Well today was a pretty good day. I spoke to a few providers and showed them how we are different and they are signing up. The girls cold calling got 7-8 more people that want to sign up. Hired another employee.. Spent a couple hours with the family. I can’t complain.
So, Avigaile and Kathy are doing so great that they are actually creating more work in the form of follow ups, return calls and account setups. This is a great problem to have but I feel like my plate is already full. So what does that mean? Hire our 3rd 4th employee. When my cofounder Nicole gets back from her vacation with her family she is gonna be shocked! But this is really needed.
I worked last night in my nursing job and I love to watch podcasts on Youtube. I ran across one with Rory Sutherland, a marketer from England that runs a multibillion dollar marketing company. My takeaway was you need to treat your business like a business. Then I found an old one from Jason Cohen (probably mentioned him in the past) and he talked about how small bootstrapped business don’t act like a true business. You don’t answer the phone when people call because you’re busy or maybe even working your 9-5 job. These two videos put it in my head, that we need to be more professional and make sure every call is answered and returned when needed.
So we decided to hire Neal. He actually interviewed for the cold calling but he has sales experience. He’s a smart guy who carries himself well. He will be in charge of answering the call backs, following up with people who said they were interested and onboarding people (walking them through registration) when needed. He is already a much needed help just a few days after the two girls had started. This will be a huge relief to me getting this off my plate. I can now focus on conversations with people who are interested and want more info.
The moral of the story was we completely judged this all wrong. When we first started we figured this is such a great system for providers that they would want to sign on. I still feel this way but have found several obstacles along the way and completely underestimated the amount of work it would really take. I expected only land maybe 1 in 10 providers but its been a little lower than that. I also misjudged how hard it would be to get these providers through the registration process. I feel its simple but again, Im not an average tradesman. In fact, I got all excited about round robin meeting scheduling, we decided to use Hubspot. Yeah, in the last month, there has only been 2 meetings setup. We are learning the hard way now, but thankfully we are able to onboard the awesome team members that will help us all succeed.
