Read time: 3 min, 34 secs

Hey there - it's Brian 👋

“Idk where to start. Help!”

Last week, I got a call from an advisor at one of the top 5 banks in the US.

His client needed help. Ecomm/brick & mortar client doing $5M a year.

It’s family run. A husband and wife.

They thought they’d retire 10 years ago.

But… here’s where it gets painful.

10 years later they’re still working 70-hour weeks. The business feels like it’s treading water. They haven’t seen growth in 10 years.

➟ No marketing plan.
➟ No goal setting.
➟ No systems.

They’re exhausted. They need their life back.

So that’s how I got the call. I’m working with the family to redefine the business:

➟ Faster growth.
➟ Better margins.
➟ And more time back to enjoy life.

Today, I’m sharing everything we’re doing.

We’re building an operating system.

This issue is for you if you feel like you’re treading water. You need to hit reset. You’re spending too much time in the business and growth isn’t happening.

We’ll cover the basics to hit “reset” and get your business back on track.

You’ll also get an uncomfortably honest look into how we do it at TalentHQ.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

For my friends: What’s going on with Brian?

I’m in a small coastal town in Colombia.

I wanted to better get to know other entrepreneurs. So I’m in a co-work with 15 others sharing our story and supporting each other.

Our focus for TalentHQ is onboarding our sales rep (“SDR”). We need to get our SDR book 3 meetings a day.

I’m typing this from a co-work sitting next to a Colombian SDR.

She was an SDR for 2 years and booked 60 meetings a month!

I’m so bullish on LatAm talent.

Reply “SDR” if you want me to send you info on how you get your own LatAm SDR.

Let’s get into it 👇

Here’s the 4 levers we’re pulling to get life back into the business

Some personal story or case study on the topic

Here's the 4 categories:

1) Where do you want the business to be? (Strategy)
2) How do you run the business? (Management)
3) How do you get customers? (Sales/Marketing)
4) How do you deliver to customers? (Operations)

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

What we're doing is setting up a basic operating system.

I like a popular one called Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS).

But it's important to understand where you're at and not just copy / pasting a cookie-cutter template.

I left out some buckets from EOS on purpose. Those buckets are important, but I want to keep the initial business re-design simple.

We’ll add more later.

If you want depth - this book covers how to get started with EOS (framework below):

The 4 levers you need to get control of your business

Good news.

In this section I’ll peel back the curtain and you can see exactly how we do each section at TalentHQ.

1) Where do you want the business to be? (Strategy)

We need to know where you want to go.

➟ Do you eventually want to add on new products/services?
➟ Expand to new cities/countries? New customers?
➟ How much money do you want to make?

Know where you want to be in the future, look at where you are today, then build a plan to get to your goals.

At TalentHQ:
We have a big vision for the talent acquisition network we’re building in LatAm.

We’ve built a method to get ~400 applicants per role.

And a big vision for the services we want to add on.

I need to keep our strategic moves to ourselves, but to make it up to you I’ll share our financial goals:

✓ Gross Margins: 85%+
✓ Net Margins: 30%+
✓ Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): $25,000
X Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): $300
✓ % of Customers who re-order: 70%+

I’m really proud of our re-order rate. 70% of clients come back to buy again.

Our margins are cozy.

If our average customer stays 2 - 3 years, that’s a very reasonable LTV.

Our biggest focus now is getting our CAC down.

Our CAC is $0 for our social channels (which is our best channel).

But that doesn’t include time spent managing socials (time is expensive).

Most our spend is in testing new acquisition channels.

2) How do you run the business? (Management)

People are your biggest leverage.

Who do you need? Doing which tasks? How do you deem success?

What culture do you want to create for your business?

At TalentHQ:
We have an internal team wiki that tracks / manages all this.

And it’s the CEO’s job to manage people:
➟ Hold people accountable to the values / culture of the business.
➟ Train & motivate people.
➟ Get the right people into the business (get the wrong people out).

You’re the captain of the ship.

1:1s, SOPs, training etc are just tools to make sure everyone rows in the right direction, in the same way, as best they can.

3) How do you get customers? (Sales/Marketing)

Customers are the lifeblood of your business.

So you need a strong sales/marketing plan to make sure you have a constant flow of people buying your things.

So I made you this 1-page marketing plan (and a walkthrough here):

At TalentHQ:
We’re marketers. So we’re always building/testing channels.

Our channels today:
➟ Social inbound (LinkedIn + Twitter)
➟ Emails (this newsletter!)
➟ Warm + cold outbound (social DMs + emails + calls)
➟ Paid media (FB ads)

Our best acquisition channels is socials + emails.

But we’ve been building these channels forever.

Start with one. Get it to work. Then expand.

4) How do you deliver to customers? (Operations)

The goal here is to deliver the best customer experience possible. Giving them as much value as quickly as you can.

But…

In a way that’s repeatable (and scalable).

To make this easy, make a visual workflow of your delivery.

Workflows help you figure out:
➟ Where are things taking too long?
➟ What can you make more repeatable?
➟ Where are there quality issues?

etc etc.

I’ll share my workflow below:

At TalentHQ:
We have a workflow visualized to make each step repeatable (so others can run it for me).

Then for the most mission critical steps, we build processes (SOPs).

You don’t need SOPs for every step.

Get your operating system

If you feel like you’re treading water, you need an operating system.

Do you know how your business should work?

If not, steal my OS. Or use EOS.

(btw you don’t need the actual EOS software. Just steal the frameworks).

Whatever works for you.

See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
[email protected]
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TalentHQ

P.S. Want help finding amazing marketers & admin people in LatAm? Let’s chat

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