How to Buy Help & Who’s On My Team

What I’d like to talk to you about today is building a team – buying help. We did a post on this and it was very popular. People were really interested in who’s on my team and what do they do. Because I was talking about my philosophy for team-building – I’ll link to it underneath this video so you can see it – how we go about building a team and getting people engaged and feeling good about what they’re doing, and being enthusiastic. Let’s talk about what specifically do the people on my team do. And I’ll tell you who’s on my team for new.smartmarketer.com and what they do, but first, I want to talk to you about the concept of buying help.

Buying help is when you’re ready to scale. You have a business and you’re doing stuff and you want some support, and you’re gonna pay for that. You’re purchasing help. And the beautiful thing about purchasing help is that it gets better over time. You get better at delegating, your systems and procedures and processes get better, and your employee or partner gets better at their job. And so 30 hours of help by this week is worth 60 hours next week – or next month – because they’re much better at their job.

So, on my team, first we have our designers. We have one full-time in-house designer, and we scale design by using an outsource designer when we need that help, but one person full-time does a lot. They design our banner ads for Facebook, our banner ads for Pinterest and Google, our landing pages for our e-commerce stores, our holiday promotion emails, our templates and all of our design work. You know, high-quality design is so important to build a brand. And what you want is a brand that’s valuable, that’s an asset, that you can sell. You can scale with 99 Designs and Elance and O-Desk, but at some point, you might want to bring in a part-time designer.

Second, we have a developer on staff who does WordPress, Shopify, Infusionsoft, who does all of our development work in-house, full-time. And that’s a very, very valuable asset to have in place. And in combination with your developer can be your Chief Platform Officer. And I actually have a separate person. I’ve got a full-time developer who does, essentially, Shopify and WordPress and HTML and CSS and Javascript and all that kind of stuff too when we need it. But mainly the platforms they work on are Shopify and WordPress. That’s Nick. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom, you’ll see my whole team; you’ll see their faces.

Pepijn is our Chief Platform Officer, and it’s his job to learn all the different platforms we work with – Leadpages, 1ShoppingCart, Infusionsoft, SamCart, Shopify, all the third-party applications for Shopify, Memberium. We use a bunch of different stuff. But all the third-party platforms, all the stuff, the social promotion tools, Wishpond, and every platform that we use, he knows inside and out. It’s very helpful to have one person who knows all the platforms.

And then we have two customer service folks. We have Boris, who’s sort of a director of operations/strategy but also helps with customer service. He’s a brilliant communicator, one of the best communicators I know, and he communicates with our customers. How you respond and relate with and communicate with customers and are able to make them happy and solve their problems really goes a long way. People tell their friends about you, they do business with you again if they enjoyed their experience. So it’s really important to have…don’t have a ticket go unanswered for more than 24 hours. Twenty-four hour rule! If someone communicates with you, you respond within 24 hours or you’re doing something wrong, in my opinion. Or maybe not doing something wrong but you’re kind of falling down on the job a little bit.

Then we have Samantha who is our Community Manager. She does things like build standard operating procedures for our courses and to document our processes and also communicates with our customers on Facebook and is a help in the customer service communication department, along with some video editing and things like that.

Rubin, who’s new to our team, is our Social Media Manager. Posts to Facebook, posts to Instagram, posts to YouTube, Google, handles our content syndication strategy. And when we look at business, guys, there’s more than just traffic and conversion. There’s repeat customers, there’s engagement, there’s back-end offers, there’s copyrighting for your engagement sequences. You want to have your traffic and your conversion in place, but you also wanna have engagement and content going out.

Mike is our Chief Strategy Officer. Mike started in e-commerce in 1991. He had a tennis e-commerce business! Been in the game for 20 years, and he really has a strategy mind that no one else on the team does besides me. No one’s been in the game long enough. Everyone else is new to the industry. A lot of the times we’re paying attention to what are we doing this week, what’s happening. But one day per week we’ve got our higher level day where we’re not looking at what specifically we’re doing over the next week but we’re looking at what are we doing in general. Do any of these strategies still make sense? We do higher level strategy once a week, and Mike and I work on that.

Carrie is behind the camera right now! She’s our Creative Director. She holds the moral line here at this company, and she’s also responsible for everything! But specifically, if you want to get off the esoteric and talk about technically what she’s doing, it’s shooting our video and helping craft and curate the messaging behind the business and stuff like that.

And then we also have an ads manager, which most of the time is actually me. That’s the one part of our company right now – we’re bringing up ads managers because one of the bottlenecks we have is that inside new.smartmarketer.com in particular, I’m really the only one who can actually fully scale direct-response advertising campaigns on Facebook, Pinterest, Google, Instagram, etc.

So that’s behind-the-scenes of my team! You were asking, folks were asking, “Hey, who do you even have on your team and what do they do?” So that’s kinda how we do it. I hope that’s been helpful to you. Go out there, buy yourself some help, and I’ll see ya in the next one.