M P consultants. Excellent. Karen, thanks for being here. Thank you KA for having us. I, I have a problem, which is my first company is called Kio global. And so the minute I start seeing your URL, I just wanna say that, cuz I've said it so often. So I wanna say Kio consultants. So I, like your URL. I wanna steal it. Yeah, well it's, Def func. Now you can have it, but KMP consultants and what's interesting about KP, I think is you take something that is massively inaccess. Which is the, business operations system. Right. And, you kind of truncate it and I don't mean simplify, but give us something that can actually be used. And what I'd like to do here on this call, if you don't mind is maybe for our listeners, especially those that, couldn't necessarily afford a high level business consultant. Give them that first piece. Like what's That you see wrong with businesses. And I know we talked a little bit about it before recording. And then what's the little hinge that moves the big door. how do they potentially fix that thing? If that's a, fair, I know it's a big question. I'm hoping that's a fair question. Well, that's, a good question because one of the things that we see a lot in businesses is people are focusing on the. So they're really excited about the marketing. That's really sexy managing the business. I mean, most entrepreneurs, most business owners are really excited about the idea and about getting people to embrace the idea and making those sales and tracking revenue growth. But if you don't have the systems behind it, if you really don't have a handle on your operation, all that growth is gonna fizzle cause you can't deliver on it. Right. And eventually what would've been a really successful business gets bottled neck by the business owner. There's just only so much time that they can devote and manage all the little details that they've been so used to managing as their business really gets too big for them to handle as one person. And so what we're really excited about is when we can come in and help people understand their business, be able to step out and enjoy the growth while being able to know that their business is gonna operate effectively without them spending 24 7 on it. And I think the thing that we hear consistently is as a leader, they're overwhelmed by the numbers that they're trying to track. They might. 2030 different kinds of metrics. And it's like a deer in a headlights kind of thing. There's so much there that they don't know where to focus and, drive it. we got introduced to a framework. It's called the mind framework, but mind methodology framework, but the, really exciting thing for us in, working with that is it laser focused us and our clients on the one number that was gonna help them drive their business most. Now for most of us, it's probably some form of profit things like that. Nonprofits that might be different, but it really. Cut through the confusion that I think we all struggle with and really allowed us to really focus on that thing that is really gonna make the biggest difference. So it's interesting cuz you're speaking to my heart a little bit in a separate microcosm, we have to do the same thing with Google ads. Inside of Google. There's, there's an unbelievable amount of metrics that are available to you. And, they're all noise. If you don't know your, goal, if you don't know, and, we make clients, if a client's gonna sign with us, my sales team is not allowed to submit a client unless the client comes equipped with a goal. That's actually that we can track. So, ROI or CAC or yeah, on lesser extent, TRO as or TCPA. So you mentioned the one number being some type of profitability. Which makes sense, but are you building the lag and the lead indicators to that number? So you can kind of see the way that the bridge functions? Well, we should back up just a little bit, cuz depending on what stage of business is in it may not be profit when you're first getting started, you need sales, right? You need to generate revenue. You need to have cash flow. As you're growing profit would be something once you've got, expenses taken care of, and you've got that traction, you've got a real business that that's moving forward. Then it may move into net profit for software companies. A lot of times what they wanna get started is get subscribers. I mean, that is the first key. So it really depends on the stage of your business and the type of business as to whether it's profit, but for profit business. Really wanna maximize profit. And what we see with entrepreneurs is. Oftentimes they're so focused on what their, their top line is, what their revenue is, cuz that's some sort of badge of success. Yeah. Revenues, a vanity metric. oh, it is. Yeah. And unfortunately it's also one of those metrics that will, deep six, their company pretty fast because a lot of them, they may be making millions, but they're spending just $5,000 less than that revenue figure and all the expenses and ads and such. So they're really not taking home very much. Whatever any point that is. So here's maybe the magic question, right? And I'm not asking you to like give away the secret sauce, but if there's a decision engine, For finding out what your one number is. Is there like a decision tree or a quiz that we can take or how, would somebody even even get to there? Cause I imagine it's multi variance. Yeah. Well, I mean to that point, actually on our website, there's a little worksheet where you can actually work through and you can actually step, so if you go on the website K and P consultants.com/mind methodology. There's a place that you can, obviously you gotta give us your email and we promise not to spam you and all that good stuff, but you can scroll down there a little bit right there, right under the baseball, right under the baseball analogy. There you go. And that will actually take you through and help you figure out what your most important number is. And by the way, mind is really just an acronym for most important number in drivers and drivers are just the work that you do. The category of. So you can go in there and you can grab a worksheet and there's other worksheets that we provide you to kind of work that through so you can get started on, generating that level of focus. Yeah. It's just a, process that we help you think through your business, through those, downloads. So that you're, first of all, looking at what's involved in your business, what really actually creates business for you. And what is that, metric that says. We're winning. We're actually killing this versus saying, oh, I'm doing really great on lead generation, but there's nothing coming out the other end for example. And, I wanna go back to your question about leads and legs and things like that. and certainly I have used that same idea, but I think that actually leads us into a little bit of. Down a bad path in some sense. So yes, the, platform that we use can do lead metrics and it can do all sorts of different kind of KPIs that you wanna do. But I think the lens that we tend to work with our clients through is the lens that says, what should we do now? That is gonna have the greatest impact on improving our most important number. And that's really the lens that you learn. And if you ask the decision engine question, that's the decision engine is, really just always being focused on, that. And it's, interesting how quickly a subtle shift like that can. Change the culture and change the thinking, a fellow, that mutual friend of ours, who you met down in Costa Rica. We've been working with them for about six, two months now. And their team has already adopted this language of what are we doing. And isn't really improving in their case that profit. And they we got the report last week from them that then in basically 45 days, they'd improve their net profit 32%. Just through that conversation. And so it's like, we focus on this. we focus on how to do the work that improves that and they immediately impacted their profitability and they also shared with us that. their CEO said, Hey, we got more done in a month than we had in the previous sixth. And their ops manager said, well, not quite, probably more like the previous two years And, it was just a change in the languaging for the people listening to this, that's the thing is pick that one thing. What's the most important thing and always think through is what I'm doing now. Gonna have the greatest impact on improving that. And if you consistently do that you'll get a lot of traction with it. and interestingly, the culture the way that that conversation happens immediately focuses everybody. On doing that and, little story from those guys as well. the ops manager was thinking about, well, I gotta get everything in process street and I've gotta do this and I've gotta do that. And I've gotta get all this stuff, organized projects, all the pro and the sales guys said, based on what you said, where we're capacity constrain, do you think maybe hiring is more important and the goes well. Yeah. you're right. I really should be focused on, hiring. Not organizing. He wanted to do the thing. He was good at, not the thing that he needed. Right. And, that's the human nature. Right. We get involved in tasks and projects that we can tick off or we can accomplish, but not necessarily something that's really gonna move the business forward. And the key cool thing in that conversation cost was that. it wasn't you need to be kind of thing or what do you think? Yeah. you're right. I think the priority really is this to do that. And it was just a sort of, the ideal sort of egoless conversation. It's, question, let's talk about it. You're right. That's the right answer. that spoke a lot about creating a level of trust in the convers. Well, it speaks to what I really like that you said is organizational alignment. Yeah. I think this happens a lot with high growth companies. It happened with us where we would talk to folks about, me and my partner would know where we're going and where we're headed and what's important. Yeah. But then do your employees, my big thing, I never wanted my staff to be incentivized. When a client increases their budget because that puts us in that puts us in a position of actually not operating in the client's best interest. And so my key metric was always retention. Mm-hmm are we keeping the client? That for me was I don't know that it was the most important number, but maybe it was the most important number by which I, gauged my, employees. Here's what's funny. I never told. I never told my people like, Hey, I'm not going after more spend, I'm going after retention. and dear God, when I told 'em it just felt so obvious to me. I was like, why would I even need to tell you that? But course that's that's absurd. Like they're not mind readers. And then when I told 'em, I was like, oh, huge paradigm shift, especially from folks that came from other agencies. So I love the idea that. we're gonna simplify focus and then put this in front of everybody. So the troops can rally and everybody knows what they're rallying around. This is not a glitch. I'm interrupting the video you're watching because I need to remind you that I'm always looking for people to join our team. So if you're passionate about Google ads and you wanna work with the best Google ads agency on the planet, please go to so late.com/apply. Speaking of working with the best Google ads agency on the planet, if you're having trouble with Google ads and you want professional help. That's what we do. You can go to. So lake.com that's S O L eight.com to apply for your free no obligation action plan. And if I've given you any level of value at all, maybe think about giving me a thumbs up and try to do our channel. That's how we choose the YouTube algorithm. So they actually know that I know what I'm talking about. If you have questions, comments, concerns, or confessions hit me below in the comments. And now back to your regularly scheduled. but then to your point, too, at the top level it would be maybe net profit, but at each layer, each, department yeah. Would have their own most important number, which naturally support the one above. So marketing might have, Sales qualified leads or X number of leads or sales might be conversion rate or revenue, they retention for, fulfillment and it can go on from there, but each one of those is going to really feed the net profit result. Wouldn't it? Mm-hmm if you're picking the right one. And there are other KPIs that we might add into it, but there are only KPIs that would help us make better decisions about improving the most important number. Well, that would be the really key thing too, is once you have the, the most, I'm thinking of a hierarchy in my mind. So you've got your, most important number organizationally. And then as you break it up by departments, I could see how it would be very tempting for the department to want to go do the thing that they're good at that even feels like. And here's the example that's in my mind, marketing loves lead quantity. Mm-hmm look how many it means. I got you. It's $3 an email, like, pound my chest. and I've always thought as the Google ads agency, when, I'm talking to a marketing agency, that's like, oh, we need this many leads. And this cost Perle. In my mind. I'm like, don't you care if they close? Like, shouldn't it be? So like they want the number of leads and I could even in a silo is the marketing director make a point as to how it would contribute to net profit mm-hmm or whatever the, key performance syndicator would be, you would really need somebody who's able to zoom out. And say like, Hey, actually, and figure out how it, contributes to, again, in my hierarchy, in my mind, it contributes to the main goal, but interacts with the other goals. Mm-hmm so maybe, let me ask about that. Talking about organizational alignment, how do you get people to choose? Do we call 'em mines? men most important number. So on a per department basis, how are we choosing men's that are synergistic or is that a concern? Well, it is a concern. I'd absolutely agree with that. I think the way that you have it is actually the conversation that you actually head with yourself. There is the conversation the organization needs to have. So as a senior leadership team or whatever that looks like decides on what theirs is, then the conversation moves to the next layer of the organization to have the conversation. So if we've all agreed that this is the target. Is what you are doing the best way for us to achieve that. and what's the measure of success and what's the measure of success. And so you would end up having the conversation where Marcus says, it's just a number of leads. I get you. Well, Is that really the thing that's gonna best drive our revenue or our profitability? No, it's probably something different. Likewise sales, you, and you kind of go through the organization that way, having the conversation where they have to kind of stand up and say, this is our clearest linkage to that. And the, team gets to kind of debate. I love. And that's how you have that conversation. Well, could you could have that same problem all the way through marketing says, I want number of leads and sales says, well, we want qualified leads. And then sales says, I want closed deals. And then operation says, well, we want retain deals, right? You sort of go down this train where everybody has to be. You have to get on the other person's team for a little bit and empathize. Right. I interrupted you Karen. I'm sorry. No, That's great. But you remember at the top level, you've got all these people who have those responsibilities in each of those different quote silos. They're focusing on really three drivers that are going to move that net profit. If that's your, top level, most important number, and they're gonna choose activities that are gonna be cross functional to actually improve that number, that's going to drive the priorities in the organization below it, which is then going to drive what is focused on in each of those marketing sales fulfillment, et cetera. So it ultimately cascades down from the top, not just based on what number do we wanna chase, but how does, what the activity that's going to improve that number? Drive the activities further down the organization. Mm-hmm and what's fun is you can actually see this all the way down to the individual contributor. So you get a heat map of the things that we're tracking. And you can see small problems arise because they show up as red or, yellow. And you can see a problem brewing well, before it ever hits the five alarm fire that gets at the, the leadership level, it says, oh my gosh, why didn't we know this before? So it's a con consistent weekly. With meetings that are highly productive, cuz they're not just status reports. They actually have a meeting rhythm that focuses on just what needs attention. So they're extremely quick, extremely productive, very collaborative. And people walk away with documented the actions that are documented, that are followed up on, in a platform that keeps everything in place. So there's no meeting notes. There's no, I mean, it's all in there. One on ones all the way through. It's really, really helpful. the one I wanted to go back to something you talked about which was sort of around the area of transparency, and I know that maybe some of. The listeners on here are a little bit newer. they're getting, their businesses going and things like that. But I think for them, what I would say is the thing that will cause a business to struggle is a lack of clarity on what's really important to your point about retention in your team. Right. And how that caused your organization swivel around. It's not that you were intentionally trying to obscure it. It's just that you hadn't really thought to share it. So. The point there is, as the leader build into your organization, the willingness that you're willing to share, what's really important. So your team knows what to rally around and do. And that is probably, one of the clearest ways to success is sharing that. And one of the clearest ways to lack of success is don't tell your people what's really important, and they just go off and make up things on their own. You wonder why. The organization isn't going where you wanted it to go. Right. But that that'll kill it as well, Yeah. So that, I just wanted to go back to that point, Casa. No, it's a brilliant point. As a young entrepreneur, I was afraid of my employees knowing how much money the company made mm-hmm cause you know, as a business owner, you realize that. I brought in a hundred bucks, but like after I paid for rent, light gas, marketing, sales, operations, bookkeeping, finance, legal, you know what I mean? Like that's, I'm not taking this and putting in my pocket, but right. we do 6 million in gross revenue and I don't want an employ, like you make $6 million, So it was always a fear of mine. But what I realized was by keeping that the key performance indicators quiet, I had no ability whatsoever to show people. The impacts that their work was directly having on the business. So now every week we do the weekly town hall, the solutions eight weekly town halls. It's 10:00 AM Pacific every single week. And we go up and all we do is we go through our KPIs. Now I haven't done I haven't done a very good job of finding my MINDD. We do have ad spend under management. That's the thing that every. Pointing at, but that's not the most important thing because I don't want my people to go out there and beat up on clients to increase ad, spend mm-hmm So I probably need to walk through this exercise. that leads me to my next question. When are you big enough for this to matter? Cause I feel like if you're like, two dudes in a basement, this feels a little bit like overkill, maybe I'm wrong. When do you think this gets rolled in as far as size? So I would say, well, we're worked with an organization, but this was developed by a fellow here in the valley as a business head of business over on the Mesa gateway airport. But They have applied it to two people, organizations, cuz they just like the fact that it organized everything for 'em and there's a way to do that somewhat economically and that's possible all the way to corporate level thousand that this, organization that, the fellow we've met we don't, his organization is pushing about 18 people right now. they're fully implementing. and then of course it goes much, much larger, but it, really depends on where you are to a certain extent you're maturity, I guess. But I would say if you're less than a million dollars in revenue, it's probably gonna be a little bit over California, but, once you start getting above that then looking at this and, even if you just practice the basic framework you're gonna find it'll pay dividends. I think one of the biggest comments that we've seen is that it's so natural. Mm-hmm, it's not here's your KPIs, here's your, goals that you need to. It's not a forced situation, but it helps people actually think about the business in a more natural way and about their work and what they do in a more natural way. Mm-hmm so it's really quickly adaptable and the focus isn't on the system, the focus is not really on the results It drives that con and it got started. The basic framework got started when the, fellow he bought business out. He was $600,000 in debt and three people. And he exited it. And I think in a little under 20 years, or more than nine figures is excellent. and the interesting thing. He's in the business was in the aircraft parts, aftermarket kind of thing. at the time I think he exited in 2017 that kind of business would demand an eight multiple, he got 22 21, 1 21 and a half multiple anything over 20, it's kinda stuff. What the trail number is. I know KPIs are important, but that's yeah, yeah. that's a big one it was, and then. They credited the framework as a big part of the reason for the multiple, the business was running well, but it was also the framework was what was sustaining it. so I would back to your question, almost anybody could start it. Lee has written a book. What's your most important number is out there. it's on and you can find out about the framework from that. And I encourage everyone to take a look at it. And it's now like a bestselling book on wall street, journal USA today, whatever, different places. And you've got, on our website, you've got the tools to go do things. He got his book to get more in depth on kind of how to implement it. I think it's actually pretty amazing. And maybe just to kinda. Close with one or, well, it up to you, we'll be close. I guess we can always talk for longer, but, interesting that leash and I think he wrote that in the book is Jack Welsh of GE fame actually became engaged with, Lee in this and, shared with Lee that he had the framework at GE. He could have made GE twice the size that it was. So, that's a pretty. That's not Fe praise coming from Jack Welch. yeah, no joke. That's amazing. Well, I'll say if you're watching this or listening to this, I wish I had engaged with sophisticated guidance so much sooner than I did from an entrepreneurial perspective. I thought I could do everything myself. And to be honest with you, I could, I'm a smart guy, but it, would take me years and years and years. So sometimes it just makes sense to just go, just go pay the people that know Karen and Tom y'all are brilliant, but you're also you, this doesn't sound like Paning, you're just good folks. like every time is like kind empathic. So if anybody out there is looking for. Business guidance, business, coaching, helping assistance in finding their men. I don't know that there's anybody else that I know in this space that I would give a, higher recommendation to, and I hope that people reach out to you. I hope they go to this page and they, download this this gift of yours. I'll make sure to include it in the show notes. Really appreciate y'all coming on. Last words to you. Well on that same page, they can even sign up for a demonstration. We'd be happy to show 'em how it works. And they walk away with a really interesting perspective on their business in just an hour and yeah, cost. This has been delightful. We, we appreciate you and, thanks for giving us the opportunity to share a little bit. This has been great. Yeah. Well, I love highlighting good people and y'all are good people and you're doing something that I think is really ultra necessary. And especially for agency owners, agency owners, and I'm one of 'em so I can slander own. All we're worried about are the tools like, And then the business grows around you and you look up one day and you're like, well, there are people here that I'm accountable to, and I don't wanna talk to them, And then people start asking you, I just learned what EBIDA means recently. like there's just this whole world that I want nothing to do with, but I know in order to do the thing that I love, I need to contend with. And then there's people like you. Who, we didn't get into Y's entrepreneurial background, but it's very impressive that they can actually help. So for our listeners and Watchers you'll hope you'll consider Tom and Karen and Tom and Karen, thank you so much for being here. Appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Casa. We'll talk to you later, man. All right, take care.