Ep6 | Andrew Mellen

Scaling Challenges

[7:00]

Andrew and his team built a beautiful program that people weren’t buying because it was self-delivered. They discovered that their avatar was disorganized, has a short attention span, and they’re easily distracted.

[7:15]

A drip-delivered, automated class without any accountability is not a good fit for them. They reconfigured the program to make it high touch, high experience for the customer and teaching it to live instead of pre-recorded and raise the price accordingly. They also built a funnel so that with a free five-day challenge at the front end of it, people were really immersed in their content and philosophy.

[8:24]

No all-in-one platform is perfect. Ontraport allowed Andrew to scale because it’s CRM, landing pages, email campaigns, funnels, it’s everything all in one. While none of the functionality is completely top drawer because they’re doing all things, all of them are better than average.  They have very little mechanical failure as a result. Being on those platforms for a small business, trying to both market in a big way and deliver high touch, easily interactable experience was a solution for Andrew.

[10:42]

People will never argue with themselves. They will argue with us all day long because they think that they’re the exception. People think that if we understand why they are special, we would cut them some slack and allow one of their 200 lies to be true.

Generosity, Thoughtfulness, and Open-Heartedness

[12:00]

You’re never going to not benefit from being generous, thoughtful, and open-hearted. It’s just never. Being miserly and mean-spirited is going to typically harm you either in the short term or the long term.

Nurture Wheel

[12:21]

Marketing now is going to be education-driven. You got to put value out there and produce content at scale.

[12:39]

If you stay on a person’s nurture wheel and you earn the right to stay in their life and inbox to add value with content and nuggets, you’re keeping the content to stay in front of them. When that business event happens in the future, you’ve earned the right to be in their inbox, and they will remember you.

Foundations of Scaling

[15:08]

You have to pay attention to when you’re laying down the infrastructure. If you’re cutting corners, if you’re not finishing out your SLPs, and if you’re not laying systems out, every one of those is going to be a chink in your armor as you go to scale.

[15:43]

You have to have an integrator, you’ve got to have a CEO, you’ve got to have somebody who’s focused on operations and systems because everything about scaling is built on that. It doesn’t matter how fast you’re accelerating or how brilliant you are. As a visionary, you got to have that structure under you.

The Game Changer

[16:20]

Emails are a game-changer when we think about infrastructure. At every scale of his clients, Andrew gets internal communications out of the inbox. It doesn’t matter which tool you use. Ceasing internal communications via email is a game-changer.

Subject Lines and Threads

[18:36]

Inside Slack, make sure that you respond inside the thread. Otherwise, it’s going to be a never-ending conversation, which is akin to an email thread where the subject line never changes. If you are responding to somebody outside, and it’s a new idea or a new meeting, change your subject line. You need to break it so that things are searchable and you’re not looking for old information or confusing an old thread with a new thread.

Rocket Fuel

[22:07]

If you are the visionary, you are not going to be the integrator for your own company, even if that’s a role that you play for your clients or your customers. If you provide that degree of executive function for your people, you are not going to be able to do that for yourself.

Teaching others to do the work

[24:17]

Take the time, make a plan, teach somebody the plan, and then take your hands off of it. Let them fail and correct them and until they get it right. Once they own it, you’re out of the equation. You got to get your fingers off of operations.

Management Tools

[26:16]

If you’re ever at looking at any of project management and team management tools, make sure to do a trial and push yourself through all the scenarios in your business.

The 20%

[27:22]

If 20% of your best work drives 80% of your revenue and output, if you doubled down on that, you’re doing 40%. It’s 160% of your output.  You can blow off the rest of the other 60% of your workweek, and you doubled by 100% on your output. Once you home in on that 20% that drives your high-value activities, know where your focus should be, and then just do more of that. It’s built on that architecture of systems. Immediately, you’re at 160% of output. It’s mind-blowing what’s possible if you have that degree of focus.

The Stuff behind the Stuff

[29:04]

What Andrew and his team are really solving is all of the stuff behind this stuff. That’s where people get stuck. The stuff on the surface or whatever that disorganization is, that’s a superficial symptom of something under it. You are curing that the stuff on the surface magically rearranges itself. That’s where you want to go and taking the time to actually look at it and solve it. Figure out your high-value activities, figure out your 20%, and then double down on it and get everybody to give you the space to do that 40% of your week. You’ll get amazing results.

The Fours and Fives

[32:39]

Things that are on your to-do list that are fours and fives are the things that need to be crossed off because you’re never going to do them. You either need to delegate them or just set yourself free. Just acknowledge because there will always be new ones, twos, and threes. It’s seldom that something that is currently a four or five by the absence of everything else suddenly rises to the significance and becomes a one. It’s a four or five now for a reason, so delegate it or cross it off your list.

The Formula

[33:56]

The winning formula is a combination of tenacity and some form of open-heartedness, willingness, a soft heart, and a hard head.

Another Day, Another opportunity

[35:10]

If you’re in the game to play the game and to win the game, the reward is that every day, you can put your head on the pillow knowing that you played full out, you showed up, you did your best, and you made enough money to be able to keep the lights on and do it tomorrow. Tomorrow’s another opportunity to scale to grow to have a bigger impact, to live in alignment with your values to support other people in doing the same thing.

[35:45]

We’re so fortunate to build our own lives in the way that we want to. We want everybody to have that privilege and opportunity, and if that’s where we’re driving, then it just keeps returning to a sense of gratitude and tenacity.

[36:18]

We have this opportunity to influence the world and shape it and make it a better place than it was when we found it.

Learn more about Andrew Mellen:

Website: https://www.andrewmellen.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/andrew.mellen/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew_mellen/?hl=es

Twitter: https://twitter.com/andrewjmellen?lang=es

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfjgsfJiYiRelfkwTmxVKrA

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmellen