Growing a marketing agency is extremely tough. Beyond finding (and retaining) a steady stream of clients, you also need to hire (and keep) experts, manage time spent on projects, and keep an eye out for profitability.
Our guest for today's episode of Help! My Business Is Growing is Thomas Padula, President and CEO of Padula Media Digital Marketing Agency.
Thomas has been recognized as one of Chester County's 40 Under 40 millennial superstars, and his agency, Padula Media, is one of the best advertising agencies in Pennsylvania.
He's our featured founder for our mini-series "How I Grew", featuring CEOs, leaders, and founders who have successfully grown their businesses.
Padula Media's success comes from taking a client-first approach, acting as an internal CMO, and offering the best and highest ROI-driven services for each client. The company has established a growth pattern through data-driven decisions, including hiring the right people and placing them in the right seats, which has been critical to its success.
In 2018, Thomas began following the model of meeting transparent, determined, and selfless people, regardless of whether they could be a client. By expanding his network and building impactful relationships, Thomas has created networking groups, cultivated strong professional relationships, and driven his own personal network to be more successful.
We'll talk to Thomas and hear his story and discuss tips, resources, and other valuable insights he can share on how you can grow your business.
We discuss:
02:07 How was it like when you started your business?
04:02 What were some things you implemented in your business that were helpful when you decided you needed to hire more people to grow?
05:40 What specific advice did the "money people" you hired provide?
08:51 How is having a deeper understanding of your numbers and gaining financial control different from when you were smaller vs. today? How has it evolved?
10:31 What do you mean by good revenue and bad revenue?
13:10 What works best for you to track employee time spent on the project?
13:52 How has implementing ClickUp helped your business grow?
17:52 How did implementing systems and processes evolve for you?
19:39 When did you realize that you needed a Director of Operations?
21:26 How do you maintain a consistent culture even if the company and its team members have grown and evolved?
23:04 Who helps you with your corporate culture? Do you have a fractional HR person working with you?
24:29 What has worked well for your organization(meetings or events) to bring that cohesiveness of the team together?
25:56 Has the work-from-home phenomenon positively or negatively impacted your team and culture?
28:19 What do you think has made the most significant impact on your business so far?
30:07 What tip would you give other business owners that would positively impact their business?
31:50 Where did you find your mentors?
Resources:
Thomas Padula, President and CEO, Padula Media Digital Marketing:
https://padulamedia.com/
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasjpadula
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/padulamedia/
Kathy Svetina, Fractional CFO:
https://www.newcastlefinance.us/
Blog post | How I Grew: Thomas Padula, President and CEO of Padula Media
https://www.newcastlefinance.us/post/how-i-grew-thomas-padula-president-and-ceo-of-padula-media
Kathy (host):
Hello, there, and welcome back to another episode of Help My Business is Growing Podcast. A podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that it's healthy and sustainable. I'm your host, Kathy Svetina.
Kathy (host):
Today's episode is the second installment of our mini-series, "How They Did It", featuring CEOs, leaders, and founders who have successfully grown their businesses.
Kathy (host):
Our guest today is going to be Thomas Padula. He is the President and CEO of Padula Media Digital Marketing Agency. He has been recognized as one of Chester's County's 40 under-40 Millennial superstars and his agency, Padula Media, is one of the best advertising agencies in Pennsylvania.
Kathy (host):
A quick reminder, all of the episodes on this podcast, including this one, come with timestamps for topics that we discussed, and each one has its own blog post. You can find the links and all the detailed topics in this episode's show notes.
Kathy (host):
Padula Media success comes from taking a client-first approach, acting as Internal CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, and offering the best and highest ROI-driven services for each client. In 2018, Thomas began following the model of meeting transparent, determined, and selfless people regardless of whether they could be a client. By expanding his network and building impactful relationships, Thomas has created networking groups, cultivate strong professional relationships, and drive his own personal network to be more successful. We'll talk to Thomas and hear his story and discuss tips, resources, and other valuable insights he can share on how you can grow your business.
Kathy (host):
Join us.
Thomas (guest):
Thomas, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.
Kathy (host):
I'm so glad you're here because we're going to talk about how did you end up growing your business and your journey, and I'm always interested to see other business owners, how they've actually done it. So you've grown into a successful marketing agency in a pretty short time, and my question for you is, how were the beginnings like for you when you started? Did you hope that the business is going to grow as much as it did, or did it just happen organically and things just evolved that way?
Thomas (guest):
I think it's different like when I started. Any business, when it starts, if you don't have like outside funding and you're self-funding, you usually don't have a ton of money, a ton of cash, and nor do you have the experience to know how to grow it.
Thomas (guest):
And we're different than let's say someone that sold a business then starting a new business. So this is me talking as someone who literally started from zero with $3,000 to kickstart the business. When I started, I was more of like a solo entrepreneur. I was doing all the work myself. I had no idea what scalability meant. I had no idea what the EMyth is. And my focus when I started was get the work, complete the work, get the check, I'm done.
Kathy (host):
Yep.
Thomas (guest):
And that was great for the first year and a half. And then I had so much work to where I was working 80 hours a week. Like it kind of physically more than 80 hours a week while I was still in high school.
Thomas (guest):
So for me I had no idea that what scalability was back then, but I was forced into it. And then I started to hire part-time people and contractors, subcontractors. When that lasted me another couple of years before, I said, This is way too stressful to just be myself and a bunch of subcontractors because they're not a part of the business." They're not stakeholders in the business.
Kathy (host):
Yep.
Thomas (guest):
But employees are. I decided, I guess it's two years ago now, that I really need to scale the business and build a life for myself that's not a hundred percent of my attention all the time to where other people can help sustain the business. So that's where we are today and that's how it got started. It was like forcing myself into it because you can't, I didn't want to get it too far ahead of myself, and I also didn't want to go in too prepared and be too late. So it's a combination of both that led us to where we are today.
Kathy (host):
And when you made that decision that you need full-time people and now you are really scaling, what were some of the things that you implemented in the business that were really helpful for you at that particular point?
Thomas (guest):
Yeah, that's a very good question. Marketing is probably the best thing because I'm not saying that just because I'm a marketer. Scaling revenue is very difficult. Everything in the business is difficult. Finding people, getting revenue, et cetera, et cetera. But in a business like ours where you need a lot of clients to have a tremendous amount like to have good revenue, you need to have that revenue and that pipeline like moving all the time.
Thomas (guest):
So starting the SEO then and redoing our website then. It took a year alone just to get that like really full in motion. So we started getting lead flow. Hiring a bookkeeper was critical. Making sure, obviously, we have a great accountant, and a financial advisor personally, was key. And they're all risks and they're all bets, but there those were three great hires. It's just people that are basically money people that can help you control the expenses and give you guidance. A coach then was very good for me in helping me understand what was needed in the business and of laying the groundwork.
Thomas (guest):
Because getting the business to a million in revenue is definitely the hardest first thing to do. But once you get to a million in revenue, you really know what to do after that point in time. It's just making sure that you utilize the correct resources to scale it from there.
Kathy (host):
Yeah, I agree. And you talked about having money people was really important for you, and that helped you. How did hiring those people actually help you? Like specifically, is just they able to advise you on how to grow the business? What your cost structure is? How did that look like for you?
Thomas (guest):
I'll start with a coach because a coach teaches you the strategies. So the coach can keep you on track and keep you accountable and working more on the business than in the business. And there's gotta be a good balance there because you can't work too much on the business, you can't work too much in the business. But a coach will teach you the right balance and they'll help you identify who those money people are.
Thomas (guest):
So there really needs to be a total load of four people. You need to have a bookkeeper, you need to have an accountant. You should have a personal advisor, simply just for retirement, if nothing more, but they can help you with the company retirement accounts and so much more. And then the last one is like that CFO hat. That can be a part of the coach, that can be a part of the bookkeeper, that can be a part of the accountant.
Thomas (guest):
I do suggest people keep an accountant and a bookkeeper separate and not the same person because you want to have one checking the other.
Kathy (host):
Yep.
Thomas (guest):
But in my opinion, it's you gotta interview, you gotta check out multiple. We had one, we switched to another and it's very hard. I think a mentor or mentors are very important at the start because if I didn't have mentors at the start, I wouldn't have known where to go and the right questions to ask because you don't know what you don't know.
Thomas (guest):
And for people at really at any stage in business, because you have to identify if you're a solo entrepreneur. If you are an entrepreneur that's going to scale your business quickly, you have to identify where you're at because if you don't know, you can make some really bad hiring decisions because it's a lot more expensive to hire people in growth mode. And you might hire someone today and six months, they're going to be more expensive, and you have to make sure that you've made that same hire or that hire today for six to 12 months from now.
Kathy (host):
Yeah. That's very much true. And I love that you pointed out that having a bookkeeper and accountant, having two separate people within, I can actually check each other.
Thomas (guest):
Yep.
Kathy (host):
Having that check and balances, and the internal controller, as we call it in the finance world, is so important, and this is something that smaller businesses really forget about. They just completely offload the entire finance function, and accounting function to this just one person and that person just runs the book and can do really damaging stuff to it, especially if you don't know what they're doing.
Thomas (guest):
Yeah. And it's important too, as an owner in any business, I know businesses that are five to 10 million and consulting, like if you're a construction, and that's 60% of your cost. Like I'm talking like revenue that is business revenue and your cost of goods sold or just subcontractors or it's important to have a very close eye on the numbers because every cent that goes out or every cent you spend.
Thomas (guest):
The common thing is like a dollar today is 10 or $20, 50 years from now on investments, but it's the same with the business. If you spend a dollar today on, I'll just say marketing because that's where I know. If you spent a dollar today on SEO, that could be 20 to $50 in your business in 50 years from now or $10 in 10 years from now. And it's the same thing. So you gotta make sure that you're spending money in the right areas because you can easily waste money in a business in the wrong area.
Kathy (host):
Yeah, exactly. And how is this financial control, knowing the numbers when you were smaller and now when you're a lot bigger, how has that evolved for you? Are you looking at it from a different angle now that you did before? Are you looking at reports differently? Are you looking more in the future? Are you doing more forecasting now that you did before? How has that evolved for you?
Thomas (guest):
Yeah, so I'm like in the middle of what you described. So in the beginning, I used to be doing all the bookkeeping. Like when I first started, it was all done like in an Excel doc, and now it's in QuickBooks and I can easily go view reports and such.
Thomas (guest):
But when I first got started, it was very like Excel document, expenses, and receipts. I was like the bookkeeper. But as I got the bookkeeper now I get monthly reporting. I get my monthly meeting. It becomes more advanced.
Kathy (host):
Yeah.
Thomas (guest):
And then you can look at the revenue and understand, "Okay, here's my revenue, here's my subcontractor cost, here's my expenses, here are my employee expenses." And now I can determine, "Okay, what do I want per month in profit?" And now I need to go back to my revenue and make sure I'm getting good revenue and not bad revenue, because I think one of the reasons a lot of businesses fail anymore is bad revenue and like we have bad revenue all the time and we have great revenue all the time, so you just need more good revenue than bad revenue. But having that good revenue is, you can figure out what that good revenue is by the research of the reports in the accounting.
Kathy (host):
And you bring an excellent point of distinguishing what is good and what is bad revenue. And I know exactly what you're probably getting into that not every sale is a good sale, but let's unpack this. What do you mean by good revenue and bad revenue?
Thomas (guest):
So I treat books as like a mathematical formula because I know what my net profit needs to be. I know what my subcontractor expense should be. I know what my employee time should be.
Thomas (guest):
So let's say I have a project for a thousand dollars or let, yeah, let's say a thousand dollars for either of use. I know my subcontractor expense needs to be X percent of that and then I know need to know how many hours of a certain employee's time is going to that. And then knowing what that employee's cost, because it's easy to go sell a $10,000 project that's going to go take four months, and the employee's time is say $60 an hour after everything. And then you end up losing money or breaking even just on the expense because you didn't calculate in how much the employee's time is there.
Thomas (guest):
And I typically just do the expense of the project, but you can also think about the opportunity cost. So if you were doing work at $60 an hour, but you need to be doing 150. And I think people get hurt a lot with fixed rate. I think businesses get hurt a lot with fixed rate projects and you have to anymore because it's really hard for a business to hire someone at an hourly rate and not know what the estimate or expense is, and every person has a different amount of detail-orientedness. But really understanding out of a project, where's the money going? How much profit are you making on the project? And some people can do projects a lot more profitable than others, too.
Thomas (guest):
So if you go out and, I was getting quotes for a move yesterday. One company was a fortune because they were coming from an hour away and the other company was a lot more realistic because they were 15 minutes away. Same pricing, right? Their costs were probably the exact same, but one just makes more sense than the other. That's an easier example. But what happens if in Philadelphia, they're paying these people $25, $35 an hour to do the work? And in Kenneth Square, they have to pay people $15 an hour to do the work?
Thomas (guest):
Okay, now one's obviously going to be more expensive than the other, so it really comes down to the expenses and what you do. And if you have, if you control your expenses, you can provide better costs and then make a better profit.
Kathy (host):
Yeah, that makes sense. And also, I know that a lot of service-based businesses that I also talk to, especially the ones that have the cost of good sold, is very heavily based on people. They have to somehow get a good understanding of where their employees are spending their time, not from a perspective of we're keeping tabs on them, but from a perspective of understanding where the capacity is, do we need to hire more people, and how much is actually costing us to provide those type of services? What have you found that works best for you in terms of keeping track of that employee time spent on the project? Do you have a special software that you use? How does that work for you?
Thomas (guest):
So it was a month or so ago, just putting it in an Excel doc and then tracking it. We're now making it a little more advanced to where we use ClickUp is our software that we run everything off of. Our HCM, our financials, like everything's in there. So we're going to have people track their time in each individual product and each individual task, and then that will feed into QuickBooks, and then every single project is going to have a cost relating to that person's time, and then it'll all sync together.
Kathy (host):
And the last time we talked before we started recording this, we had a conversation. You said the ClickUp was really instrumental for you business. And ClickUp for those that you don't know. It's a project management tool. It's relatively new and they have grown significantly, and I am a huge fan of it as well myself, because I use it.
Thomas (guest):
It's slow. It is slow.
Kathy (host):
Yes. And it does have a little bit of issues with automation. Sometimes it's a little bit buggy, but because it's such an open slate, you can do so many things with it. So how has implementing ClickUp, project management tool helped your business grow?
Thomas (guest):
Yeah, so we treat ClickUp as like our hub. And you can customize it a lot too, and you can build out everything you want.
Thomas (guest):
Now, I think if you're looking at like a task manager like Asana or monday.com like they're, everything's the same, but some you can't customize that much and you can't build them out. Like it's like Teams and Teams is very actually similar to ClickUp except Teams is like more chat oriented. It's just as good because like you can build it out and you can I don't want to say custom codable, like you can code it and design it to be what you want it to be.
Thomas (guest):
And with Click Up, we have our projects in. All of our processes are in there. So we take our processes that are written out in a Word document, which no one ever follows, and then you put them in ClickUp, and now people are required to follow them because you need to check them those boxes off as we move a project down the pipeline.
Thomas (guest):
So we have our CRM in there, client relationship manager. All of our contacts are in there. All of our deals are in there. We have our HCM software in there, so our human capital management. So if someone wants a PTO day, they fill out a form, we get a notification to approve it or deny it, and they get notified. If we need to send an invoice for the client. It goes in a ClickUp. Here's the terms, here's the price, et cetera, et cetera. Is it recurring? Boom goes straight to accounting. Accounting creates the invoice. They now have a task, check it off.
Thomas (guest):
So like we automated our entire business through ClickUp because oftentimes, like it's hard to scale a business when you're on teams. You're on text, you're on hangouts, you're on Slack. I don't understand how people use Slack. I get that you're talking about different projects and stuff. We have over 300 clients a year, so we need to have a super efficient way to move things through the pipeline, to move things to from start to complete it. And then as you drag a website from the pre-development to design phase, a new set of tasks pop up.
Kathy (host):
Yeah.
Thomas (guest):
And as you move it down the pipeline, you have your different tasks, and then when a video project's done, then it gets an email that goes to the social media person and then they need have a task to post it.
Thomas (guest):
So it's just the automation of everything and making sure that everything's interconnected because it's just I see so many businesses that are run off of just the platforms aren't great and we've built out ClickUp to be exactly what we want it to be.
Kathy (host):
Yeah. And that's the beauty of ClickUp is that you can build it based on what you need and not be pushed into this particular workflow that everyone else might not work for you.
Thomas (guest):
Exactly.
Kathy (host):
This is really interesting and I want to stay with the systems and processes because it's someone who does finances I can see this over and over again in businesses that, businesses that don't have systems and processes in place really hurt when they're starting to grow because as you're starting to get more people on board, you have to onboard them. You have to explain how you're doing things, and it's very hard to do that if you don't have a set of systems and processes that you can implement them in.
Thomas (guest):
Yep.
Kathy (host):
And how has that, it's an evolution, right? It's not, you go from zero to a hundred in a matter of a day or two when you start to implement this. How has that worked for you? How was that evolution of implementing the systems and processes for you? Where did you start and how did you end up to where you are right now? Which is, I would say, pretty advanced at this point.
Thomas (guest):
Yeah, it's, it's trial and error, so what works for us today probably won't work for us in a year. We just redid our systems over the summer, so it took us about three months to get everything done, and we're planning to be done actually by the end of the year. We did a complete refresh and we got we knew when we needed a refresh like things are flying back and forth, there's no tracking metric, and we got lost and we're like, "Oh my gosh, this platform, this system isn't working for us." so we needed to build out more and we need to change it.
Thomas (guest):
We've been on Asana, we've been on teams, we've been on Slack like we've done all that and we failed at that and identifying why we failed at that and identifying that looking at every single, we've been on HubSpot, looking at every single system, writing out the pros and the cons and committing to it.
Thomas (guest):
If you look at any business, they don't spend time on this. They either hire a consultant to do it for them who doesn't understand their business, or they have someone in house that has no idea how to do it. Steve, on our team, this is what he does, and we got lucky that we have someone that builds it out and that's what they do, and who fully understands the capabilities of the platform and the capabilities of the system.
Thomas (guest):
But it was trial and error. It was trying many different things out. But you have to commit to it because when people buy a business, they look at your systems, they look at your processes, they look at your client base, and usually people get businesses at discount because their systems and processes aren't good because they don't do it.
Thomas (guest):
So we really focus on having a system and process that we could even go sell to another marketing agency. That's not what we're probably going to do, but we could if we wanted to, and that's what's making us win.
Kathy (host):
And the person, Steve, that you have on the team, is he a director of operations? Is he's an IT person? What's his role?
Thomas (guest):
Director of operations. Yep.
Kathy (host):
Okay. And the role he has right now, how fast did you onboard him when you started? Was this like in a year two that, that you've realized you needed director of operations or was it at the beginning, I know you started as a solopreneur, but when was the point when you realized it?
Thomas (guest):
It's your first hire. Your first hire should be a director of operations, in my opinion. It depends on every business. Every business is different, but in my opinion, a director of operations is one of the first people that you really need in a business.
Thomas (guest):
Now, in my business, they go together because director of operations also does client work. Wherein construction, you need a director of operations who literally just figures out the operations of a business and then you have a VP of construction or a director of construction. But in the marketing world, marketing is very similar to a law firm or a large accounting firm to where the people, everyone does the trade and it's just where you are level-wise in that trade. In my opinion.
Kathy (host):
Yeah, every business is different. You're right. It really depends on where you are. But it's always good to hear like what other businesses are doing that you can take the best practices and implement it in your business if that's something that's relevant to your business.
Thomas (guest):
A hundred percent.
Kathy (host):
And as you've grown, you have also grown your employees, and you've talked about how you made that move from actually having contractors or having full-time employees. And every time you have started onboard people, there's a culture change as well because you're adding more people to it. There's more and more minds. How has that process been for you and how have you reigned that in so that the culture still stays the same or has it evolved?
Thomas (guest):
My big thing is I think different generations aren't the best at managing or working together. I think Gen Zs and millennials don't really get along. I think baby boomers and millennials don't get very along very well, and I think it's something I see every day in my clients. They're always complaining about, they're always complaining about their employees. They're always complaining about their superiors. It's very frustrating for us to see that it's like where's the gap?
Thomas (guest):
And I think I'm not going to talk about by any means, any generation, their strengths or weaknesses, but I think they don't respect each other's strength and weaknesses and they can't identify how to fix it or set better expectations with each other across the board.
Thomas (guest):
And it's hard because I think some generations look at things in a very black-and-white way, and that's not how things are anymore. I think marketing, even just talking, in my world, marketing isn't sales, and I think some generations think that marketing is sales and the first time I sit down with anyone anymore, I'm like, we're not salespeople, we're marketers.
Thomas (guest):
And if you want to sit down and tell me when you're competing with 500 other people in a mile square radius that you want to try for to pay us X amount of money and try to get you business. No, we're marketers. We're not salespeople. Apple doesn't hire a marketing company to sell them, sell X amount of new iPhones. They have a presence and they want to build it and they're going to have trial and error in so many different markets.
Kathy (host):
Yeah. And going back to this culture thing, as you are developing the business, as you're growing it, do you have someone that helps you with the culture? Do you have a fractional HR person in the business that it helps you with the people problems? How does that look like for you?
Thomas (guest):
So we built it internally. We do events, we do volunteering, team games, team days, dinners, stuff like that. But a culture is built based off the people you hire. You can't hire people then try to build a culture, in my opinion. You can't just decide what your culture's going to be, your culture just happens, and it's very important to us. Our mission is very important to us. Our core values are very important to us, and we will limit our growth if it means not hiring someone who can take a we just had an opportunity to hire someone really good, but they did not match our mission. They did not match our core values. They probably could have increased our revenue by a good percent. But it's not who we are because a bad person in the culture can really mix things up and not for the best.
Kathy (host):
Yeah, you're right. And having someone who can be toxic to the company really affects everything else.
Thomas (guest):
Yeah. It's not that they're a bad person, it's just that not, we're big on traction here. So right person in the right seat is very important to us. And even if we have the right person and don't have the right seat right now, we usually still hire them.
Kathy (host):
And have you found anything that works really well within your organization when it comes to people? Is it like certain types of meetings you have, certain types of events you have, what is it something that's really worked well for you to bring that cohesiveness of the team together?
Thomas (guest):
I think it's just being with each other. I don't think the team meetings are a necessity, but they're not what make our culture. I think being in an office, I'm so against, I think hybrid work is fine. I'm incredibly against remote work. I think it kills workplace productivity. And I think it kills company culture. And I think that staying away from a complete remote company is one of the best decisions we've made so far. And I know a lot of companies with 500 to a thousand employees that say the exact same thing. So I know that's the right thing to do. It's not worth saving X amount of money to not have an office and just do remote, no offense to anyone, but that's my opinion.
Thomas (guest):
So I think that's been really good for our culture, but just getting along and having the same values is just so important. Grabbing lunches one-on-ones, just having time when you're in the office between meetings at lunch, we spend time together. It's not like we are each going out to lunch with our own sphere, which would be great, but it's like we're here together and I think, actually enjoy genuinely spending time with each other. And it's fun. We have fun here, and we have the same sense of humors. It's all, we each respect each other too, and that helps out.
Kathy (host):
And how has that been since you mentioned with the work from home and work remotely isn't really particularly good for your company. How has this whole pandemic been for you and for your company? Have you seen that as you were working from home, that the team members were working from home, has there been a certain type of impact that it made on the team that was not as desirable as you wanted it to?
Thomas (guest):
Yeah. Yeah. because you lose the culture. You completely lose the culture. I don't think it's just our company. I think it's every company. I think working from home is fine as I'm not talking about like people who work for themselves or they have one and one other person want themselves like another person. I'm more so talking more about companies that like have an actual like team or culture and they need to collaborate.
Thomas (guest):
If you need to collaborate with someone or people will say it all day long. You can't do it over Zoom. And if you get to a certain point and you're like at a certain size and you need to have people everywhere. I think that's one thing. I'm just saying one day a week, a day and a half a week, it's not a lot. Just having people together is just so important.
Thomas (guest):
Like one of the gentlemen on our team, it is probably only here half a day or a full day per week because he is out on the road all the time. But we still have that one day in person per week and we also have like huddles every Wednesday and Friday at 8:00 AM to get we motivated, move him for the day.
Thomas (guest):
My opinion is just very important to be present, in person, and live and kind of work and be in the same community. But that's not to say if I think remote work is, there's definitely a place for it. If someone's out in California and you're in New Jersey, yeah. And obviously that has to be remote, but if people are local and everyone lives within an hour, I think you gotta do a day. And that's any business.
Kathy (host):
It definitely has a different feel when you are actually meeting in person. It doesn't have to be every day. But it does have a different feel to the team, to the way how you work, the way how you interact with each other versus being constantly remote. And I see that with the businesses that I work with. And I also seen that from, before when I was in the corporate world, it just brings a different type of, I guess team cohesiveness to it. Not to say that there's ways to do it if you work for remotely as well. So one question that I have for you is, and I'm really curious, what do you think has made the biggest impact in your business so far? Is there a certain thing that you implemented? What has made like that you could say, "Man, we've implemented this and the business just skyrocketed because of this."
Thomas (guest):
Yeah, so the reason you hire a director of ops is because they're usually going to be there for a while and they're going to help really the operations of the business. So the reason you need to do that is because you can't hire three people and then hire their superior, especially when you're a small business. So would say that's one of the bad decisions I've made is not hiring that position sooner. And sometimes you can't, but I've had hires that are. Hiring someone's boss is one of the most difficult things in the world to do when they're the only people there, and tthat hurt for a while, a long time.
Thomas (guest):
And then your question was the most impactful. I think it's just a blended so much it's networking. It's a combination of like our biggest success as a business has really been doing our start transit optimization and being very relevant on our social media and video presence has been very good and strong, but that stuff has just supported the networking and being local in this like Westchester area. We have the company car that drives around literally every day, all day.
Thomas (guest):
Having that with the online brand and reputation, also networking, like we say around here a lot, Thank you, young Thomas because years ago, all I did every night, every week would be network and I built up this massive network of people. And now if I ever want to identify a lead, I usually have the person to get to that lead. So I would say networking is probably the biggest, impactful thing that I've done. And then the digital efforts and the branding have supported that. .
Kathy (host):
Now, that makes sense. And you know there's other growing businesses that they're listening to this. Do you have a one tip that you would give them that would really impact their business in a most like profound way? Would that be networking? Would that be systems processing? What? What would be your one tip?
Thomas (guest):
It really depends on where they're at in a business. If someone's just getting started out, I would say go find a mentor that's like a little further along than you are. My mentoring coach from day one changed two years in and then changed again another two years in. So I like latch onto the person who's doing significantly better than me. That kind of pulls me up, but then I'm like in that range and it's okay, I need another person to pull me up.
Thomas (guest):
But I think it's the same with what you do. On day one, it makes no sense for you to build out a system and process in year two. It makes no sense to build out a system and process. Now, if you're a lawyer and you leave a law firm and you're starting your own practice and you're a year in, you've got plenty of clients and you have time on the weekends during the winter, now's a good time to build out a system and process. Or if you don't have kids and you have free time every night of the week and you need business, go network.
Thomas (guest):
Like I think the formula is the same for everyone, but the timing is different for everyone. So I think it really depends on like where you're at, but I, if you need more business, go out and network every night of the week. If you have the business and you can't scale it or you're not retaining clients, you need to fix the systems and processes. If your clients aren't paying, and you don't have a bookkeeper, go find a bookkeeper.
Thomas (guest):
I just think that the biggest problem, and the reason I say mentors is I don't think people are self-aware enough to figure out what they need for their business, or they think they have it all figured out and they're not willing to change and learn. And I've seen that a lot as well.
Kathy (host):
How were you able to find your mentors? Did you find them through the networking because you did a lot of networking or were they recommended to you from your network? How did you find those mentors?
Thomas (guest):
A little bit of both actually. Yeah, pretty much. 50/50. I would say most of them came from networking, but also like recently it's awards, so I've won a few awards recently and then I usually meet them through those groups in some form or another, and still be proactive. Like it depends on who you are and life mentors are important.
Thomas (guest):
Business coaches are important, and you need to identify what you want in your life and what you want in your business, and then find people that are going to replicate it. If you have someone who's more focused on giving back, then you want to follow them. If you have someone who's more focused on building a lifestyle business, you want to follow them. It really depends on what the person wants, and you have to make sure that they share the same values you do because that's most important because you can't have a mentor because a while ago, I was going down a path that I actually didn't end up liking about six to eight months later. And when you invest in your time into that and you're doing the wrong thing, you can be like, "Oh my gosh, put the brakes on. What am I doing here?"
Thomas (guest):
Identifying that at the start is important, and also identifying what you want is important because if you want to build your business, you might not want to build it forever, or you might want to slow down at a certain point, or you might want to just keep going forever. But you need to make sure that your direction or the person providing that direction is aligned.
Kathy (host):
Yeah, that's very good advice. If you are planning to sell the business within five years, you're going to be a completely different traction, completely different path than if you are wanting to go and scale it and grow it to multi-million dollar business. It's a completely different way of doing it and having those advisors that have been there and they know how to do that. It's really important.
Thomas (guest):
Hundred percent.
Kathy (host):
Yep. So, Thomas, I am really grateful that you decided to be on the show, and thank you so much for being here.
Thomas (guest):
Of course. Thanks for having me.
Kathy (host):
Thanks so much for joining us and I hope that today's episode has inspired you and provided with some ideas that you can implement on your own growth journey. Also, if you love this episode, you can find all the timestamps, show notes, blog posts, links, and more on the website, newcastlefinance.us/podcast.
Kathy (host):
And before I go, I do have a favor to ask. If you are listening to this on Apple podcast, if you could please go to the show and tap the number of stars that you think the show deserves because this helps the algorithm and it helps other people find it as well, and of course benefit from it. Thanks so much. Until next time.
