Please note: This is an automatically generated transcription. There are typos and the system may pick words or whole phrases up incorrectly.

Intro: I’m Paul Higgins, an ex-corporate executive turned business owner who, for five years, struggled to grow a cloud Consulting business whilst battling a chronic disease. With the help of mentors and experts, I got the business model right, built a sales and marketing engine, and developed a high-performing team that ended in a successful exit. I received a kidney transplant from a mate, and now on my second life, I dedicate my time to helping other Cloud Consultants go quickly with less effort to enjoy life. Detecting an accent, I'm an Aussie working globally from Melbourne, Australia. I interview successful Cloud Consultants sharing their scaling story to give you inspiration and practical tips. I have dedicated experts for Cloud Consultants on the show to save you time and money by working with the right people. If you want to scale quickly with less effort to enjoy life, you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Speaker 1 (0:55): Hi I'm Paul Higgins and welcome to the Cloud Consultant Show Episode No. 486. Today's topic is a masterclass on using inbound content to become the number 1 Zoho partner in the US. And you’re going to learn lots but one thing you’re going to learn is that consistency is the key and the’re no better time to start than today. The second is the media assets to create and when to create them. And the third thing is a golden tip on webinars that I’ve never heard before and I think you’re going to absolutely love them. If it's your first time welcome and if you love what you hear please subscribe. It is for cloud consultants. So yes, if you consult and deploy on a SaaS platform, doesn’t matter the platform, you're in the right place. If you’re a regular, thanks for your support. I’d love to hear from you. [email protected], send me an email and also suggest some topics or maybe you know a guest or would love to be a guest yourself. There’s a link and summary of the key links within the notes that you’re listening to, but also, you can get the full transcript to Paulhigginsmentoring.com/podcast because I think you’re going to need this one. 

Speaker 1 (1:54): But before we go into the interview with Brett, I'd like to thank our sponsors. The first is the cloud consultants collective. It's the world’s only revenue-focused collective for cloud consultants where you can get answers quicker than what you can out of Youtube and Google. Don’t believe me, try it for yourself. Just go to cloudconsultantscollective.com to join for free today. And the other is Workflow Academy. Are your top performers overworked? Is there risk that they might also leave because they are overworked? If that’s teh case, we have an innovative solutionto help with that. We bring in highly trained junior talent to support your top talent. It is a fantastic idea and you can find out more at paulhigginsmentoring.com/WFA. 

Speaker 1 (2:34): So before founding Zenatta, Brett spent 25 years in the IT channel I’d say. He started with the founding of Channel Solutions Group, a full-service sales and marketing organization specializing in value-added channels for tech manufacturers. And as part of the executive team, he led you know, lots of solutions. He worked across both the Vendors side and also the Value Added Resellers side. So he fully understands that. That’s why his experience that he shares today is so valuable. And over the time he’s impacted over 50 companies with their channel partners, including Cisco, McAfee, Citrix, VMware, just to name a few. And Brett is also the host of the CRM Zen Show. A weekly podcast focused on Zoho suite of products. And what I’ll do now is hand you over to Brett Martin, founder of Zenatta Consulting and also the CRM Zen Show. So excited to have you here Brett. 

Speaker 2 (3:33): Glad to be here Paul. Thanks for inviting me. I really appreciate it. 

Speaker 1 (3:36): Yeah, well look, we've had some fantastic conversations off air. But it's about time we put them on air and you can share the fantastic things you've been doing at Zenatta with the rest of the partner network out there but Zoho. Because I think some of the things you're doing are worldclass. I'm going to dig into those. But why don't we kick off with who your ideal clients are and what problems you love to solve for them?

Speaker 2 (3:58): Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think we'll get down to this a little later on the show. But I think our ideal client really, it's not necessarily a particular industry. I think it's more like a certain mindset, right? You know we’e fortunate and we can just pick this client but you can kind of tell when you get on a phone call with someone after a little bit, if they're going to be easy to work with, or they’re going to be difficult to work with. So we really want those clients that are just, you can tell they're easy to work with, they get it, they want your help. You know that things don't go wrong all the time, but occasionally they're little bumps in the road when you're doing development for people and you want the kind of person that isn't going to be hysterical and upset and screaming and yelling. You want someone who's going to go, hey. is this is why we're going, what can we do here? You know, you could work with them to get through that and fix it. So, you know, for us, it's just someone who, you know, clearly can use our help. They're struggling, getting their ERP, you know, whole system set up and running. They're not really getting things going with their CRM. They're having trouble here. They need automation. They understand that, you know, there are certain things in their business that just take up way too much time, theywant our help to getting it all going. it's also really good if they kind of have some idea around business process. You know, oftentimes we'll give them a little homework around, let's discuss your business process. Sometimes you got to hold their hand. That's fine. But I think, you know, it's crazy thing to say, but the ideal client is someone who I would like to go have a beer with, you know. 

Speaker 1 (5:27): Or a wine in your case, right? 

Speaker 12(5:30): Or glass of wine, exactly. You know, it's just, you know, you talk to him, you like him, you hit it off. It's the great thing about, I mean, you know, you're interviewing people all the time. But the great thing about this business is number one, you get someone on the phone and you're like, wow, I didn't even know that was a thing. I had no idea you could make what a great idea. And then you start to talk to about where they live and you know, and then you kind of you hit it off and start discussing their life. And it's fun because you're meeting a bunch of really good people and it makes it easy. So my ideal client is just that someone I'll have a glass of wine with, right?

Speaker 1 (6:05 ): And has it always been that case? Were you're really strict at the start? Because I know you've got a great pedigree and corporate background. Was it like that at the start or you're a bit straight up to begin with?

Speaker 2 (6:14): You know, I would say in the first couple of years of our existence, I might have ignored my Spidey senses a little bit, you know? Maybe we were trying to make a number for that month and I thought, you know, they'll work out. That's okay. They seem like they might not. But so no, I mean, it's not always. I mean, I'm older now. This is not my first rodeo. So having been through this, I did have that rule in place when we had started Zenatta, but I have ignored it a couple times. It has never worked out well for me. Never worked out well, you know. To tell you a story we had someone it was really a major client who shall go unnamed, okay? But they have in the United States, they've got a big real estate show, right, and there's a bunch of them like this. They buy homes clean them up flip them sell them, right? And we're talking to the team and it's going well, and I think we're gonna bring them all as a client and then the guy says, well, this better go well because if it doesn't and you make one mistake we will destroy your lives and your company. And I went all right. Well, we're not doing business then. Goodluck finding someone. That's a classic example of the kind of client you don't want right, but anyway. 

Speaker 1 (7:31): Yeah, yeah and then look , you’re right. We've all had them you sort of listen to Brett, you probably know we can head going, yeah, look, it seems too good to be true, chances are it normally is. And what are some of the size? Like, you know, you talk that was a really big opportunity. Was there any particular employee size you sort of swan?

Speaker 2 (7:50): We're a Zoho developer and consultant and doing those kind of things. So, you know, Zoho is trying to go into the enterprise market, but really they fit small to mid-size business, right? And you can stretch it to the SME, up to maybe 250 to 500 users. They can handle more than that, but then sometimes can become too complex with outside integrations, although they can handle it. It's just companies, when they seem to reach a certain size, they just don't even consider Zoho, right? It's all these salesforce, some Microsoft Dynamics or Oracle or those kind of things. So we don't really have a target. It's anywhere from what you call a solopreneur, you know, individual company. That's all they are. To a few hundred people. But, you know, I would say our average clients in that 20 to 100 range.

Speaker 1 (8:35): Yeah. And look, I think, you know, that's where Zoho's sweet spot is. And I remember we were on a platform previously where each time I've invented capital or a new board member or whoever invested in the company. So let's go enterprise. Let's go enterprise, right? Because they want as much return as they can. And you'd sort of whether the storm and, you know, three to six months later, that person would be gone. Maybe they'd only be gone and you'd be back saying, yes, let's stick to our knitting and knitting. And I think, you know, the hedgehog, if you're good to great, you know, that's a fantastic book. And it's, you know, it's all about, you know, being a hedgehog, not a fox. And I think that's what Zoho will continue to be strong at.

Speaker 2 (9:09): Yeah, I think they might cross the chasm in a little bit from as you look at, I think more and more companies are looking at the salesforce.coms and the oracles and the rest and the multi-year contracts and the thousands of dollars, per thousand dollar plus per employee per year that they're paying for those. And they start to say, well, we're only using a subset and you're starting to see some of that migration come over where they're looking because it was clearly caught up on CRM. They had a desk and some of the other core applications. So you are seeing larger companies start to migrate over for sure.

Speaker 1 (9:45): And there's always small companies within larger companies. And there's always opportunities. It's not a blanket. It's enterprise and and then there's SME and SMB. SMB is never that.

Speaker 2 (9:57): It's funny you say that we do have a bunch of, not a bunch, but in the Fortune 500 we've probably got a dozen companies where we have division.

Speaker 1 (10:04): Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:07): You get that approved and then that can lead to other things as you go through.

Speaker 1 (10:11): Yeah spot on. Because you know, I've never met an enterprise that's got a one stack solution that's clean across their entire business. It just doesn't happen that way. So there's most opportunities like you said. And you know, you, I think, have got the essence of what makes a great consulting business, and that is bringing content, right? You know, I've sat last night prepping for this, just watching your YouTube channel, you'll have it in the links, but it's, you know, the CRM Zen show and we'll have all the links in. But, you know, you're bringing at it. I think you create content, your space better than anyone else, but across the board, I think you're one of the best content creators.

Speaker 2 (10:51): Well, thanks. A quick jump ahead here, but that's our go-to-market strategy. It's content from from day one content. And, you know, it's not easy. As you know, as a content creator, I mean, you know, we started off the CRM Zen show as a straight podcast, and then we decided we would make the jump to YouTube, which turned out to be the best decision we could ever make. And so we just did the show there, then we said, well, let's produce some quality content around Zoho products. And but then what it became and I think the key to anybody, you've probably heard this, you've got content creators on is absolute consistency. I mean, absolute consistency. The CRM Zen show records every Friday morning at 10am. It goes live live on YouTube every Friday morning at 10am rain or shine. Right. That's just how it is. That's, you know, you can't ever miss it. Our newsletter, when we started a newsletter at the very beginning, which is here's all that happened in Zoho last week. And the newsletter is easy. It's basically the CRM Zen show is for those that don't know Zoho has 60 applications. So every week, there's enough news to make up an entire show that's going to go anywhere from a half an hour to an hour, where you just talk about, here's what happened with Zoho last week. This app got this update, they added this new feature, they added a brand new application that can., Well, the newsletter really is just here's what we talked about on the show. And so the newsletter goes out every Monday morning at 6 a.m. Then the podcast drops. So there's the YouTube goes live, but then the audio podcast gets cleaned up, changed, and it dropped every Monday morning at 6 a.m. as well. And if it doesn't, and there have been a couple of weeks where we've had a glitch on the newsletter going out, or there was a glitch on the podcast, that's not bad over 250 weeks. We've had probably happened three times, right? I get emails. What's going on? Where's the news? What happened? Where's the podcast? What happened? Right? And so it's that consistency in just doing that. You know, we're always looking for what more can you do, what more can you add to bring value? Because I think, you know, as you know, success your podcast, and the only reason that people go to the YouTube channel to watch anything on the people watch the CRM Zen show the only is it's valuable. It's these really good tips and tricks and, you know, and how to use the product and what to do and real actionable information for their lives because people who are listening to it are using Zoho. And so that they find that valuable. So you produce that valuable actionable content and people will keep watching and they'll subscribe and, you know, and then I think it's just constantly evolving, changing the format, changing things up, doing what's better. We used to do a read of the week every week. And then I thought, wow, some of this is just trivial, you know, we're just stuffing in something and we would do an app of the week with an outside application that we found useful, right? And I think we did one on I think it was a diet application one time and we said, okay, that's it. It’s over. We've gone too far. This really doesn't block anything. So it's like, you know, changing things, keeping it around. And there's opportunity there, I think, for other things, too, right? So at the end of every CRM Zen show, we would do a Q&A. And Tyler and I would answer the questions. Well, we'd review those questions maybe 10 minutes before the show went live. And we wouldn't give them short shrift, but, you know, we just kind of profunctfully answer them, point them in a direction, do that kind of thing. And sometimes that would make the show go exceptionally long. And so we said, well, maybe there's an opportunity for another show where we just answer questions. And I was in the shower and I asked Zenatta anything about Zoho. And I came out of the shower to my wife going, Azaz! Azaz! You lost your butt? I'm like, no, we'll do a Q&A show. And so we started that. And that's just been a huge success. But now what we're doing is we're bringing, not just Tyler and I bring other experts from the company in. And we have a pre-show where we go through all the questions. We decide I was going to answer them, if we're going to do a screenshot. That show in and of itself now, the last one ran an hour and 10 minutes. Because we're given that time. That's becoming another asset. I guess the other thing that people want to think about is you really got to think about SEO. As you're doing these things, you want to maximize them because you could have the best video in the world about something, but if you haven't properly done the optimization on that for search, no one's ever going to find it. People ask these great, amazing questions. They were tag-ons at the end of the show. There was zero SEO. Now, it's its own show with its own full description of all the questions and all of that kind of stuff, thereby driving more people to you, more people find you, more people want to use your services. So anyway.

Speaker 1 (15:46): Yeah. And once again, the links will be in the show notes, but go and have a look at it. I actually just did a podcast with this episode 486 is listening to Brett Martin. You're in the future, but I did ones of other platform plays where they go to markets being YouTube and that's delivered their success. It is something that, as I said in my solo podcast, it's not easy. You said the same thing, right? And it doesn't have to be perfect at the start. Like, if I look, go back and look at the graphics, where you are today, I think the graphics and the design is spectacular. It looks like a brilliantly produced show, but you know, it wasn't that at the start and it was only you at the start and now you've got your team members that are contributing to it, right?

Speaker 2 (16:35): Yeah, it was awful.

Speaker 1 (16:36): It's a journey, right? It's a journey. You've got to start it somewhere and what Brett is proving here is that the best time to start it is today, right? Best time would have been 20 years ago, but no, the next best time is today.

Speaker 2 (16:50): And you know, the thing that you'll find, both on the podcast side of the world and on the YouTube side of the world is that if you do that consistency and you do it, it's crazy to watch. There becomes an acceleration point. There becomes an ignition point, right? Where you're producing, you're producing. I remember it took us, when we started YouTube, it took us a year to get to 500 subscribers. And then it took three months to get to 1,000 subscribers. And then it took another nine months to get to like, I don't know, 4,000 subscribers. Then we hit 10,000 subscribers. So we're only, we're three years in at 10,000 subscribers. But in that first year was only 500. And it's because people have to find you, you've got to get in the algorithms, you get that whole little thing. And I've granted the quality. I think the content quality was great. The production quality lacked a bit, right? But now we have a producer and makes life a lot easier. You can just go ahead and do all those kind of things. But I think It's important, you know, and like we say consistency, this never, never miss a beat, you know, constantly.

Speaker 1 (17:59): And look, I've seen people create as like yourself sort of take two strategies. One is where they talk about the platform, right? And they target the users and the features, and the other is they talk more broadly about business, right? You know, business process, et cetera, you spoke about. What was your thinking and, you know, takes us through the point where you are making a content strategy decision for the marketing assets you've created. And how did you make that decision on which was the best way to go?

Speaker 2 (18:28): Well, I felt that there was on just general product content, because Zoho is based in India, 85 million users, 12,000 employees. But the bulk of their employees were over in Chennai. And so the videos are all produced over in India, right? And so they're good, but I thought they were dry. Right? They're very dry as the product manager reading it. These are great people. I'm not putting anyone down. But it was kind of just dry, you know, kind of content. I thought, well, you know, it might not be a bad idea to have some content with kind of, you know, different sensibility and different take on it and kind of go forward and drive that. So I thought there was an opportunity there. We did move into business process later on, though. I mean, in the CRM Zen Show, we added this whole implementation of the week thing, which truly is around a business process and how the real use applications and then that got broken out into its own segment as well. So that's where kind of things evolve, right? So the implementation of the week, it's like, let's do that. We can talk about real implementations and how this is applicable in the real world and so you kind of put that out there from an implementation standpoint. And then they're like, Oh, well, let's make that its own little segment. And we'll do the implementation zone segment. You're doing the Q&A. Oh, let's make that its own segment. So things can kind of evolve from that. And that I think, you know, led to it, because our whole strategy is inbound, inbound, inbound. And then once we reach critical mass, we built a, we started an online community. And that was another thing. And we think about it, we have meetings every year with the executive team. And we talk about what worked this year. And then we go through, you know, what everything's working, what we're doing, what's not working, what we should change. And then we decide what our initiative is going to be for the next year, right? And so we kind of go through, and it was a struggle with the community. We launched it in 2022. I thought it was going to be the biggest hit in the world. It wasn't. We chose, we did not like the platform we chose to launch it on. It was tough to get the engagement from my team internally, I think, for a variety of reasons. You know, we did. and give up on it though. We took a step back, we reorchestrated the entire thing, we drove more content to it. And so I think that's constantly, you constantly just looking at things from every side, right? What can I do to make this better? What can I change? You know, our website, we had events and it was on the website, you click on events and it was, hey, here's all our events, here's all Zoho's events, we didn't care other partners events, we don't that content over to the new community platform. So if you want to know where the events are, you got over the community platform. We'd have the news on there, here's the latest news stories, well, let's move that over to the community platform to engage a discussion around it. And then you started to really see this big uptick, because you got more and more and more actionable content, driving more discussions, driving more questions, and that anyway.

Speaker 1 (21:29): Yeah, and then raising the bean there, right? And then it comes more sticky. And like, you know, for you, you know, like if you always in a marketing person, like is marketing come naturally to you? Or is it something that you've had to really work on running your own business?

Speaker 2 (21:45): I guess so. It wasn't my degree in college. I was an English major in college. You know, I was going to teach high school English, but no. And so, you know, I think it was a real love lesson learned life experience, you know, from the marketing side. You know, my first, I was a mortgage broker in college. And so you kind of got a little bit there. But then I got into insurance. And, you know, that's real life lessons around marketing. And you know, this is cold calling and physical mail and emails. And you're kind of learning all this is in my 20s, right? And I'm 61 now. So, you know, a whole bunch kind of came into this. that. And I had a tech company on the side that I was doing while I own my insurance agency. And so when I sold that, it was kind of one of those things. I don't know strangely enough, my first real company that I was ever hired to, I was just hired as the executive vice president and given marketing duties and sales duties. And then that never changed. So I was like, oh, he's a marketing guy. But then you do learn and you kind of grow and you go through all that. And plus I think, you know, my background is building channel programs. That's really where my life settled, which is you need to build a partner program. I'm a partner for Zoho. So how do these companies decide what their partner's programs are going to look like? How are they going to go to market strategy to recruit their partners? How are they going to do all of that? And you know, ended up launching an entire company around partner recruitment, partner marketing. You know, there's, you know, sell through the partner. There's so to the partner, there's there's all of the different things. than all of those different little marketing components. And so it was really trial by fire for a very long time. Right. And I don't think I really figured out how to all the magic sauce together until I was probably 50. Right. But that was just a long learning curve of a lot of businesses. You know, I was Lexar and just doing Cisco's channel program, the McAfee’s channel program, and building these programs, and working for these different companies, and working with really smart people. You know. And by the way, that's the key to everything, Paul. Just hire people way smarter than yourself all the time. Surround yourself with super smart people. And I just hire great people that are smarter than me. Makes my life super easy.

Speaker 1 (24:01): Yeah. I'll tell you a we’ll come into that recruitment piece, you know, because I think you had a great philosophy on that. So it sounds like you sort of build up the partner model that worked really well. Like, a heady big, like partner, and you sort of, build that up. You sat on the other side of the fence and then you've sort of gone and done it yourself. Like, and I sort of come back to the same of marketing because, you know, like I said, your content's brilliant, but I think you would spend a lot of time on it. But roughly, you know, from the start, like how much time do you spend on marketing when you first started with the business? And what is that today? Like how much of your time is invested in marketing?

Speaker 2 (24:35): Oh my goodness. You know, it's funny. So when you're first when you're trying to get clients, really Google ads, right? So you're going to buy Google ads, you're going to work on keywords, you're doing all of that. And, you know, we were spending probably 5,000 a month on Google ads when we first kicked it off. By the way, that when we got to 1,000 subscribers on YouTube, we didn't need Google ads. That was the crazy thing because the inbound leads actually were replacing Google ads, you know, and now it's kind of its own thing. But, you know, I would say we spend an inordinate amount of time on marketing. It's for me, I mean, my consultants are working with the clients and the developers are working with the clients, but you know, from the marketing team perspective, it's all we're doing. I mean, it's really, you know, what's the content schedule for this week? What's the social media schedule for this week that's going to promote the content? What's the newsletter for this week? What are we promoting in the newsletter? You know, what's this drip campaign looking like that's going out on the inbound because we're 100% inbound, right? So when someone comes in, you know, we are quasi outbound because we will throw people into drip campaigns, right? But other than that, we're never going to call them. Where that that's going to be extended. They're going to then have to get enough of those drips to go. Oh, I think I'm in a higher zenotic kind of thing. So it's, it's a lot. I mean, just if you think of the production time alone, you know, we did a webinar today. So our webinars are different. By the way, great tip on webinars. I learned this from, I can’t remember who it was. I was invited to guest host a webinar and they said here's what we do we get together day before we do the whole webinar and we record it and then we push it live to the rest of the world well the webinar we're gonna tell you that the webinar is 40 minutes the fully recorded piece everybody comes on wearing exactly the same clothes with hopefully your hairstyle is similar to five minutes before and then they go now to Q&A and they throw a Q&A banner up and then you're doing Q&A and that has just been great so like Monday, we did a whole webinar recording, tomorrow that will go live right but it's a perfectly executed webinar, perfectly edited webinar, but then it will be live because no one will know because then boom they'll come on and answer all the questions at the end of the show right, we'll record tomorrow afternoon we'll record Ask is an not anything about Zoho and then that'll go live on Wednesday And then we'll do the CRM Zen show on Friday. And then there's a tip in a trick that's getting recorded and then we've got the newsletter to produce and put together. And so I don't know 20 30 hours for I mean, it's way more than that. It's a just the marketing team alone is probably a hundred hours a week, right. That's getting put into Production and all that kind of stuff and you can say well that's super expensive you go hire a marketing agency, right, because it is it's not cheap. But it's the best leads you can have. These are people number one you're a trusted advisor. They are getting on the phone you have no idea. That's like oh my god, I feel like I know you, it's the best feeling ever right? You're like, hey, great so you don't have to sell them because they already think you're great and You know, it's these are the best leads you can get so it's worth my advice any professional services organization is just build a model like this it'll just come in in spades. It really will. It's so hard to be out there just fishing and dialing for dollars and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (28:02): Yeah, totally agree. And you know, for me, it was a hard learning because I came from a world of Coca-Cola where, yes, the Coca-Cola company did all the marketing and then if you're in sales, you then basically did all the account management, right? So my natural strength was account management. That's what I did. And yes, that turned into new business, but it was all outbound in a way because you were always either existing clients and then you did a little bit of outbound, right? But you didn't do the marketing per se. The Coke company took care of that because in the old days, you could spend $3,400 million in the Australian market and that was enough, right? But that world's changed now and it's the great opportunity is like, right, showing is that you can create your own content to an ideal client that trusts you and they come and spends money with you and you don't have to have all the complexity to marketing and agencies and paid and all of that. Like you can do it. Brett's a great example of it. And that's why I brought him on the show today to learn from that. Now, we're just going to pivot for a moment to talk about your team, right? Because like you can't do this all yourself and you've built a great business.

Speaker 2 (29:11): And I don't do any of it, Paul

Speaker 1 (29:14): I see your face there and again, but I see your team working very hard on the YouTube. Right. And like you said, that's a deliberate strategy. And it's a good strategy, right? But you've talked in the past to me about, you know, recruiting people and then effectively building them up. Right. So, tell us a little bit about your internal development of your people and your recruitment strategy.

Speaker 2 (29:38): Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting because when you're doing this kind of consulting, you have to know business process. So I don't even know how you learn business process. You know, as an MBA, you kind of get it. You understand some theoretical structures of it and you can do those kind of things. And I think that's super helpful, right? To have that degree, I don't. But I think it is helpful for people who have that degree and who can come in and do that. Because a lot of people are coming into you saying, just help me, help me. I have no process. I have no strategy. Well, what do you do with the lead? It just sits there and I don't know what's the process with the lead and what's the followup and what’s this and that. So that whole business strategy side and being able to talk to somebody about their overall sales process, their marketing process, how they're converting things, when you open an opportunity or a deal, when does that happen? It's different for everybody. When does a lead get converted into a contact and an account? How do you make these decisions? A lot of people have really, they're on it. They know exactly. They know their whole process. That's great. But a lot of people, they want to know what should I do, right? So you've got that aspect of it. So hiring someone with that skill set is difficult. Now then hiring someone with that skill set, who knows Zoho and is really an expert at Zoho, well, that's doubly difficult. And then if you're actually going to be in a consultant who's engaging with somebody and talking to somebody, you actually have to have a personality as well. So finding all three of those things is just brutal to get that. And we left out, we found it early, we found some great consultants who could do all three of those things that were amazing. Then as we started building things going along, we found it was harder to get that one piece. But what you could do is you could hire a full-stack developer and get that person in who knew nothing about Zoho. But they were a really good developer, right? And they had good personality, great. And then you could teach them Zoho because the coding on Zoho and learning that, you can get them their original eventually. And you could kind of grow them in there. But how do you teach in the business process? Well, if you are a developer for three, four years, you're going to have touched hundreds of clients, worked on hundreds of processes, done all those kind of things, you're going to learn all the product line, but you're also going to learn business process when you convert leads, why it converts, what their theory is, all of that kind of stuff. So our entire process has been really to take developers. And then, and this by the way, I only arrived at this like two years ago, right, which is take developers and put them through all of this stuff, and then start giving them, hey, you just take this one on your own, right, and then saying, wow, they're doing a good job, boom, boom, boom, and then moving them up through the consultant base. And we're having good luck with that. That seems to be it. Because that's, I think that's the hardest thing in scaling any professional services businesses, people.

Speaker 1 (32:34): Yeah, yeah, well, you just can't have the front, like you've done a brilliant job in the front end, but it can't be an isolation. If you're going to deliver it against the back end, then you're not going to get the third, you're not going to get the quality of your work. You know, you know how it works. And I think it's smart to do both of those, which, which you've done. The last quick question I want to ask you before we go on the rapid fire is around, you know, you might have a statement to me that really stood out, which was around, you know, we don’t do retainer project based work, right? And I'm like, oh, okay, what do you do? Hourly work. Yeah. Okay. And that was like, wow, okay. I've spent, you know, quite some time trying to get everyone off Hourly working to retainer base work. Right. So I'd be you to tell us why you guys at Zenatta prefer to do hourly rather than project based work.

Speaker 2 (33:18): Well, because there's just a ton of scope creep that can occur and it's almost impossible to properly scope anything in a half an hour, an hour, two hours, three hours, right? Which what are you going to, you know, and so for us, it's we've gotten to the point where we can give pretty good estimates, right? We want this app to set this up. That's going to be 30 to 50 hours, right? But, and we're very clear about this. You're going to want more. You know, you don't have to want more and we're going to guide you every step of the way. But you're probably going to want more because you're going to say, oh my gosh, I really want a button that I push here and I click it and it does these nine things. And it might be fine that you want that and it's going to save you. There's huge ROI on that, but that's going to add 10 hours to the project, right? And there's always seems to be confusion on project based work. Well, I thought that was in the project. Right. Well, but no, it's not the problem. I kind of read the sentence to say that that was included.

Speaker 1 (34:20): And I'm the customer and, you know, I think I'm paying the bill.

Speaker 2 (34:24): Yep. And you're like, okay, great. You know, then fine. That's you will do that for you. I've talked to a lot of consultants. I said, you know, that have left project base work to hourly. And I said, well, we did one project, right? I think we made about 99 cents an hour on the entire project because it's just the scope creep got him and got him. So we move that way. You know, we also moved to a minimum engagement because you can't really get to know a client and less than a certain amount of time, right? And so you want a client that's going to kind of agree to that.

Speaker 1 (34:53): And what is that minimum engagement?

Speaker 2 (34:55): It's 20 hours. Yeah. So we're, you know, we're 200 an hour. So you're basically $4,000 to engage and get going. You know, then from there, and it doesn't matter. We'll have a client. We'll say, wow, this is just be 300 hours. We're going to still 20 hours is what we're going to start with, right? And then kind of go and build and kind of go through the entire project. But it's worked out really well. Clients are very happy. You know, we built a massive portal. That's the other thing. I think client communication, that constant visibility, right? Here's what we're doing. Here's what it's done. Constant, constant, constant, constant communication. The worst thing for a client is you don't talk to them for two weeks. They have no idea. They haven't gotten an email. You know, I know developers, they're slaving away building the most massively beautiful thing, but they didn't communicate it to the client and the client’s upset. But if that was communicated, hey, we've hit milestone one. We've hit milestone two. And here's what we've done. Here's a video of the progress so far. You know, you just take two minutes to send that out to them. They realize they're not forgotten, lost and you know, it's kind of very helpful. Keeps everything.

Speaker 1 (36:00): You know, I always recommended that like even when we're back at working with clients, you know, corporate sense, Coca cola’s exact same thing, right? Because unfortunately, people are meaning making machines and they will make up meaning even if there isn't any, right? And I've brought people make up is not good news. Its normally bad news, right? So they're expecting bad news there like, you know, they've been burnt by so many other providers that they're just expecting you to be the same. So, you know, if you are communicating regularly, like Brett said, and it's, you know, good news, you will just stand out so much. And then your chances are going from 20 hours to 400 to 500 hours, whatever it may be, is significantly more. So look, we could talk forever, Brett, we're going to have you back on, you're a fantastic guest. We're episode four eight six with Brett Martin from zenatta.com and the CRM Zen show. But what I'm going to do now is get you to do something a little different, which is rapid fire. All right. So I'm going to ask you four questions, and we get rapid fire answers to close this off. So ready for that?

Speaker 2 (37:07): Fire away.

Speaker 1 (37:07): Let's do it. So the first one is what are the daily activities that you do to help your scale Zenatta?

Speaker 2 (37:12): Well, I think like I said, it's just consistency. So there's no set of daily activities, but there are set of weekly activities. So there's daily check-ins with different groups and there's daily check-ins with different people and there's daily milestones and then there's kind of project check-ins as we go along. And it's basically a constant series of you have to know where everything is at all times and you have to trust the people that are doing it. So I'm basically there to say we're on schedule. Do you need anything from me? Anything I can do? I mean, I think that's kind of the key. So my daily habits are just making sure that I provide everybody the tools they need to succeed.

Speaker 1 (37:49): And what about you? Where do you go to learn more about how you can drive your business?

Speaker 2 (37:54): I'm a constant reader. It's just constantly reading. I don't know if there's,  I'm fortunate. I've got some other good, really great friends that are also avid business book readers and that kind of thing. And I think you've got to constantly improve. So if there's a book out there and it gets recommended by two or three people, and I'm constantly reading it.

Speaker 1 (38:15): And is that a physical book?

Speaker 2 (38:17): Oh, Kindle or physical.

Speaker 1 (38:19): Yeah. Next one is one wish.One wish we could grant you at Zenatta. And that's it.

Speaker 2 (38:25): I don't know. What's that line from Groundhog Day? World Peace, Paul. World Peace. You know what? It's I just wanted to keep. I guess one of the things is we built a culture, right? The one was for this business is we have worked so hard on this culture. As a matter of fact, shout out to fire it up culture. It's a consultancy we've worked with forever. They are constantly doing culture surveys. We do these little personality profiles, not to see if things bad. It's just see, hey, you know why this person and this person don't get along? It's look at look at their their opposite, man. That it's not going to work. So we work on this culture. We work on a culture of fun. We work on a culture of prioritizing your life above work. And my one wish would be that we can keep growing this business and just have as much fun as we are and keep this culture going because it is not easy.

Speaker 1 (39:15): Great. And the last question is what do you know now that you wish you had to know when you first started Zenatta?

Speaker 2 (39:21): Wow, that's a good question. I've been just so quick on my answers. I think it would have been, I probably wasted several years not doing all the things I'm doing now, not having these consistent practices, these consistent things. I would have launched everything so much sooner. As bad as it would have been, we would have taken that plunge early on and right away just carved out an extra 10 hours a week on content marketing and that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (39:52): Yeah, and just quickly on that, I'll listen to all this Start up podcast, etc. And you know, that's the number one identify for most successful startups is the fact that, the mover advantage. Right. There's nothing better than having first mover advantage. And you know, I think the key call out here is if you've been waiting for the right opportunity to produce your own content to drive inbound leads, that is over. Right. You're going to take what Brett's shown you're going to go to his YouTube channel and you go see his other assets and you're going to create your version of it. Right. But you're going to do it because it is what is a key ingredient to the six more professional services firms as Brett said. And it's your time to now do it. And Brett's been a great inspiration for you and for me to go and do the same. So Brett, thanks for coming on the show today. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Thanks for your wisdom. And if you haven't, go to Brett's profile, go to his YouTube, go to this YouTube. And then come back to me if you really think he's 61 because I actually think he's lying. If you're sixty one, I need to go see a plastic surgeon anyway, thanks for thanks for all your time today.

Speaker 2 (41:10): It's been great. I look forward to seeing you when I hear in the States. Take care

Speaker 1 (41:13 ): I can't wait for that. What a great interview with brett. I actually don’t know how to summarize because there’s so much value. But the best thing is to go and start your journey today in creating content. I think that’s the number one thing. But why don’t you share the things that you learnt from Brett. Share it on LinkedIn, at mention him, he’s very active on LinkedIn, he would absolutely love that for you. But also share it with your peers, right. You know people that need a kick starter and Brett is the right person to give them that, so please share it with them. They’ss think you’re a rockstar for doing it. Also check out our solo shows. Don’t forget if you’re scaling your cloud consulting business and you want a great blueprint to success, just go to paulhigginsmentoring.com/blueprint to get your free copy today. And please take action to grow with less effort and more reward.