Transcript Episode 8: How Data Can Double Your Income and Not Your Workload with Jennifer Grayeb
Transcript Episode 8
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Welcome to the 100 Degrees of Entrepreneurship podcast. The show for purpose-driven entrepreneurs who want to get inspired to step outside of your comfort zone, expand it to your purpose and grow your business in a big way. I’m your host, Stephanie Skryzowski, a globe trodden CFO, whose mission is to empower leaders to better understand their numbers, to grow their impact and their income. Let’s dive in.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the 100 Degrees of Entrepreneurship podcast. I’m your host, Stephanie Skryzowski and I am here today with my friend Jen Grayeb. Jen is the CEO of The Nimble Co, a consulting group focused on helping online business owners better understand their numbers so they can make data-driven and profit generating marketing decisions. She recently left her senior strategy role at a Fortune 5 company where she had six roles in just seven years. While in that role in just two years, she built a productivity blog that reached over 2 million page views per year, which she then went on to sell. In every role she’s had or every company she’s owned, one thing has been consistent. She delivers results without working 80 hour weeks, and now she helps others do the same with one of her best kept secrets data. So Jen and I dive into data and numbers today, but not in a boring way.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Jen basically tells us the secret to why entrepreneurs and online business owners are losing thousands of dollars every month, without them even knowing it. She uncover some of these problems that you might have, or maybe you don’t even know that you have in your business. We talk about using numbers to make super, super smart decisions within your business. We talk about looking at the right metrics within your business and hint, hint, it is not number of Instagram followers. So she talks about doubling down on what’s working in your business and knowing what to double down on by using the numbers. So she drops so many genius gems in this episode, and I’m super excited for you to hear our conversation. So let’s dive right in.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the 100 Degrees of Entrepreneurship podcast. I’m Stephanie and I’m so excited to be here today with Jennifer Grayeb. Jen and I met, I think on Instagram a couple years ago, we were just chatting that the last time we talked, I was pregnant and my daughter is 15 months old. So it’s been a little while. But Jen, welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.
Jennifer Grayeb:
Thanks, I’m super excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Yes. Yes. So we met on Instagram and I was looking at your website in preparation for this call today. And I love that you put your strengths finders strengths on your website. And I noticed that we share three of the five top five strengths. So we are both achievers and focused and competition. So I love that.
Jennifer Grayeb:
[inaudible 00:03:02] surprised by that, but I love it.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
I know. And Enneagram three. So we are kindred spirits.
Jennifer Grayeb:
Yes, very much so.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Awesome. Well, you have such a cool business journey and I would love to hear that. Can you tell us what has your sort of business/entrepreneurship journey look like and how did you land where you are now?
Jennifer Grayeb:
Yeah, so it’s just quite a story. So feel free to cut me off at any point if you [inaudible 00:03:25]. And I’m not even going to go all the way back to the beginning. So just know that I’m going to pick up my story kind of incorporate, but know that before corporate, I had been a professional blogger. I had been in the online business space previously and I ended up kind of going to corporate, to be honest, to take a little bit of a break, right? As we know, running a business can be exhausting. And so corporate was my way to take a step back, start my family, and have a little bit more stability, which I know is not normally what people think of when they think of corporate. So anyway, I ended up working in a Fortune 5. I was in an HR position, which was completely accidental.
Jennifer Grayeb:
I had no background in HR, really no business in HR. But I had a marketing background. HR needed this like social media type role for an internal social platform that the company had. So that’s kind of how I ended up there. Accidentally fell in love with being HR and ended up quickly, that achiever in me and the Enneagram three wanted to immediately be at the very top, right? And so I started learning everything I could about HR, finding the best mentors I could find and just really climbing that corporate ladder. And so I had my eye locked in on a specific role. I got pretty close to that role. I was the chief of staff to the head of talent management by the time I left the company. And I started to just completely burn out. I was so close to where I wanted to be, right, which was head of talent management.
Jennifer Grayeb:
And I’m looking around and realizing that this is not at all what I wanted. And I’m a mom of two, I have little ones that rely on me. And so something had to give. I was also just longing for something that was my own again. And so I needed an exit strategy to get out of corporate quickly. My hair was literally falling out. I’m not exaggerating when I say I was sick. I have an autoimmune disorder. So stress really negatively impacts me. So I did what I knew is the fastest way to replace income, which is jumping into a service-based business. I’m strong in terms of operations. And I think HR also gives me extra strength in that area. And so I can jumped in as a fractional COO for online business owners.
Jennifer Grayeb:
I was able to get five clients really quickly. And so I could leave my corporate job. I made the decision in January. I gave notice in March and I left corporate in June. So it was a very quick move. Again, I want to give a giant asterisk to those listening. I didn’t build some passive income business from January to June, right? This was like service-based business, recurring revenue. That’s why I was able to just make that quick jump. So from there I got into operations and I found myself in same boat as corporate, again. I took on too many clients. I was burning out and I wasn’t really loving what I was doing. So while I was continuing to deliver with my clients and figure out what is it that I want to do in this online space and what do I love, I noticed that there was a real lack of data-driven decision-making with the clients I was working with.
Jennifer Grayeb:
So they were making a lot of decisions, especially marketing and sales decisions based on what they saw everybody else doing, versus looking at their numbers and understanding what is actually working for them and making strategic decisions accordingly. And so I started learning more about Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Data Studio, building dashboards, helping people get more comfortable with numbers. And so that’s really when my business started to take off for me, because I think I found this spot that just not a lot of people are talking about, which is marketing analytics. And I loved it. And it was funny. I got to be in a position where I’m learning constantly, constantly solving problems. And so first I implemented it with my operations clients, but then word got out that I could build these dashboards. And over the past year, my business has really transitioned now almost entirely to measurement over operations.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
That’s so cool. Yeah, because when we talked, a year and a half, two years ago, you were a fractional COO, like you said, just like we are a fractional CFO. So we were very much in the same zone. And so was at any point scary to make that shift from what you really were good at, what you really knew as a fractional COO to doing more of this data stuff.
Jennifer Grayeb:
Yes and no. In some ways it’s scary because I switched from retainer model, recurring revenue to really project based model. So that in and of itself is scary, right? Because you have to feel really confident in your ability to be constantly signing new projects. But to be honest, I’m just pretty comfortable with taking risks. And I don’t think that it’s some unique gene I have, I think it’s just, there’s been so many times throughout my life where I’ve had to jump into an unknown situation, like the corporate example, right. I had no HR background. I knew nothing about HR. I had never worked in a real corporate job before and I came in at Fortune 5, right. But in both of those scenarios, HR and needing to learn corporate, I was successful. And so what I really like to do is just constantly keep that evidence bank for myself of all the times that I’ve done something hard or done something scary or did something without perfect guarantee that it was all going to work out and it was fine.
Jennifer Grayeb:
And so I think a lot of people don’t take the time to think about those examples in their life, but I really make it a priority to be thinking about it because it helps me feel that confidence to make big changes and know that everything’s going to work out.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Oh my gosh, the evidence bank, I am going to take that. I love that so much because whenever anything challenging comes up, it’s like our automatic first thought is, this is the end of the world. My business is going to die. This is the worst thing ever. But if you have those little pieces of evidence that you can intentionally bring yourself back to, that basically I’ve done hard things before and I survived or even thrived. I imagine that has helped you get through a lot. So I am definitely going to use that.
Jennifer Grayeb:
Yeah. The other thing I like to do too, just as a little confidence booster when we need it. Because as business owners, we all need it is… And this is not an original idea. I don’t even know who named this, but it’s called a keepers file. So anytime I get like a thank you card or a testimonial or a note, that’s really kind, that highlights something that I’ve done and not just like, “Oh Jen, you’re a nice person.” But like, “Hey, thank you for doing this.” Right. Or, “Great job on this.” And I’ve saved this over the past 10 years. So I have actually probably 15 years because I have pre-corporate examples, corporate examples, client examples, even just notes from friends, right. And so anytime that I’m not feeling confident or even just having a bad day, I love to just look through the keepers file. And it’s a nice way to make you feel good about yourself and give you that little kick in the pants that you sometimes need as an entrepreneur.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Oh my gosh. That is such a good idea too. I think I have a Google doc called testimonials, but it’s not everything and it’s not all inclusive. So I love having a filed that. And I feel it also probably helps if you’re developing website copy and you need a testimonial, you have this whole database of them. I love that. Okay, so you’ve pivoted from being a fractional COO to doing marketing analytics. So what does that actually mean? And I’m asking the question because a lot of times when I say, okay, I’m a fractional CFO and we help you really understand your numbers and analyze your financials and people are, “Well, okay.” But what actually does that mean? So tell us how you help online entrepreneurs today?
Jennifer Grayeb:
So basically I tell people if you’re doing any marketing in your business, any at all, you’re probably wasting money. Because most people are just guessing as to what’s working, right? You’re, “Well, I know money’s coming in,” even if it’s good money. “Good money’s coming in. So all the things that I’m doing must be paying off,” and that is guessing, right? It could be one of those things driving 90% of your results and you are wasting time on all the others or you’re wasting money on all the others. And so I always just tell people, if you’re not using data and numbers to drive your business strategy, you were 100% wasting money, or time, or both. For me, and more specifically, what that means is it’s really looking at what are the marketing and sales activities that they’re doing and what are the results that they’re getting from each of those activities. And it’s just this continuous cycle of measuring the results and changing the activities. And you’re just doing that over and over and over again.
Jennifer Grayeb:
And so in marketing, in particular, we’re usually looking at where your traffic is coming from by source. So if you’re just kind of average business owner that I work with, you’re probably on… Maybe you’re running Facebook ads, you might be doing some organic social media on Facebook. You’re probably on Instagram and maybe you’re on Pinterest, right? And you might be spending your time in those places or you might be spending your team, i.e. your money and your resources in those places. And so what we’ll do is we’ll look at traffic from all the places that you’re currently marketing and see what’s actually bringing traffic to your website. And then of those traffic sources, we’re seeing which of those people actually go on to become leads and which go on to become sales.
Jennifer Grayeb:
And so an example I can give you that I think as a fractional CFO, you’ll appreciate, is my previous business was entirely built on Pinterest. I literally grew a business to 2 million page views a year on Pinterest and went on to sell that business. And I share that because I want people listening to understand that this was not a lack of strategy. I know how to use Pinterest, I know how to grow a business on Pinterest. So I, this year, I think it was in August hired an amazing Pinterest person, would five-star recommend her, would hire her again. And I was paying probably seven or $800 a month for this person to do all my pinning and manage my Pinterest strategy based on what we both knew was going to be effective.
Jennifer Grayeb:
So I was kind of one of the things that you normally do right, you hire someone and then you almost set it and forget it. She would send me her monthly reports and we would talk about impressions and the repins. And I was like, cool, okay. So four months in, I decided to actually go look, I was looking at my financials and I’m like, where am I spending money? Let’s see what the ROI on all these investments are. I went and looked and saw that we had gotten 13 clicks from Pinterest in four months. So while the Pinterest strategists rightfully so is talking about repins and impressions, which are important, and Pinterest definitely can be a long-term strategy, for me, right, people aren’t on Pinterest looking for Google Analytics tips. So we were finding that people they were saving it and they were maybe repinning it, but they weren’t actually clicking through.
Jennifer Grayeb:
And so when you do the math on that, actually before I say it as plus of the 13 people that did click onto my website, not a single one of them got on my email list and none of them made a purchase. Okay. So when you do the math on that, I ended up spending $200 a click for no, again, a click, we’re not even talking about a lead or a sale, $200 a click. So that’s the best example I love to give people is, sometimes you’re, “Oh yeah, it’d be nice to know what’s working and what’s not.” And it’s like, “No, that’s actually will save you a lot of money.” Because if I had just continued operating under this, oh, I’m getting a lot of repins and I’m getting a lot of impressions, I would have continued to be wasting $200 a click and be getting no return on it.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Oh my gosh. That is huge. And I think people don’t understand, and I know even myself, we have just started to implement looking at more marketing metrics. And again, not just what’s the engagement, how many posts likes, how many comments, but let’s take that one step further, how is that converting into anything? If it’s not, then why are you spending so much time? So I think that sometimes we’re looking at metrics, but we’re not looking at the right metrics. Likes on Instagram do not equal money. And I think we all intrinsically know that because we hear all the time, well, number of followers doesn’t matter, but are we actually looking at the data to see how all of that effort that we’re putting into Instagram for example is generating zero leads, zero sales, zero revenue? So I think it’s a matter of looking at the right metrics too. So is that something that you do kind of assess people’s businesses and help them understand what the right metrics are for them to be looking at?
Jennifer Grayeb:
Yes, absolutely. Is this probably the number one thing I argue with clients about is I won’t measure vanity metrics. I will not build you a dashboard that tells you how many Instagram followers you have. I will not measure likes. Those are not things we look at, right? We say, what are your business goals? Okay, my goal is to make money, right? You run a business. All right. How do you make money? Well, I have consults, right? That’s still in the service or I sell these digital products. Great. That is what our goal is. Getting the consults, which will convert to the services or selling your digital products. And so we are only measuring things that can directly impact that, right? So in most cases, that’s the click. I very rarely find an instance where it’s not the click over to your website, right? Because note unless you’re selling in the DMs and never give people a link to anything, which I guess some people could do, I’ve yet to meet that business owner. In most cases, you’re sending people to a link to actually make a purchase. And so when someone’s clicking, that’s how we can actually measure that they’re taking an action. And so we need to figure out where they’re coming from, so you can get more of those kinds of people that are going to go on to make that click. Does that make sense?
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Yeah. Oh my gosh. It totally makes sense. And I love that you’re, “I’m not measuring vanity metrics for you because they literally don’t matter.” So after your sort of going back and forth with your client, “We’re not measuring followers. I don’t care about followers,” did they sort of come around once they see these other metrics that actually lead to sales or are they still hooked on followers?
Jennifer Grayeb:
I never had anybody be, “You know what? Nevermind. We’re not going to work together.” Right? So I think they do come around. Some people are resistant because there is a bit of a balance, right? So when you’re thinking about Instagram, for example, and I love to say followers don’t matter, likes don’t matter, but kind of like the Pinterest example, who knows maybe if I had stuck with Pinterest for six more months, all of those repins would have suddenly paid off, right? And so I think there’s this like fear of missing out people have of, well, if I have more likes and if I have more followers, then that means I’ll get more clicks. And I think the difference is just that I’ve been behind the scenes now in so many seven figure businesses where I’m seeing about your top source of traffic is always your top source of sales. I think I just, again, it comes back to that confidence. I think I just have a little bit more confidence in that. Well, yes, maybe those things could impact it. Let’s focus on the thing that we know for sure will drive results, which is getting more consoles or getting more clicks to your sales page, right? And then again, tweaking the activities that lead to that.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
I’m glad you mentioned that because what I was thinking was, okay, well, how do you know when something is not working? Obviously, you know when it’s not working, I guess the question is more, you’re seeing it not working, how do you know when it’s time to change and how do you know what you should change?
Jennifer Grayeb:
So I typically, I will, if they have a CFO, which most of my clients do, just because again, I’m working with multi-six or seven figure business owners. I will usually speak with the CFO to see how they’re allocating marketing dollars. And then what we tend to look at is just, could this money be better spent on something else, right? And so in my case, could I have let that Pinterest thing flow? And again, my Pinterest manager was amazing, she was getting way better results than probably any other Pinterest person who could have come into my business would’ve gotten. So could I have continued to make that investment month over month? Yes. But when we realized how many more leads and sales were coming from Instagram over Pinterest, I personally would rather move that money to Instagram where I can almost double down on what’s working rather than have it split and not be getting as much as I could out of Instagram while also spending money on something that doesn’t necessarily have a return.
Jennifer Grayeb:
So there’s no perfect answer, right? Because I know people, blogging great example. I used to be a professional blogger. I know a lot about blogging. I invest in blog content, right, whether it’s my time or my money sometimes, I’ll outsource, there’s not an immediate ROI on that. But I understand the long-term play of SEO and how organic traffic does tend to convert at a higher rate than non organic traffic. So there are certain things that you do, you just have to kind of trust your gut or your intuition on, but you’re doing it knowing that this is a long-term strategy. So I never mind paying that money because I’m like, you know what? Yes, I can’t perfectly quantify that now, but I’ve seen what the longterm ROI on that can be.
Jennifer Grayeb:
So it’s not a perfect answer, I mean, you could get really mathy and say you needs statistical significance, right? But it’s, at what point do you actually have a statistical significance for those of you who don’t know? It’s just really just having enough data to say, “This is representative of what I’m trying to measure.” So for example, if you’re serving a 1000 person email list and you asked two people on our email list, a question, and one responds, yes, and one responds, no, you can’t say 50% of your list doesn’t like this. It’s, no, you asked two people out of 1000. Now, if you have 10 people on your email list, two people might be good representation of that, but it’s hard to just kind of throw out a generic number. So I’m just really looking at, it is a bit of trusting my intuition on what do I think it’s a little bit of gambling, right? What do I think will pay off, but ultimately I’m just trying to maximize my use of my marketing dollars and maximize the use of my client’s marketing dollars.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
And I love that you said double down on what’s working because that’s a phrase that I use all the time because we’re looking at the financials and the way that we structure a lot of our client’s financials is we can see a P&L, so we can see the revenue and the expenses for different revenue streams in their business. And so we can see the profitability of each of those revenue streams. And so that’s something I always encourage business owners to do, is you need to know what’s working. So to know that you have to crunch the numbers a little bit, you have to have some data to figure out if it is working and then double down the air and get rid of the crap that’s not working.
Jennifer Grayeb:
Yes.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
So I love that.
Jennifer Grayeb:
100%.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
So one thing I was just thinking about as you were talking, so a business like mine, everything we do is all organic marketing. I’ve dipped my toe in the Facebook ads water, and it basically burned me, the water was too hot. So I have not gone back into that water since. So I often think about these kinds of analytics as more for people who are doing paid marketing, but it really sounds even somebody like me who is just really all organic, this is still useful for my business. Is that right? Is that what you’re saying?
Jennifer Grayeb:
Oh yeah. 100%. I recommend it for people who run ads and for people who don’t, right? So if you’re not running ads, it’s actually going to help you dial in where you and your team are spending your time. Because again, you may think most of your leads are coming from Instagram, but it might turn out that maybe you’re just getting a lot of traffic from Instagram, but the reality is the people who convert are the ones coming from Pinterest or Facebook on terms of your posts. And then you can also even dial the marketing down using something called UTM tracking, where you’re just adding a little snippet of text on the end of your links to be able to get, drill down super specific to say, not only did this lead come from Facebook, but they came from this post in this group on Facebook.
Jennifer Grayeb:
So you can get like wildly specific. And I think people just don’t realize that, and it’s not hard to do. It’s really not hard to do. It takes a couple extra minutes of your time, but now you’re able to get that granular that you’re, “Wow, every time I post in this group on Facebook, I need money.” How useful is that information to have? Pretty useful? So and then if you’re running ads, I think right now it is a very important time to work with someone on measurement or invest in UTM strategy, mainly because with all the iOS changes that are happening, we don’t know exactly what the impact is going to be to Facebook reporting. And so having a measurement strategy in place and having UTMs set up is kind of your backup strategy, because if Facebook ads, reporting let’s say black’s out tomorrow, a lot of people are going to be left having to just throw spaghetti at the wall to see what’s working and what’s not. And if have UTMs implemented, you’ll still be able to see which ad, which ads at which campaign is converting compared to those that are not.
Jennifer Grayeb:
Most of them, I’m trying to think of the ones that don’t, but most really do have a mix of organic and paid. But I just think that’s also just, I don’t work with a ton of strict service providers, like your organization or my organization, I work with a lot of people that have a mix of service and it’s usually more leaning on the digital product side. And so for them, that’s just kind of comes with the territory to run Facebook ads.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Oh my gosh. That’s so interesting. And it’s UTM strategy, I have legit never heard of that before, so that’s so cool. I mean, I feel like there’s just so much opportunity here regardless of what your business looks like.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
You hear me talk all the time about how important it is to know your numbers as a business owner, but you may be thinking, well, how in the world do I do that? Where do I even begin? So I have a free resource for you. The Profit Playbook is an amazing template that you spend about 15 minutes getting it all set up and you can literally see into the future of your business, revenue, expenses, cashflow, just like a crystal ball. It is a huge resource that will absolutely help you create a roadmap to reach your goals in your business. It is for free, over at 100degreesconsulting.com/profit.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Like I said, we are sort of starting to implement in our business, kind of tracking some of this stuff, but we’re doing it very manually because I don’t really know a better way. And we don’t have the volume, we do one-on-one CFO and bookkeeping services. So it’s not we have thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of purchasers or leads or anything, so we are doing it manually. And I imagine people can probably get stuck. So do sort of put into process this whole thing, you get it all set up, you tell them what things they should be tracking, and then did they run with it after that and it’s all sort of set up and automatic or are you constantly in there helping them analyze the numbers and all that stuff?
Jennifer Grayeb:
So it really depends. So we have DIY options. So for people that just want to dip their toe in the water, kind of like you mentioned, we have DIY dashboards that take less than 15 minutes to set up. We have videos that walk you through all the pieces of it. And that’s a good entry point to starting to understand marketing measurement, right? It’s not going to tell you, although we do have some that will tell you conversions and sales and things like that, most are really just helping you get used to looking at those numbers and what are these marketing activities and how many people are they bringing in? So those, we have a lot of DIY options that do that.
Jennifer Grayeb:
Then we have a course as well that teaches people how to do this. So some service providers want to understand how to offer this as a service or just be able to better support clients, but also business owners don’t want to pay for a one-on-one package when they have a team. And so I found a pretty high number of business owners that’ll invest in this just to have that skillset on their teams, so that their team can build it and manage it for them. And then we do have the done for you packages. Those are higher, but those are more complex. We’re going in, we map the entire customer journey end to end every possible path, we set up measurements so that we can see what’s happening across all those paths. We’re optimizing their Google Analytics account. We’re setting up Google Tag Manager to deploy everything. And then we are building the dashboard that answers all the questions about their marketing and sales activities.
Jennifer Grayeb:
And then from there we do offer retainer. I honestly don’t love personal preference. I don’t love retainer work. I love being in and out. I have a couple clients that are on retainer and it’s almost like they meet with me kind of the way they would meet with a bookkeeper, right? It’s we would go over their numbers once a month, we talk about what changes they might want to make, some people like to look at their dashboards, and so they’re cool with just running with it. They’re like, “Nope, I have my tool now. It’s all automated once I set it up.” So unless they make a major change to their business, it runs on its own.
Jennifer Grayeb:
So some people love that and the ones that usually stay on retainer are the ones that just want the accountability, or they’re like, “I don’t even want to look at this Jen, can you just tell me what you’re seeing here?” And then I can just synthesize it for them where I’m like, “Hey Facebook, all of a sudden is performing 30% higher than it was last month. What’s going on? Did you try something new? Awesome. Let’s do more of that.” Right? Or, “Hey, this is down a certain percentage, what’s going on there?” And sometimes there’s great reasons for it. “Oh, we started spending less on Facebook.” Well, that sense that your Facebook ad results have gone down. But sometimes there hasn’t been a change and that’s when it’s rotating and while we’re digging in unravel more. So those are the different ways that people that I know, there’s other people in measurement that operate in different capacities.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
I love that. I love that you’ve got a little something for everyone, especially for somebody who’s like, “Okay, I need this, but I don’t think I need you in my business every single month.” And I that you can sort of share that capacity with your team. And that’s something I think I need to think about because I’ve got an amazing ops director on my team who would probably love this and be able to run with it.
Jennifer Grayeb:
I find a lot of people in that are either operations people, right, the director of ops, OBMs, there are people, because I know I was in operations, clients ask for this and they’re always asking for a spreadsheet, and they’re asking for the vanity metrics, and you the operations person, no, it’s not a good use of your time, it’s not a good use of their time, but you don’t want to argue with your client. So I think this also arms you with ways to handle that. And then the other big group of people we get in this are bookkeepers. And actually my bookkeeper has gone through my program and she now can create reports that are, I’m sure, and you probably know way more about this than I do, but the way product sales come over from Stripe and PayPal sometimes group things together in QuickBooks, so you can’t easily see sales by product.
Jennifer Grayeb:
So that’s one of our most popular dashboards that we build and some of my bookkeeper has through, and now she does that. So she’ll give her clients a report of a breakdown of, here are not only your total income, and not just the total income by the bucket, but total income by this program sold this many units and this program at your sale price sold this many units, here’s how that’s changed from prior period. So it has been interesting to see you the themes of people that are coming through the program.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
That’s really interesting. I love that as an opportunity for service providers who are working for other businesses to serve their clients better. So we definitely, we have lots of clients that are digital course creators and have online programs and things. And so for every Stripe deposit, you’re right, we actually go into Stripe and break down the deposit in QuickBooks to show what is coming from which products so that they can have that information. But we do that all manually. So that’s fun.
Jennifer Grayeb:
No, you can set it up in 15 minutes and never have to touch it again.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Okay. Yes. I’m coming in your direction for that. That is awesome. So, because I am a CFO, I really love to hear how other business owners manage the finances in their business. And since obviously you’re a numbers person too, I’m sure you have a great process or some great tools or a forecast, or what’s your process for managing the finances in your business?
Jennifer Grayeb:
I love this question so much. So I have a dashboard that I built myself that is my sales dashboard and I don’t do a lot of forecasting at the moment, but that’s something that I’m trying to work on for 2021. But what I do right now is I look at my dashboard every single day because I have found the more I look at my numbers, the more I drive and control my numbers. And it actually started, which is going to sound, I’m going to sound like such a hypocrite right now because I build these fancy dashboards for all my clients. And I have a dry erase board next to me. And I literally would write every sale that came in down on a dry erase board. I had my four buckets, right, service income, affiliate income, digital product income, I think it’s three buckets. And anytime there was a sale, I’d go up to my dry erase board and I’d race it and update the number.
Jennifer Grayeb:
But it was that practice of seeing it every day. And the more I saw it, the more I’d want to grow that number. And I would set new goals and challenge myself. So it started there. And then I was eventually, it got to the point where I was growing my business so well that I was getting sick of having to get up every time a sale came in, a great problem to have. So I was, okay, it’s time to make this dashboard now. So I start every morning with my dashboard. I go into it, I see where we are in terms of our overall, how we are progressing against the goals that I’ve set. I look at our accounts receivable just because now that we have this course, we do have payment plans, so there are some recurring revenue that’s coming in. We also have, most of our clients are pay in full, but sometimes we’re starting to book out kind of far now. So right now people want to put down a deposit and then pay the balance the month before.
Jennifer Grayeb:
So I’m having to manage that kind of stuff that I didn’t have to manage before, which is why I’m starting to think through forecasting. But as of right now, it’s just a quick review of here’s our accounts receivable, here’s how much we’ve actually made so far this month. Where’s the goal? How are we trending to gold? Do I need to push myself to increase the goal? Which is like the conversation I had yesterday with myself, which sounds like a crazy person, but I was looking at my dashboard and I’m like, wow, I am already on track. I’m so close to the goal. I think I’m 75% to our monthly goal already. And it’s the first, just based on the income I knew it was coming in. So I’m, well, I need to raise this goal because I like to have a bar that feels a little bit challenging to achieve, that’s what motivates me.
Jennifer Grayeb:
I mean, I think it’s just a daily practice of looking at your numbers. And then again, it’s like, okay, this was the first month that we had the payment plan revenue. So when I sat down and I was looking at all the accounts receivable, I’m like, wait a minute. This is a lot of money that’s coming in from sales I made last month. I don’t have to do anything for this money this month. And then I’m like, well, I want to sell more of that program so that next month I this, right? And then immediately I’m, okay, so what worked in selling that last month and what can I do this month to do that? So I’m always thinking about numbers in terms of activities. To me, it’s never just a number, I’m thinking about it as I have full control over this number, so what activities do I need to do to bring that up or down? And then I also have been trying to get better about expenses because I am a spender, in personal and in business. So FOMO is a very real thing for me.
Jennifer Grayeb:
And so one of the things that I do, which is actually inspired by Kelly Roach who is a coach, I can’t take credit for this, but I was listening to one of her coaching calls and she was talking about operating off of a budget in your business. And that sounds so obvious. When I was in corporate and I led teams, I couldn’t just spend whatever I wanted, right? I had a budget and I had to stay within my budget. And so it was one of those kind of forehead slap moments where I’m like, I’ve been running this business for two years now and I’ve never set any kind of budget. I just spend what I want to spend when I want to spend it and that’s it. So I literally took a day last week or the week before, and I built out an entire budget for the year. And I have to tell you, I’ve probably saved three grand in the past week and a half alone.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Oh, my goodness.
Jennifer Grayeb:
People have sent me over some program or some coaching thing or some whatever, and normally old Jen would have been like, “Oh yeah, I can just buy this.” But new Jen with a budget, it’s like, “Oh, that’s not in my budget.” And if I’m going to break my budget, what is going to be the ROI on this investment? And if I can’t quantify it, I’m not breaking my budget for it.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Oh my gosh. There were so many gems in all of that. I can’t wait to rewind it and listen again. Okay. So first of all, I love that you’re looking at your money constantly. I say this all the time. We have to keep looking at our money because what you focus on expands. We want to be focused on the thing that we want to expand and that’s your money. And I think people are like, “Oh, that means I need to like, look at this P&L every day.” No, you’re not looking at your P&L every day, you’re tracking your sales and looking at your goals and looking at the numbers that are important to you. So I think that looks a little bit different for everyone, but I love that you have a whiteboard, a dry erase board because I do too.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
And so everybody who I have sent a proposal out to they’re sitting on my dry erase board. And then when they sign, I’ll put a little star next to them for a couple of days and then erase them and then they’re in our portfolio. But I love that because I can think about those clients and be like, I really want to work with those clients and definitely a mental thing too. And I also have my revenue goal up there. So I love that you do that. And the budget, if you’re going to break your budget, if you’re going to spend on something like that just gives you a little bit extra pause rather than the money just going out and maybe at the end of the day, you could afford it, but do you really need it? Is it really important to your business right now? Is it going to generate an ROI? And I think often people think of a budget as this limiting thing and negative and really bad, but sometimes putting some limitations on yourself can actually be a good thing.
Jennifer Grayeb:
100%. And I think you can build in, I actually I’m somebody that’s super… I don’t what I call calendar jail. I don’t like feeling trapped by anything. And so I 100% relate to people who are feeling that way right now because a budget surface level does feel very restricting to me. But I had a lot of fun building my budget and I was inspired by one of my corporate mentors. He always used to build in fund money to his team budget. So when he was my manager, we all had personal development budgets that we could go spend on books or courses or whatever. And so when I started managing a team under him, he really encouraged me to do the same, right? Building some fun money so that, one, it serves as a nice back up and it pushing him to be able to spend it great, but two, it gives you that flexibility and you’re prioritizing these kinds of investments.
Jennifer Grayeb:
And so I did budget in for personal development, right? Because I do like courses. I do like coaches and as a service-based business owner, I invest in masterminds because networks for me lead to clients. So I have to factor in though. That’s probably other than paying me and my team, personal development in the sense of networks, coaches, all the things is probably the second highest budget item on my company budget. Because again, I can take that when I invest in a lot of these things, I ended up getting more clients, which make me more money. So I just want to encourage people, if any of that felt scary to you is think about the fun things you can budget in and a budget doesn’t mean, and this is the other thing I used to get stuck on in corporate, right? It’d be like, Oh, you have $500 a month for personal development. It’s like, but what if I want to spend a thousand this month? That’s fine. You spend a thousand this month and you skip next month. Don’t feel like you have to stick to it, to the penny, right? It’s the same way as you would with a savings account. If you save for two months, you can buy something. It’s the same concept.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Yep. Exactly. Or I have $500 on my budget, well, I’m going to pull $500 then from this other line item that maybe you’re not going to spend, it’s like a budget it’s flexible. It’s just some parameters to work from. So I love that you’re looking at your too. Because I think a lot of times we often get real excited by the revenue side and ignore the expenses. And then we’re like, wait, why do I have no money at the end of the year? I had a great revenue year, well?
Jennifer Grayeb:
Oh, trust me, this wasn’t like I had the foresight of someone really smart. It was looking at 2020 going, how, when I had the best year ever is my profit $2,000? Oh. Because I bought everything that I wanted, like a spoiled brat, right? We all do it though. A new tool comes out and you buy it and then you forget that it’s a subscription thing. And so at the end of 2020, when I saw kind of the mess that I had created in terms of not having that profit margin, but this was like, I’m on payroll. So that included paying me and stuff. So everybody got paid for their work, myself included, but we just didn’t have excess money at the end of the year. And so that was a big red flag for me. And I’m like, no, we’re changing this because again, who am I to run a business that’s telling people to make decisions on numbers, if I’m not going to do that myself? I’m not a CFO, that’s still a number in my business. You need to be just as strategic about your financial numbers as you do about your marketing and sales numbers as it relates to activities. So that was kind of the big thing, I don’t like to be a hypocrite and sound I need to fix this in my business right now.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
I know. I was the same way when it came to doing the bank reconciliations for my books, because obviously we are sticklers about it. Every bank rec for every client is done by the 10th or the 15th of the month. No excuse. It’s always done. And then when I went to give my books to my tax accountant, last year, the year before they were like, “Your bank recs aren’t done since like April.” I’m like, “Oh my God. Okay. That’s embarrassing. Let me fix that.” So now I do them every month.
Jennifer Grayeb:
I think it’s like shoemakers kids though, right? Because I do the same thing with my marketing measurement. We had a big launch last month and I was like, awesome, where did some of these sales come from? So I was surprised by some of them, because it wasn’t what I had basically anticipated by all the numbers that I had been running. And so I was like, well, let me just check my dashboard. And I go into my dashboard and I had never set up anything for measuring this particular funnel. So I literally couldn’t even measure it. And I just had a great laugh at myself because I’m we would never do this with a client. I would never let them turn on a launch without having every measurement component in place so I can get that granular information. But for my own stuff, I’m just slapping it up there and doing it. So I think it’s just the nature of what we do because I find myself in that situation all the time.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Yep. Exactly. So we are all promising to do better. Okay. So before we wrap up, I have three, just a quick questions for you that I like to ask everybody that I chat with. So what is your favorite productivity hack tool, whatever in your business or life?
Jennifer Grayeb:
Brain.fm. I use Brain.fm. I think it’s 30 bucks for the year or 50 bucks for the year. I had canceled it part last year as part of my expense cleanup and then promptly regretted it and resigned up. When I need to focus, I opened brain.fm and I turn on the focus channel and I’ll just block an hour and you can conquer a month’s worth of work in an hour with this focus music on. I don’t know what it does to your brain, but my husband makes fun of me because he’s, “I could come in and move your desk out from under you and you would not even notice.” It’s like I’m in a trance of productivity. So hands down, if you don’t have it, they probably have a free trial. I’m in no way affiliated or related to anybody. It’s a tool that’s changed my life. So I love it.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Oh my gosh. Okay. I just went to their website and there’s a testimonial on it and it says, “I don’t know what sort of witchcraft or brainFM has up its sleeve.” I’m like, “Okay, I need the witchcraft. I need the focus witchcraft.”
Jennifer Grayeb:
I’ve used it for sleep [inaudible 00:42:24] my kids. If my kids come in my bed at night and they can’t fall asleep, I’ll open brainFM and just turn the… I think it might be sleep. If it’s not sleep, it’s relaxed or something, there’ll be out immediately. Witchcraft is a great way to describe that. I don’t know what it’s doing to me. Hopefully it never tells me to do bad things because I’m in a trance, but if I can be in a trance and get stuff done, I will take that any day of the week.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Oh my gosh. I love it. Okay. I’m definitely going to check that out. Okay. Second question, what is a favorite book that you have read?
Jennifer Grayeb:
Oh, there’s so many. I’m going to go with Essentialism, just because I tend to be someone that wants to do all the things and be all the things and have all the things. And that book really helps kind of pair things down for me.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Love it. I need to reread that one. I have it on my shelf. I think I started it and I did not finish it. So I need to go back and use some focus to read that one. Okay. So this last one, imagine that you had a weekday totally free from work, and what do you do?
Jennifer Grayeb:
Oh, watch Hallmark movies. I would watch Hallmark movies all day long.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Perfect wintertime activity for sure. Awesome. Well, Jen, this was such a good conversation. I have two pages of notes of things I wanted to do in my business, including checking out some of your programs. So are there any resources or different things that you offer that you would like to share with our listeners and point them in the right direction?
Jennifer Grayeb:
Yeah. Absolutely. So the best place to kind of find all my things are on my website. So it’s thenimblecode.com. And if you click on our shop, we have the traffic insights dashboard that is a super affordable, at this point in time, it’s $47. It’s the best way to start to see if marketing analytics is something that would be helpful to you in your business. So that’s where I would recommend starting. And then our signature program, if you’re interested in learning to do measurement and building dashboards is measureandmaximize.com.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Awesome. Oh my gosh. Definitely check those out. We will link those on our site in the show notes. And this was so great, Jen, thank you so much for being here and we’ll see you soon.
Jennifer Grayeb:
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Stephanie Skryzowski:
Thanks for listening to the 100 Degrees of Entrepreneurship podcast. To access our show notes and bonus content, visit 100degreesconsulting.com/podcast. Make sure to snap a screenshot on your phone of this episode and tag me on Instagram at Stephanie.S-K-R-Y. And I’ll be sure to share. Thanks for being here, friends, and I’ll see you next time.
Transcript Episode 8
