Best Email Marketing Strategies For Small Business Success | Nikita Vakhrushev

Can email marketing be the game-changer your small business needs for success? Tune into this episode of Small Business Pivots, where we sit down with Nikita Vakhrushev, the visionary CEO and founder of Aspeꓘt, to uncover expert strategies that can dramatically boost your email marketing efforts. Nikita walks us through getting started with a basic email list, choosing the perfect email marketing platform, and using pop-up tools to gather emails and SMS numbers. We also get practical advice on maximizing lead generation and engagement through automated and mass email campaigns.

Listen as Nikita shares his entrepreneurial journey, emphasizing the importance of persistence and learning from failures. We delve into the enduring relevance of email marketing and why it remains a vital tool for engaging your audience. Nikita introduces us to the concept of a welcome automation sequence, explaining how to create a series of emails that introduce new subscribers to your brand without being overly promotional. Addressing common concerns about time and budget constraints, we explore how AI tools like ChatGPT can help create effective content.

Nikita also shares insights on maintaining an 80-20 ratio between educational and sales-driven emails to keep your audience engaged and drive conversions, ensuring your email marketing efforts yield tangible returns. Finally, we look at the investment required for successful email marketing, from software costs to potential agency fees. Nikita offers invaluable tips on crafting compelling subject lines and avoiding the spam box to boost open rates.

We also discuss the significance of organization and SOPs in scaling a small business, touching on time management and the importance of regular team meetings. Emphasizing the need to adapt to evolving technology, we recommend resources like "48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene and provide details on connecting with Nikita for further insights. This episode is a must-listen for small business owners at all stages, offering a message of hope and empowerment to navigate challenges and achieve success.

Nikita Vakhrushev: Founder/CEO of ASPEꓘT

Website: https://aspektagency.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikita-v/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NikitaVakhrushevTV

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikitavakhrushv/

Blog: https://aspektagency.com/blog/

#EmailMarketing #SmallBusinessSuccess #Entrepreneurship #NikitaVakhrushev #MarketingStrategies #LeadGeneration #EmailAutomation #BusinessGrowth #DigitalMarketing #SmallBizTips #MarketingTips #BusinessAdvice #EmailCampaigns #EmailMarketingTips #AIinMarketing #MarketingSuccess #SmallBusinessAdvice #BusinessPodcast #SmallBusinessPivots #SmallBusinessSuccess #Success #Podcast #SmallBusiness #BOSS #MichaelDMorrison #Oklahoma City

Chapters

• 0:00 Email Marketing for Small Businesses
• 11:01 Email Marketing for Small Businesses
• 17:55 Email Marketing Implementation and Investment
• 24:02 Business Growth Through Organization and SOPs
• 33:02 Business Growth and Adaptation in Technology

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

All right, welcome to another Small Business, pivots. We have a very special guest from around the world. Where are you coming to us from today?

Speaker 2: 0:08

Nashville Tennessee.

Speaker 1: 0:09

Nashville If I were to visit there. I have, but what if someone had visited there that's never been there? What is one thing they have to do? You?

Speaker 2: 0:17

have to take yourself out on a night on Broadway. I mean, I'm sure you're familiar, michael, go to all the honky tonks and all the cowboy bars.

Speaker 1: 0:26

Nothing like it, and before that, if you're in that part of the world. In this season we hit a hockey game before, and then we went out afterwards. That was. I'll never forget that night.

Speaker 2: 0:40

Yeah, you got to hit the Preds game at Bridgestone Arena and then right outside you got all the bars, so it's perfect.

Speaker 1: 0:45

That was fun. And good music too. Good music so well, I know no one can introduce themselves better than the owner, so I'm going to let you introduce yourself, your company, and then maybe how we're going to help people today.

Speaker 2: 1:00

Yeah, my name is Nikita. I'm the CEO and founder of Aspect, and we specialize in helping online brands as well as small businesses with their email marketing. That's primarily helping them with their automated emails that are automatically sent out on their behalf, or sending out mass blast campaigns.

Speaker 1: 1:19

Very cool. So what do you think listeners will walk away with today that can impact their business? So what?

Speaker 2: 1:25

do you think listeners will walk away with today that can impact their business? I would hope that they walk away with either overview on the strategy side of things on how they can implement email marketing within their business to generate more leads, more interest, more engagement between window shoppers and their current customers, and I would also hope they can get some ideas on maybe some campaigns they can start sending out, either starting today or maybe even next week.

Speaker 1: 1:48

I think you got some ears perched, because anytime you talk about leads, sales, people are here, so let's take a brief second to introduce the show and we'll be right back. Welcome to Small Business Pivots, a podcast designed for small business owners. I'm your host, michael Morrison, a small business coach and founder of BOSS, where we make business ownership simplified for success, so that you can own a business that runs without you. To learn more, go to businessownershipsimplifiedcom. All right, welcome back to Small Business Pivots. Let's get going. Where do you start?

Speaker 2: 2:24

with emails, it's important, yeah, so get going. Where do you start with emails? It's important, yeah. So the first thing that you want to start with is obviously having emails to send out to. Uh, that's obviously the like when you're starting a business from scratch. You're usually limited to not only just like people that you know, maybe some people you met online, and that's a good baseline to start with. If you're not a total creature that lives under a rock, you should have at least like 50 to 100 people that you can immediately add to your list. But there's a lot of different ways to start that list, so you want to have at least a list starting to be compiled, whether that's just manually in like an Excel spreadsheet, or it could be your phone contacts, whatever that is.

Speaker 2: 3:04

Next up, you want to choose an email marketing platform. So there's dozens of these marketing platforms. At this point it used to be only MailChimp, but now you have MailChimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, Sendlane, OmniSend I can go on for days. But you want to pick an email marketing platform and after you've picked your platform, you then want to upload that list, and most of these platforms have a pop-up collection like addition to their software. So not only can you send emails out, but you can also collect emails and SMS numbers through a pop-up that you can put up on your website. So I think those are the first three things that I do in any account when we set it up for a client, so that way we can at least start collecting emails on the fly before excuse me, we can collect emails on the fly before we start sending anything out, because you kind of need an audience to send to before you send anything.

Speaker 1: 4:00

Yeah, and for listeners, if you didn't catch the last episode, we had a professional coach, karen Grill, come and talk about funnels. So this is a perfect segue into our topic this week on the emails, because that's obviously part of a sales funnel. Talk about how you got started as an entrepreneur. What are some trials, tribulations you grew up with I know a lot of us. A lot of us business owners might have some mindset trash or something we had to overcome, and what got you on the entrepreneurial journey?

Speaker 2: 4:34

Yeah, definitely I. I feel like at this point, being like seven years in, I got seven years of scar tissue, of failing forward yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 4:43

A little bloody nose here and there.

Speaker 2: 4:45

Yep, Yep, you got to get hit in the nose sometimes, and that that sure definitely happens. I started off, actually, in college, so I was 19 when I started, um 26 now and about to be 27. I used to well, actually it starts in high school, because that's where all the foundation was laid out. I used to go to what's called Print Media Club and it's like an after school activity in my high school where you can design things in Photoshop or design things in Adobe Illustrator and you're able to take those designs and put them on T-shirts, put them on mugs, stickers, et cetera. All these like different ways that you can just turn things digitally into a physical product, like different ways that you can just turn things digitally into a physical product. And I did that for myself, made some cool shirts while I was at it and was able to sell some shirts to classmates where you know, maybe they needed six different shirts for their field day or maybe a soccer team, whatever it is. I helped them out there Pretty much.

Speaker 2: 5:38

After high school, I went into studying engineering at a local community college and halfway through the year I stumbled across a Reddit post of you know. You can sell t-shirts online without doing any of the fulfillment. All you needed was the design and I'm like perfect. I have like like 50 or a hundred designs in the backlog for my high school days, so I immediately uploaded those and this was at the time drop shipping, slash, print on demand business model. So you basically don't carry inventory and all you have to do is just market it and sell it and you take the profit difference from the manufacturing and so on. So I had some decent success with that setting up my own Shopify store and setting up my own Amazon storefront. Did that for about a year until Amazon kicked me off.

Speaker 2: 6:24

And after Amazon kicked me off, I had to learn how to actually get sales to my Shopify store directly. So that's where I learned all the email marketing, Facebook ads, Google ads, SEO, web design, conversion rate optimization all the you know digital marketing goodies that you need to run any business at this point, any business at this point and that snowballed into people asking me how do I do this for my website, how do I set up a Facebook pixel, how do I set up ads, how do I make emails? And that snowballed into me getting my first couple of clients, and that's where I kind of honed in my skills, reinvested all the money that I made into like courses and programs to better my skill set and eventually, like in 2020, that's when things really started to take off because a lot of businesses needed to go online and that was kind of like the pivot year for me where things really started to take off I got more. I was like I don't even remember 2020 because it was just all work, but that set me up for success, because in 2021, we hired employees and in 2022, we realized that, you know, doing all these different services like Facebook ads, Google ads, email, like five different services that we had lined up and serving all of our clients, was very I'd say, we got to burn out very, very quickly, because trying to manage different services for different clients and different niches and trying to keep up with, you know, privacy policy, updates, ad tracking, all these different things coming up in the digital space that were kind of bottlenecks.

Speaker 2: 7:53

We realized that it would be a lot more beneficial for us to transition into one service specifically, and around 2022 slash 2023 is when we or mainly in 2022 is when we pivoted into doing solely email and SMS marketing and you know, we've never looked back since, and that's what we've been doing since.

Speaker 1: 8:11

You mentioned something earlier about it's important to have 50 to a hundred contacts in your list and I know for a lot of business owners, some of their frustration is okay, I know I need to email, but how do I get people to sign up for my email, because it doesn't seem like anyone does that anymore, because they're getting a ton of them in their inbox. So, versus some suggestions that you can give to build that email list, yeah, absolutely so.

Speaker 2: 8:42

For some of the people that you've already worked with like for customers, past customers, past clients, maybe even past collaborations you already have email communication with them, so you can automatically just export that list from your Gmail and import it into your whatever you're using let's say, klaviyo for this example and you can import that, so you already have a list there.

Speaker 2: 9:02

But when it comes to bringing in people that are maybe visiting your website or just checking you out, I'm not sure A lot of businesses use the free quote, but I think there's more that you could do to that.

Speaker 2: 9:13

So if you're doing, let's say, like a roofing business, for example, you could do something as simple as like here are the five signs to look out for if you need a new roof or if you think you need a new roof, and that could be just a simple, you know, one page ebook that people can download and submit their email, and that's an easy way to get an email.

Speaker 2: 9:32

So creating either content or creating some sort of incentive around your service and around your area of expertise is the best way that we found to get email subscribers, and if you want to offer even more info on top of that, that's another sort of incentive to get SMS numbers as well. We've seen it work very well when you have an email offer on the pop-up and then people submit their email and then on the second step it's like hey, get a little extra bonus if you give us your SMS number as well, and we've seen that convert very well. So not only do you have their phone number so you can call them, text them, contact them, but you also have their email at worst that you can contact them after you get that info.

Speaker 1: 10:12

So we're building a list. What do you suggest works best for the content for those news emails that go out in the future, newsletters, solicitations? You mentioned that you kind of had it dialed in good, which, by the way, for all the listeners. I 100% back emails, because you made a very good point about you got kicked off Amazon. So I know of a marketing person a few years ago that got kicked off LinkedIn and that was her bread and butter and she got permanently deleted. So I want this to be. I want people to listen to what you have to say, because emails you control that. So what do you start sending these people once you get their name?

Speaker 2: 10:54

Yeah, great question and honestly I've I've had that before where you're de-platformed and it's not a great feeling. And that's one of the reasons why we chose to go with email, because it's one of those like it's like the rails of the Internet. You know, people still use trains, even though train transportation is outdated, but they still use it for commerce. So it's the same thing with email in the aspect of you have that data, you've collected it and you own that. You own that data so you can utilize it to advertise, keep people informed, et cetera. And tying that into your question, that's exactly what we do on the email side once people sign up.

Speaker 2: 11:33

Once people sign up, they go into what's called a welcome automation or a welcome sequence, and this is a series of anywhere between five to 10 emails that are automated and are sent out typically three to four days, sometimes a week apart, and essentially what these five to 10 emails go over is information about the business.

Speaker 2: 11:53

So going over what you do, how you're different, the history of the company, basically messaging that buys people into your brand and it showcases exactly what you do, how you do it, why you're an expert at it and why people should choose you.

Speaker 2: 12:05

You're not directly selling them. I would recommend, against that, maybe having a call to action at the bottom, but nothing like buy, buy, buy, discount, discount, discount, because that's just going to turn people away and it's also going to cheapen the brand. So I would just recommend starting to go through some of the more basic questions that you have that people ask about your brand, maybe some of the objections or questions that they might have during the sales process, like how do you work, or you know what's the fulfillment time, or you know how does your team work, that sort of thing. You can go over in some of these initial you know, welcome emails to answer any potential questions that a customer might have, as well as give them a little sneak peek of how you actually work and like what kind of services or products that you sell.

Speaker 1: 12:49

This may sound like a silly question, but I always say there are no silly questions. So what if a business owner says I do not have any more time to do one more thing and I don't have the money to invest in one more thing, how can they get into this email marketing? What would you suggest until they build up enough to come hire somebody like you?

Speaker 2: 13:10

Yeah, that is a tough question because that's another thing I noticed is being in the industry this long is. There is that, I guess, uncanny valley of either starting with funding and you have enough money to get to point A or point B, or, if you're bootstrapping it, you're always filled with time, you don't have enough time and you're in that middle ground. I would say it may not be a time issue, it may be a priority issue and it's more so. Do you prioritize having like a safety net or a moat around your business? So when things do you know when, for example, like with roofers, it slows down during the wintertime, so that's perfect time for you to nurture those contacts and nurture those leads that you've got over the summer that you may have not closed, so that when it comes down to the next year, those people are all ready to buy. So it comes down to the priority. So if you don't have enough money to spend, that's completely fine.

Speaker 2: 14:07

I would recommend just utilizing like AI software like ChatGPT Everyone's familiar with it and not only writing down. Like you can write down your ideas that you have about your business or about the emails that you want to send out. It could be welcome information, break that down and then have chat, GPT, format it. It doesn't have to be a pre-did design, as long as it's the copy or the information that you're providing comes from the source directly and is accurate. When you have time, more time, more money, and maybe you have a marketing assistant to help you out, then you can get a little bit fancy with the designs. But as long as you're communicating to your customer on a consistent basis, that's all that really matters.

Speaker 1: 14:48

Do you feel like the emails are more educational awareness or can be used as a call to action? In other words, is it a marketing platform that they can see sales from, or is it just part of that package of marketing that all kind of works together?

Speaker 2: 15:06

Well, what's the point of sending things out if you're not going to make money from them? Absolutely so money is always tied in to. One of our core principles is what's the point if someone's paying us, whatever they're paying us, if they're not seeing at least 2x return on what they're paying us? So we definitely want to get that return on investment, or at least return on the amount of time and effort that you're putting into email. The awareness and education side is what helps convert those people into buyers. It may not be today, it may not be tomorrow, but eventually, if someone's talking to you long enough, you will buy from them. And that's essentially what the goal is is to consistently stay top of mind, and that those type of mind emails are like the invisible hand that pushes the customer forward to make a decision.

Speaker 2: 15:51

Now there's also sales emails that you can send out. So if there's a period where or I like to use this ratio called the 80, everyone's familiar with the 80-20, but 80% is educational, nurture content, and 20% is sales, call to action based and directly promoting your service or your product. So that's how I would split up my content. So for every fifth email that you send out, I'd recommend sending out some sort of call to action. So it could be once a month. If you're sending out a weekly email, or if you're doing bi-weekly, it could be once every two months.

Speaker 2: 16:24

So the thing is, when you send out too many promotional emails, people get jaded to them very quickly and they immediately see an email coming from Michael, for example, and it's like oh, it's another promo email, I'm not going to open it because they've all been promo emails for the last five. So you want to have that. The ratio is there for a reason. So the education helps them understand your business more. And then that conversion is like hey, we only have like four spots left for this specific thing that we're running. Do you want to join us? And then it's like okay, I've been reading about them for the last month.

Speaker 1: 16:57

Let's actually take action on this. Now You're listening to Small Business Pivots. This episode is proudly brought to you by BOSS, where business ownership is simplified for success. At BOSS, we help business owners create their businesses to run smoothly without them being there 24-7. Our seasoned business coaches who have walked the path themselves provide invaluable guidance and support and with additional services like fast business loans, some approved within 24 to 48 hours, comprehensive online courses, detailed workbooks and engaging classes, boss offers a wealth of resources to help you succeed. Discover how small business success begins with Boss at businessownershipsimplifiedcom.

Speaker 1: 17:42

If you're enjoying the podcast, make sure to stay connected by hitting that subscribe button, giving us a thumbs up or leaving a positive review. Your support keeps us going. Now let's get back to our incredible guest. I'm only using this because I know, or asking this question because I know. In SEO they're like well, it's a minimum of three months before you really start seeing three to six months Emails with the 80-20 rule only 20% of that being called to action. Is there a timeline of? In about 45 days, your customers or prospects will start getting used to these emails, start taking action. Is there anything like that in that world, or no?

Speaker 2: 18:25

Yeah, so there is definitely something like that.

Speaker 2: 18:26

Seo obviously is a long term approach to any business, no matter what you're selling. But on the email side, since you have those emails already being collected automatically, I would hope with the use of pop-ups and with an existing list, you should be able to see returns within the first 30, 45, 60 days. At least that's what we see. And with the clients that we bring on, we try to hit at least an improvement in some sort of area within the first 30 days and then revenue lift within the first 60 days. Those 30 days, that 30 day improvement, that could be deliverability, that could be content, that could even be revenue. So some clients clients we've gotten into the account within the first week we flipped a switch that they had. You know, maybe something was wasn't working correctly and they immediately see like an extra 10 grand that month. Some clients they come to us and they have bad deliverability and that's when, okay, we work on getting their deliverability improved so that way more people open their emails, more people see and eventually more people buy.

Speaker 1: 19:20

What would you say is the most important part of email on when it goes out? So, like for social media, it's the hook, and it might be the same for emails also.

Speaker 2: 19:31

So, like you mentioned there, the hook is the most important for social media. The subject line is the equivalent of the hook on email. So that's just a preview of what you're sending out to the person or what the person is receiving. So if your subject line isn't contextual, doesn't make any sense or is incoherent or it's too long, sometimes people just won't open. So that is the barrier between people opening up your email and seeing what you have inside, versus them just not opening and not seeing it, kind of like what you said with the person you had on last week.

Speaker 2: 20:04

It's all a funnel essentially. So you want to win the person by the subject line. So the subject line wins them over to open. Now, once they open the headline or the headline image, whatever you have in above the fold, that's supposed to win them over to continue reading. And whatever they continue reading is supposed to win them over to click the button. When they click the button, whatever is on your website, it's supposed to win them over to buy. So it's all downstream essentially. So if you have low open rates, less people are going to see, less people are going to read through, less people are going to click. So that subject line is crucial to every send that you make.

Speaker 1: 20:39

So we get a lot of things that go straight to our spam box. What is some guidance that you can give people to keep their email from going to the spam box and never being seen?

Speaker 2: 20:50

Before. If I were to talk to you, let's say six months ago or maybe a year ago, I would just say make sure to reduce the number of links that you have and try to reduce the amount of images that you have in your email. But after I think it was after February Google and Yahoo implemented a new sort of. They implemented new rules into receiving emails from businesses and from other contexts that you have. So in order to follow those rules, you have to make sure that all of your email records are in check, and a way to do this is well. I don't want to bore you with the details, but there are tools online where you can go through and scan all of your your email records to make sure that everything is set up correctly. I also have a couple of YouTube videos that go over that. I can send you over after if you want to link them in the show notes that go over the deliverability side of things there. But outside of that, I would just recommend keeping your images to a minimum, or like reducing the amount of images that you have in your emails.

Speaker 2: 21:52

Main reason for that is Google, yahoo, apple Outlook. They can't scrape email images, so they don't know whether it's, you know, an informational post or a social media post of a cute girl and having a coffee, or it could be malware or spam phishing for you know, for a WhatsApp number that leads to a scam. So they don't know the difference. So if you have a lot of images and you have a sketchy reputation with Google and Yahoo, that email is likely to land in spam. So if you have a lot of images and you have a sketchy reputation with Google and Yahoo, that email is likely to land in spam. So I'd recommend doing that. I would also Google keywords to avoid in emails. I think there's like a HubSpot article out there somewhere that has a giant list of like 100 plus keywords that you would want to avoid using in your emails. That will lead to spam. So I would recommend looking that up and following that rubric there as well.

Speaker 1: 22:39

What could a business owner expect to invest in using email as they're in their marketing?

Speaker 2: 22:46

Yeah Well, the cool thing about email is it's not like advertising. It's free for the most part, or it's relatively free. You only have to pay for the software to send out those emails. So depending on how big your list is, that's how you get charged on that price. So from Klaviyo to MailChimp, I think it's anywhere between like a hundred bucks a month to 500 bucks a month. Sometimes with bigger brands that have like a list of a couple hundred thousand, that bill is anywhere between a couple thousand bucks a month. So that's where the main, I guess, price is. The biggest price is if you have an agency managing it for you. So for us that price ranges anywhere between $1,000 a month all the way up to $20,000 a month, depending on how many emails or what the work that we're going to be doing. So if you're going to be considering on investing into email marketing, if that's something that you're going to be handling yourself, expect a couple hundred bucks a month for the software.

Speaker 1: 23:46

But if you're going to have an agency like us manage it, expect maybe a couple thousand dollars a month for that to be managed for you, and I encourage business owners to always hand off things that they're not professionals at. So if it is in your budget as a business owner, I highly encourage you to let someone else do it. That does it every day You'll get. You'll get much better results.

Speaker 2: 24:02

I had that same thing happen last week when I was trying to repair my car. I'm like you know what? I'll just take the mechanic. I'm not going to spend my weekend working on this.

Speaker 1: 24:11

Oh yeah, I, I, I. As I get older, I do that more and more like, yeah, I could fix that plumbing part, but do I really want to get a Home Depot pick up the part, come back and it's not quite the right one? No, plumber, just let you do it. You can be in and out in 10 minutes. Let's talk about your business and your growing pains. You kind of mentioned how you've evolved pains. So you kind of mentioned how you've evolved. What are some things that you've learned that you would share with others, saying you must absolutely do this this was awesome or not do this? What are just a couple of things that you'd like to share?

Speaker 2: 24:48

I would say like if I were to look back and see what are some things that I'm still doing today versus like seven years ago.

Speaker 2: 24:56

I think the organization side of things, so organizing.

Speaker 2: 25:01

I'm a very OCD person and I like to keep things organized, like my desk is super clean, and that translates to a lot of other areas in my life, whether it's business, personal, financial, whatever it is.

Speaker 2: 25:13

So I had like when I started out, everything was organized in like individual folders.

Speaker 2: 25:18

Everything is easily found within the business, and that only scaled up when we had employees come on board. So from the time that I was a freelancer, I had everything organized in like my Google Drive folders and then when we brought employees on and taught them the ways of how I organize things, that scaled up with the team. So now everyone in the team is organized and if anyone needs anything immediately, they can easily find it within our internal file storage. So I think that's one of the things that really helped us out as far as like, as far as customers and actual revenue generation goes, I think the biggest thing that has helped us out is focusing on service delivery and like quality of the emails that we make or quality of the service that we provide. That has helped us retain clients for longer than I'm not going to say longer than I expected, because you know stabilize cash flow and stabilize any potential. You know bad months that we might have had because of our quality of service and because they stayed on for so long.

Speaker 1: 26:31

Most of us don't come into this world as an entrepreneur and we start a business and then we realize we have a job because we're working in the business. How did you transition to working on the business? That's kind of one of the biggest questions I'm always asked is I don't have time to focus on the future when I can only focus on today. And it sounds like you've, you're, you're looking forward and always have since you started. How, how did you get into that mindset and what, what did you do to do that?

Speaker 2: 27:04

So the fun part about having your own business, uh, outside of working all the time, is that sometimes you're still working in the business. So, um, there's still some things that I'm working in the business for, maybe some small technical things, but outside of that, for the most part, all of our fulfillment is now on the employee side, and I'm mainly managing and working on lead generation and client generation. One of the things that has helped me out with that and this is more of a basic exercise, if anything, for people that say they don't have the time to do it is taking a time audit of what you're spending your time on. And way back early in the day I was in that same spot of like I'm handling all of this client fulfillment, I'm doing all of these things and by the time you know, I wake up at 6am and by the time it's 8pm I'm already out, I'm gassed, I don't have any energy to do anything. What has helped me is just taking a big audit of like a week, for example, of where I'm spending my time, and that has helped me figure out, okay, if I'm like, where I'm wasting my time, because when you're in it, you don't really see yourself from an outside perspective. So that helped me out, helped me carve out. I think at the time I was spending maybe like 60 or 70 hours working a week. That helped me carve out like an extra 10 to 15 hours that I realized I was wasting on maybe like trivial things or scrolling through social media, for example. That helped me carve out the extra time to dedicate to hiring, to dedicate to maybe setting up SOPs and setting up processes.

Speaker 2: 28:36

So when we do hire someone on, they have at least a baseline of things to work on or to learn. After that it was mainly management and figuring out cadences for weekly meetings or things to actually talk about on those weekly meetings. And eventually now the biggest thing that has helped me is having monthly 60-minute meetings with everyone in the company. So everyone in the company is on the 60-minute meeting and we go over what we've worked on in the last month, what we're currently working on this month like a big initiative, and then what we're going to be working on the next month and maybe months out further. So that way now everyone's on the same page about what I'm busy working on day to day as, like the owner, what they need to be working on to. Maybe maybe it's a course that they have to go through, or maybe it's a specific training module that they have to go through. So everyone's on the same page and there's also a sense of accountability, because everyone else is on the call, and we do these every single month at the first week.

Speaker 1: 29:32

One of the biggest challenges I have as a business coach who works with small business owners is when we get to the SOPs. They're the most tedious, mind-boggling. I don't have time to do those, but I love that you said you have those. How did you get started one? And secondly, did you have a coach or a book that kind of moved you that way to see the importance of SOPs? How did you get that ball rolling?

Speaker 2: 30:02

I think, just being in the digital marketing space and hanging out with other people that run their own agency, the word SOP just comes out naturally. Just whenever you're like maybe it's like a coffee shop meetup or something like that SOP gets brought up at least once. So I think just being in that environment has kind of made me aware of it before I had to hire someone on, especially with more experienced agency owners. And documenting the SOPs may not be as tedious as you think. It may take an extra five to 10 minutes out of your day, depending on what you're doing, and one simple thing that I've learned to do is whatever I'm doing right now is I just record. Like I just hit start on my loom, like I have a loom and I hit record and whatever that video is, I just that's the SOP now.

Speaker 2: 30:49

So I first started out with just doing video only.

Speaker 2: 30:52

Then, eventually, after doing video only when I had extra time and bought back my time through employees and having an organization, I then started to write out the SOPs in more detailed fashion.

Speaker 2: 31:03

Now and this is something that I'm going to be trying out in the next couple of months when we're updating some of our SOPs is Loom has an AI feature where they read through everything that you talk to, like the transcript that you talk through while you're going about what you're doing on the screen, and they automatically create an SOP summary for you through I don't know what AI software they use. So you have the video and right next to it you have the SOP in step-by-step order based off the transcript. So now all you have to do is just record the video and you have the process. Basically, to sum it up, I would just recommend whatever you're doing that you want to offload, just record what you're doing and then now you have a process for it and you do that over and over and over again over the course of a couple months and now you have a whole library of your day-to-day activities that you need taken care of for you.

Speaker 1: 31:52

After you recorded these and got them documented, how do you get your people to follow them? Do you have them in one central location? Do you have notebooks? How do you get it to work in your company?

Speaker 2: 32:04

Yeah, definitely so.

Speaker 2: 32:05

I keep all of our SOPs in Google Drive and essentially it's just a document or it's a folder with a lot of documents in them, and mine are mixed with written instructions and video right next to the headline.

Speaker 2: 32:18

So it's like for us right now it's like how to design an email or how to come up with a topic for an email. Right next to that headline there's a video and then there's like written instructions. So one thing I do want people to do is I require them to go through it and I send out like a weekly not a weekly Slack message, but whenever I complete it, I send out a Slack message going over everything that the SOP covers, link to the SOP, and I say put a check mark on this message to make sure that you've gone through it and actually like read through it or watch the videos. And then on our weekly meeting, uh, on the following week, I asked if there was any questions that they had, um, or if there's there's anything that they want to add, kind of like testing and quizzing them to see if they actually watched or read through it.

Speaker 1: 33:02

Is there a book that you would recommend to business owners that helped you, or audio, audible or anything? Video, yeah.

Speaker 2: 33:11

I listen to books, I read books, so like, I totally get that. I think one book it's a little controversial, but 48 Laws of Power, I think is like a really, really good business book. I know it's a lot of like if you go on like TikTok or Instagram reels or YouTube or whatever everyone's like, oh, it's a book that teaches you how to manipulate people. I don't think it's the case.

Speaker 2: 33:30

I think Robert Greene's a really good author and a lot of history and a lot of historic lessons were imprinted on that book, and the biggest takeaway from that lesson, I think, is just like or like the biggest lesson that I've used so far that's helped me out is I forgot the number of the law, but it was the one that said to like to give gifts in order to be on the equal playing ground with people that are above you, and that's helped me out so much in networking scenarios mainly, which have led to business partnerships. So I recommend that book wholeheartedly. Maybe not all the laws have to apply to you, but there are some that you can handpick and choose from, and it's a book that I try to reread at least once a year.

Speaker 1: 34:12

Good for you, because many people they'll just read it, put it away. And I want to encourage business owners, because you said something right there about you know some of it was good, some of it wasn't. For a lot of business owners that we work with, they'll take a book, a business book, and try to scale their business from that book and it's like no, no, no, no Use what's applicable for you. It's not all going to be for you. Just take the parts. You can't take a book, learn everything and implement it in your entire lifetime. I mean, it's impossible because your business is going to be changing. Economics changes, your business, there's going to be some things that are relevant today, but maybe not tomorrow, which leads me into my next question when do you see this industry of technology, digital marketing, ai, because that all affects what you're doing. I know we can't say it's going to be this, but what do you see happening in the next just couple?

Speaker 2: 35:09

things is only going to get better and some of the things that we use people for now is just going to be automated through software. Um, like copywriting is already getting easier with the help of chat, gpt, and that only came out two years ago, and now most people use it for some day-to-day communication. People even writing their emails for them, um through ai. So I think a I think a lot of those tasks that require people are no longer needed, which for us, or like at least, I don't see a threat to that in our industry because there's still people that need to be making decisions.

Speaker 2: 35:50

Ai is good at executing or maybe not good, depending on what the prompt is. It's good at executing but it's not good at thinking on its own or thinking like taking all the data in and thinking for you. It's not going to think for you. So I think there's still going to be people in the decision maker seats that still will be paid, whatever we're paid to make those decisions for the business owners based off the data that we see, like on the email marketing, off the data that we see on the email marketing side. So if we see email open rates are down, we can have ChatGPT analyze that data and we can see a specific problem, but we still need to make the decision based off that data for the client in the best interest of their business.

Speaker 1: 36:31

If people want to work with you, which I hope they do, how can they get ahold of you? How can they follow you? How can they learn more? What's your favorite platform to to follow?

Speaker 2: 36:41

Yeah, uh, I'm. I'm active on LinkedIn, I'm active on YouTube, so those like you, just look up my name and you'll be able to find me. I think I've done enough SEO in my lifetime to where I pop up first. So, and your?

Speaker 1: 36:52

name is is a very unique.

Speaker 2: 36:55

Yeah. So just look up Nikita Vakhrushev on those and you'll find everything you need to know there. Youtube I try to upload weekly. I need email tips or anything that can help you get better at email. If you want to work with us, just go to our agency website. It's aspectagencycom A-S-P-E-K-T agencycom and just a little special for the listeners here. We typically charge $200 to $300 for an audit, but if you came in from this podcast and you want to get your email audited, just write down that you came from the podcast and we'll do it completely for free for you.

Speaker 1: 37:29

Wow, that's a heck of a deal right there. Now you really have to reach out to you. I mean free, like come on. That word is not used very often in these days, so I'm going to ask you one last question. If you were in front of an audience of business owners of all sizes, seasons of business, what's something you could share with them that would give them a voice of hope? Today? That's kind of applicable for all of them.

Speaker 2: 37:55

I think no matter what situation you're in with your business I've been in the lows, I've been in the highs you're always in control of your situation. No matter how bad the situation is, you still have control over it as a business owner. So you're the person that's steering the ship and if whatever happened, you're like, you're responsible for it and whatever whether it's bad or good you're responsible for it and if it's bad, you can still control and pivot out of the situation. It doesn't have to be a bad situation for long and you'd be surprised that when you realize how much control you have, you can quickly turn around situations that you've been in.

Speaker 1: 38:36

That's fantastic advice and I just shared this on a recent podcast. It seems to be the flavor of the month for me, anyways. And that is the business you have today. It goes. It aligns with exactly what you just said. You can control your destiny because the business you have today, the challenges you have today, you either created those or you allowed them to happen, so you can also change them. You know so, uh, cause you're the, you're the captain of the shit.

Speaker 1: 39:06

So appreciate your time today, been a blessing to so many people. Appreciate you. Make sure you go follow Nikita and we'll see you over on LinkedIn. It was a pleasure, michael. Thank you for listening to Small Business Pivots. Please don't forget to subscribe and share this podcast. If your business is stuck, you need help creating a business that can run without you, or you need a fast business loan or line of credit. Go to our website businessownershipsimplifiedcom and schedule a free consultation to learn why small business success starts with boss. If you want to talk anything small business related, email me at michael at michaeldmorrisoncom. We'll see you next time on Small Business Pivots.