How to Predictably Deliver a Great Experience to Your Customers by Mapping out the entire Process involved! – with Brandon Bauer

OWEN: My guest today is Brandon Bauer, and he’s the co-founder of the National Factoring Group. Brandon, welcome to the show.BRANDON: Hey, how are you doing?OWEN: So let’s jump right in. What exactly does your company do and what big pain or problem do you solve for your customers?

BRANDON: Okay. What our company does is it allows businesses that are on the B2B sector looking for commercial loans to be able to actually review their finance options and pretty much go beyond the brochure. They can see the customer service ratings, the collateral positions, everything that essentially isn’t really told to you by the sales person, so that they can make the best decision based on their specific needs.

OWEN: Okay. And I think my own understanding of it, please correct me, is basically if you have invoices coming in but you need cash today is like you can borrow against the invoices coming in, right.

BRANDON: Yes, exactly. What it is, is it’s working capital for companies that don’t qualify for traditional working capital. You liquidate the assets right away rather than waiting 30, 60 days for your customers to pay.

OWEN: Awesome. And so how many full-time employees do you have?

BRANDON: Right now we’re down to just two of us as full-time. We’ve actually by design moved everything to where we’re completely outsourcing. We have programmers, social media, SEO, everything is sent off somewhere else now.

OWEN: Awesome. And also during the interview we were talking about why you decided to go that route of having employees, having subcontractors. We were talking about that during the interview. And now, what was last year’s annual revenue and what do you probably expect for this year?

BRANDON: Last year we underwrote right at about probably 19-20 million dollars in loans. Throughout the year our revenue was north of a quarter of a million.

OWEN: Awesome.

BRANDON: So we had really good revenues. And this year we’re actually on projection to quadruple in size.

OWEN: Awesome. And so this interview is really focused on how an entrepreneur like yourself can literally create a business that runs without you successfully and it’s all about learning from your own journey of how you were able to systematize your specific business. Before you to this point where the business runs without, let’s go back. What will you say was the lowest point in the business and describe how bad it got.

BRANDON: Well, for us the low time was when one of our lenders defaulted. And one day defaulted with their lender, they wound up having to sell off a large chunk of the loans. At this point in time we’d actually gone out and we’re going to go the traditional route and we’d hired a bunch of salespeople. And actually had to uphold pretty much half of my money out of retirement just to keep the staff going and everything while we’re running through it. Over time we had employees that didn’t work out for various reasons. And we really wanted to figure out the way that we could help the majority of the businesses and not sacrifice the service levels they were getting. Whenever we were dealing with one employee over another we could get completely different results, because that way we look for ways to automate everything. So now we’re to point where our sales is now web-based. When it comes to referral sources they’re now predominantly using on our mobile platform which is actually about to become the first app in our industry. And then once it becomes a prospect, everything gets automated through our CRM.

OWEN: Awesome.

BRANDON: So, every customer always gets the same results and didn’t we take the feedback from them and we just improve constantly.

OWEN: Can you give me like an example of a specific situation back then where something’s just happening, like something just has to change.

BRANDON: Yeah. We had a lady that was working for us and she was very, very focused on getting prospects and not actually getting them the help they needed. She felt that the larger volume she could do, the larger her commissions were going to be.

OWEN: Oh, like a sales–

BRANDON: Sales agent, yeah. We brought her on, I’d known her for years and she was a very, very nice lady and she was great on an operations side but she wanted to transition over sales and marketing. The customers wound up falling through the cracks. And I wound up spending 80% of my time just following up on her customers, trying to keep them moving forward. And there were a lot issues that came up that directly harmed the customers. And one case, or one specific case, a customer went with the funder that they thought that we had referred them to. And we actually don’t associate ourselves with this funder because they do some very shady practices. In our industry what they do is they file a lien against the company the second they fill-out an application and then bait and switch them. It wound up taking me a month and a half of going back and forth with the funder to get them out of that situation.

OWEN: Yeah.

BRANDON: And we then ever want to have our business associated with that level of service. So we basically said we’re sorry we’ve got to let you go. And she was all about volume, volume, volume and not actually looking after the customer’s needs.

OWEN: Yeah. I’m glad– I like that story because I know during the pre-interview you mentioned how one of the lowest point was really making sure that you wanted to outline your client experience. So that regardless of whoever is working on them, the clients coming in, they have a specified specific expectations and delivery of service on you guy’s end as well. So, I’m glad you highlighted this story. And so, let’s talk about some of the things that you did to solve the problems at the lowest point. Go ahead, do you remember what you said?

BRANDON: The first thing I did was I hoped on the phone with as many customers as I could. And I took their feedback and I had them actually all fill-out surveys. The return rate wasn’t as high as we would’ve liked. But it completely changed our entire focus. We went from being an organization that was going to be about having regional sales people, to an organization, and that was about making sure the structure was in place and the steps were there so that the ball never go dropped. And at that point in time we realized having human salespeople is great. But having an automated system set-up to deal with every situation for the customer worked out better. So for us, the way that it works is the customer comes in, they get notified immediately, they get 100% of the information they need about whatever selection they made. They are then talking to that funder, they’re getting follow-ups from us, we’re then doing quality follow-ups 90 days after their customer to make sure that one is actually treating them they way they’re supposed to. When I was dealing with human sales element, what was happening was they were so worried and so focused on giving that next commission check that there was no real follow-up from them on their portfolio and their customers. And that for us the way that we operate is we operate with an extremely small margin. So we have to combat attrition. And the only way we’re going to combat attrition is making sure that every customer coming through us is having the absolute best relationship with their specific lender. So, at the end of the day, it was a forced issue.

OWEN: Yeah. And one of the things that I liked during the pre-interview you mentioned that one of the first thing that you did was a storyboard, what needed to happen in order to ensure that every customer had a wonderful experience. Can you share that story. It’s one of the dullest story and stuff like that.

BRANDON: Yeah. It was going into spring break and I had a kindergartener that was going to make it very difficult for daddy to work, since we work out of our house. So, we went to go and buy her some finger-paints at the dollar store. And while I was buying those they were right next to poster boards, 2 for a dollar. And I just had this idea that we could map everything out and come up with the systems, and we had to spider web everything to make sure that nothing was getting left undone. So I pretty much bought them out of all the poster boards, came home, started off with pencil, realized the pencil was too thin, wind up redoing everything in sharpie markers. And I basically built a map on our living room floor of every single situation, how everything was going to interact. And that wound up leading me into even marketing ideas on how this blog was going to work with this, and how this was going to automate here. And we developed a– you can’t develop for every single situation but we think we’ve gotten 95%-96% of the situations that are going to come up already covered and ready to handle everytime they come in.

OWEN: And I’m glad you highlighted that story because I want to get it clear to the listener that sometimes in order to– you hear about great experiences and all that from different companies and their customers and you think it’s just happenstance. But literally you have to sit down and design how the systems would start. And it started out by you brainstorming on how each part of your business should interact with one another in order to get the customer experience and have it always be uniform. And so after storyboarding like you mentioned, the next thing you did was to start implementing the systems. Talk about that.

BRANDON: Well, the next thing for us was basically finding a CRM that was going to work for us.

OWEN: Why?

BRANDON: For us, it’s all about automation. When we’re at full capacity we’re going to be working with such a large volume that we have to have stuff that’s going to automatically talk to it, talk to each other, and have every single program covered. Being that I’d left big corporate I was accustomed to dealing with the most expensive CRM out there that had every single bell and whistle. Now that it was my budget it was time to– much like the locations of where I went out for lunch on their expense account versus my dollar changed. So did the practicality of looking at everything. So we try to figure out how to cost save as much as possible so that as we got information we did improve the site rather than wasting money by spending an extra $50 in this program and actually this, this. And now, everything’s web-based. Our phone lines are web-based, our CRM automatically talks to our website. It has triggers that are set-up. We set-up these different rules. When a customer comes in this happens, when this gets responded it moves from a lead to a prospect. That triggers this, at the end of 90 days a customer service review goes out, all that comes in, it gets sent to us. Our CRM also covers online chatting for us.

OWEN: You know what, I want to hold you there because we’re going to get to that point when we talk about how the systems that works.  But I want to really go back to where you were thinking at the point where you have decided, you’ve storyboarded everything, how things should work. But I’m trying to give the listener kind of like a logical step to the next story where now it’s about figuring out what tools to use to actually make that storyboard that you created come to life. So I’m trying to figure out how you determine which tools to use, how you plug them together, stuff like that.

BRANDON: For me it was trial and error. The first tool that I selected was not functionality, it didn’t have what I needed. But I thought because at end of the day it’s what I use when I was a big corporate. It obviously has to be the right system. I worked for a company that was doing, in just the finance arm they’re doing over 20 billion a year.

OWEN: Wow.

BRANDON: So, I’m sitting here and I’m thinking, these guys have done all the research, they’ve got all the answers to everything else. And it was actually a friend of mine on Facebook that said, “Hey, have you checked this out?” That introduced me to the winner.

OWEN: Feel free to share the names. We want to tell the listeners as many resources as possible, that’s what we’re trying to do.

BRANDON: For me I found Zoho was the resource that worked best for us. We had not just the CRM applications but it had, as I said, the online chat. It’s got the ability when I’m working with our subcontractors to have wiki setup so that everybody knows where everything is at every stage. It has everything basically we need all the way down to an email marketing platform. So we’re able to do all that stuff. And then on top of that it even translates through our accounting software. So we’re able to track everything, forecast everything, project everything. And the way it came about was first I was looking for the functionality of being able to just purely track and setup some automation and follow-ups. Then they actually came out with a survey program. And that changed from me doing my very, very novice survey which was essentially a Word program document that I had as a please check box to now a much more integrated software program that works out well. So, as they come out with these schools– one of the biggest things for us is then you get the new tool, the tool’s neat, and you want to figure out how to implement it. Whether it’s your Smartphone, your tablet, your this, your that, everybody now tells you, “Oh, you need to focus on social media. You need to do this, you need to do that.” And you can get so tied up in all those little things, it’s just a matter of trial and error. When you screw up all of a sudden you figure out, hey, there’s actually solution for this. And that’s how we’ve gone through it.

OWEN: Can you give an example, maybe just to make that more concrete in mind for the listener?

BRANDON: Yeah, I was approached by, when we first got started every social media company on earth was saying, “Oh, if you give us X amount of dollars we’ll bring in X amount of customers for you everyday just by simply tweeting, following up with this, following up with that.” The thing was Press LinkedIn is an excellent format, Twitter is not. Twitter is phenomenal for B2C customers. When you’re selling your business services to a consumer, when you’re doing business to business. It’s really hard to trend about interest rates or doing this because [Unintelligible 00:14:31], or 90-day [Unintelligible 00:14:33] at this. You don’t get that sex appeal that you do with Kim Kardashian’s wearing my shoes.

OWEN: Yeah.

BRANDON: So that wasn’t a good platform but I got everybody telling me, “Oh, you got to focus on Facebook, you got to focus on this, you got to do this.” I’ve had people say, “Why aren’t you Pinterest?” And it’s because I don’t sell knick knacks. So for us it’s always one of those things where there’s the industry of cool and you want to capture that marketplace, but you just through trial and error learn where your customer is. And it’s the same thing with dealing with any automation. You go out and at the end of the day most of them have 30-day trials, or this or that, so you’re not looking at the expenditure or the cost perspective but you are looking at the expenditure of time.

OWEN: Definitely.

BRANDON: So you have to be willing to cut the cord and not be worried, “Oh wait, what if I’m missing that two-tenths of a segment of the marketplace.”

OWEN: Definitely, yeah. I like how you shared how for you it’s more about not necessarily knowing about the two completely on the onset but just being willing to, first of all, be open to try it, and trial and error and see if it is the right fit. If it’s not the right fit you’re still in the trial period, you go out and find the next thing. And that’s how you figure out all the best tools to currently use. And so now that we’re talking about the tools. Let’s jump right in and talk about the specific systems that you have enabled in the business, and that allows you to run it without you having to be there. And I think during the pre-interview you mentioned how that, first of all, it depends on the process in which the customer comes in. Let’s talk about that.

BRANDON: Yeah, exactly. For us we have customers that come in through traditional web or are referred to us. We have used sales people that basically work on a commission only. That just hasn’t been a model that’s worked for us. So when we get something that’s referred to us by the banker for example. The banker generally is sending us something that they know that we can help them with. Or government agency, that’s BDC, is one that we do a lot of business with as well. They want to follow and they want to be able to track and know where that customer is, in the banker’s arena. They’re wanting us to incubate the deal so that it can become a customer. For our perspective we want to help incubate the deal, we want them to move on and we want them tell every friend of theirs we are the ones that did it. SBA or the SBDC actually turns in the reports to the government and that deals directly with how they’re funded.

OWEN: Yeah.

BRANDON: So, on every transaction for looking at different styles of reporting, the stuff that comes in organically or comes directly to us, we don’t have to report to anybody. But the stuff that’s referred to us by this group or that group, they’ve got a vested interest in knowing how that customer’s evolving.

OWEN: Okay.

BRANDON: So, once again, that was the next thing, that was an evolution for us was when we– and once again, it’s just trial and error, and [Unintelligible 00:17:42]. And we found out our CRM would once again talk to our accounting software. That gave us a very easy way to assign account numbers to referral sources, track everything going on with them, and not just letting the actual, let’s use the example of the banks–

OWEN: Let me make it even easier for you by asking this question. So, imagine your business being like a conveyor belt. But on one end of the conveyor belt you have a customer that either could be referred to you by, like you mentioned, one of these organizations the SBDC. Or they would have been coming from like a marketing campaign via the internet, right? So either of those one have that person coming in. But behind the scenes are a bunch of different parts of your business interacting together, and also tools and people to make that person transform from a lead to a customer. And then now on this other end of the conveyor belt they’re excited, they’re raving about you guys and they’ve gotten funded. But I want to dive in based on those two different scenarios, either they’ve been referred by one of this organization, or they’ve come in from your own personal marketing campaign. What is happening behind the scenes to transform them?

BRANDON: Behind the scenes what we’re doing is we’re working on their behalf with the lender is essentially what we’re doing. We’re gathering the data, we’re making sure that the lender’s living up to the responsibilities that they’re following up timely. And then on the flip side we’re also looking out for the lender and we’re making sure that the customer’s actually doing what they’re supposed to do as well. So for us the moving parts are really more about making sure that the communication doesn’t collapse. And making sure that the– in the event that there’s been a structural change, which does happen with the lenders from time to time, that that information is then getting translated to the customer right away because it could directly affect their entire business. And example would be if they went from just having the receivables to all assets. If this company is needing their equipment freed up so that they can loan or borrow against it, trade it out, get new equipment. That could detrimental to them. So for us it’s about constantly following up and constantly keeping up with what’s trending or what’s going on.

OWEN: You mentioned earlier that now you no longer have employees but you have dedicated contractors in each part. And this what I was trying to see if we can get some insight as to now–

BRANDON: Okay.

OWEN: Yeah. What tools are you using for the different aspects of the conveyor belt? And also what specific contractors are handling each part. Do you understand what I’m saying?

BRANDON: Yeah, okay. With us, I’m a finance guy, I’m not a computer guy, so I had to first find a web developer. Then I had to find somebody that actually understood social media. I guess it’s not me. For us it’s predominantly marketing efforts that we outsource. I’ve got one group that specializes in pay-per-click for us, I’ve got one group that specializes in social media and SEO group. And then I’ve got a developer and a programmer. We even outsource to another group test marketing. So they are constantly going out, they’re doing little tests and letting us know the customer feels this is inadequate, so that we can constantly get everything upgraded. And that’s where kind of the wiki’s fallen to part is when the test market came back to us and told us they didn’t like the fact that we were identifying our funders as group A, B, C, and D. We had to turn around and get that over to the programmer and reshape our message going out to marketing. So everything is constantly us outsourcing these little projects, these other guys, and then following up and making sure that they’re hitting the timely manner they’re supposed to. And that’s always been very difficult for us. One of the biggest problems is they give you a date and then you can pretty much guarantee to add 2 weeks and then 10 issues. It’s made me actually go out and buy books on programming which it’s kind of like my grandmother reading [Unintelligible 00:21:55] instructions, it just doesn’t translate well. So that’s for us we where the conveyor belt is as far as outsourcing projects is making sure everything synchronizes and it’s done right. The app as I said is coming soon. I’ve been waiting for the programmers to finish that for 45 days. And that’s really what’s holding that up at this point.

OWEN: And then internally when it has nothing to do with the outsource team that you have, what is the workflow looking like between the team members. And also, what is the tools you’re using internally at that point too.

BRANDON: I get up every morning, I check all my emails, I correspond all those as quick and possible. My wife turns around and starts working on following up with the next day stuff. And it’s all about trying to be 3 days ahead. That’s basically what our workflow is. We get the customers in– let’s say a customer comes in on Monday, we’re already automating and saying setting everything up for what’s going to happen, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and the next week, and the next week. And making sure everything did actually wind up correctly. So that’s one scope of work for us. The other is following up and making sure that the customers have been taken care of properly. Everybody does from time to time, they go on vacation, they get sick, and something might slip through the cracks. So our thing is making sure these automated tasks have gone out to these people, and making sure that they’ve been followed up. So we’re constantly checking our reports making sure essentially if everything’s green light, the way that our system works it’s green, yellow, or red. Yellow means it’s just barely past due, red means get on the phone with them immediately.

OWEN: And what’s highlighting those green, yellow, or red in the system. What tool are you using for that?

BRANDON: On that it’s just, once again, going to our CRM, it’s just a [Unintelligible 00:24:00]. We’ve got everybody setup on task manager, and a calendar. And if it goes beyond this date then it lets us know they didn’t do what they’re supposed to. We’ve had new correspondents, we’ve had nothing, and everything once again synchronizes.

OWEN: Okay. And so what I get from that, and let me see if I can summarize this well. So the nature of the business is people are coming to you to help them find the best lenders for factoring, right. And so, first of all, on one hand is figuring out this is the right fit for you guys in the first place. So there’s a series of ways that you guys go through to qualify and make sure that they’re a right fit. And when you determine that they’re the right fit, the next thing is to figure out, okay, of all the portfolio lenders that you guys work with that can actually offer the financing, which is the right fit for them to be connected with. Once you determine which is the right fit for them to be connected with. Now, it’s where you figure out, okay, because if you’re working with these lenders you know what the lenders require and what is their workflow for each specific lender. And now you guys working with this, your client, to guide them through the requirements for that lender and the workflow of that very lender. So at the end of the day they end up getting the loan. Am I correct in summarizing what’s happening?

BRANDON: You’re about 90% correct. With us, the difference is we don’t actually tell them which lender to go with. We provide them all the information that they need to make the decision. The business reason behind that was a human being you can go in there and you’re going to show some favoritism.

OWEN: Yeah.

BRANDON: With us, what we wanted to do was we wanted to make sure that every customer was actually seeing all their options. Our site was built out of frustration. When I was a sales guy I would get brokers saying, okay, well I’ve got this deal. It’s absolutely perfect for you, but I want a preferred rate, or you’re not seeing the deal, or this guy’s going to pay me more, or we don’t even know this option, or sometimes you just outright overlook it. With our system, they put in their information, they set-up what they want actually to see. They get those results and they can compare. No one’s going to look out for your business better than you are. Me having a 10-minute conversation with somebody or having them fill-out a form that takes 5 minutes isn’t going give me the insight of their business.

OWEN: Yeah.

BRANDON: That they have down perfect, giving them the information so that they can make the best decision for their business, and then setting it up in a competitive manner. And that’s really the next advantage for us is to the lender, it’s absolutely blind. They don’t know if they’re competing against nobody or if they’re competing against three funders. So they’re always putting that best forward. So ours is purely compelling in getting the information, and then making sure that they didn’t sneak in any junk fees. And that’s really what our day-to-day operation is making sure the lender didn’t change anything, making sure the lender didn’t say, misrepresent themselves. And as I said, 96% of the cases they don’t, but sometimes there’s special exemptions that makes sense, sometimes it’s just greed.

OWEN: Go ahead, finish your statement, go ahead.

BRANDON: Oh, I was going to say, for us it’s about being the advocate. And then that’s it.

OWEN: So I get it now. So it’s like instead of being the one connecting them and saying this is what we feel is the right fit. You give them all the information that they need for each of the lenders and then the customer now chooses who they want to go with. And they choose who they go with, then it’s where you now guide them through the steps to work with [Unintelligible 00:27:53]. But I’m curious, what happens when you show the customer all the lenders that are available for them to go with and yet they’re not making the decision to move forward. That might stop the flow to the next stage, I’m curious how do you handle that.

BRANDON: That actually, we get reports and we capture the information, and we send them a one-time email saying we noticed you didn’t select anybody, can you please tell us your scenario? Because it might be that they just put in some wrong criteria. 9 times out of 10 it’s not wrong criteria’s, wrong term but our search actually allows them to break it down to companies that specialize in their field, companies that are geographically close to them, or companies that are large companies with a national presence. If you’re in a very, very obscure field, and you are in, let’s say [Unintelligible 00:28:49] Wyoming, there’s a good likelihood that there’s not a lender that specializes in that. And if you’ve only searched in that criteria, you’re not going to necessarily be happy with the results. Now if you turn around and focus on a specialist, you’re going to get bombarded with results. So, our big follow-up with the customer then is getting them to fill-out that little 5-minute form so that we can send them the information. And typically it’s sending them articles, blogs, things, for them to look at, things for them to educate themselves on. There is a misconception and there’s a lot of people that– honestly they believe they buy the brochure. Everybody’s out there, their job is to get you to sign-up with them. And none of them are doing it because they’re bad people, it’s just that’s how you get compensated, that’s how business works. So, this little company thinks that that’s the only way that it works, they’re going to go with that. Our job is to open up their eyes and let them know what the options really are.

OWEN: Yeah, if we get that. And so, I’m curious, what challenges did you experience when you initially try to create systems for the business. How did you solve them?

BRANDON: Honestly, we’re the first ones to ever do it this way. So, for us it’s been uphill battle and everything, from getting to finance companies to understand what we’re trying to do. And getting them comfortable with the idea of actually disposing everything upfront, to getting the customer to understand that there’s a different way of doing it rather than just calling this guy. And having them go, “Oh, well you should go with this guy because I’ve got a relationship with him.” So for us our biggest uphill battle is we’re re-informing people on how there’s a different way to do it. So it’s getting the information out there. That’s our biggest challenge day in and day out is getting the information out there. And then the next is getting the customer educated on what the best fit for him is. If I’m talking to somebody in my industry and I throw out acronyms, they know exactly what I’m talking about.

OWEN: Yeah.

BRANDON: I’m talking to an oil guy, he might use the same exact acronyms but they mean something completely different. So it’s about education, education, education.

OWEN: I get that, education-based marketing. Especially, if you’re trying to innovate in an industry where they’re used to this whole style of doing things. And now you’re probably hit with the challenge of saying, “Oh, I don’t want to disclose everything upfront.” This is from the financial people. I’m just curious, so is this just only educating and trying to get people to think in that same like mindset in terms of the financial side?

BRANDON: On the financial side the other thing is the competitive advantage. If a company goes out there and advertises extremely low rates they’re trying to get the customer to come in for extremely low rates. The rates typically wind up being about the same as the other guys that don’t advertise and rate but they’ve got hidden junk fees. So, getting somebody to sit there and that’s done all their marketing on the we’re the cheapest, we’re the cheapest, we’re the cheapest to actually disclose every hidden junk fee that they’re going to hit the customer with after they sign the contract. It’s not an easy pill to get [Unintelligible 00:32:22]. The follow-up, no you actually have to be honest but I don’t feel this is out of the norm of business. Well, then you shouldn’t have a problem disclosing it to your customer. And so, dealing with that on the finance side is tough. Now, turning around and getting a customer to understand that because they say, our rates are as low as–

OWEN: Yeah.

BRANDON: That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to qualify for it also. You can be a $10,000 a month company, or doing $120,000 a year, and they’re advertising based on the rates that they gave the company that’s doing $24 million a year to get you to come in the door. So, getting everybody to understand on both sides, that’s always the challenge.

OWEN: I totally understand. And also during the pre-interview you mentioned how one of the biggest challenge was also getting your own staff members or contractors to follow the protocol.

BRANDON: That’s actually why we went to subcontractors is we had a much– with the employees, we couldn’t get them to ever follow the protocol.

OWEN: How come?

BRANDON: At the end of the day my employees were sales-based, small salary with a commission structure and they were looking at the next commission, they weren’t looking at the effects of what was going on. As far as they were concerned that deal was locked in and that was done, so now I want to go out and do this. And the service was just getting dropped.

OWEN: Let me even highlight that. So what you’re saying by that is that those people were based like sales professionals on commission that were focusing on getting the next sale, but not necessarily on the customer’s success after the sale is closed.

BRANDON: Exactly. The deal is done, they’re now locked in, they’re going to get X amount percent. So as far they’re concerned that deal is finished and they’re going to move on to the next one. As far as our whole entire organization and what we’re about know we want to make sure that the customer is being treated right from day 1 until hopefully every customer– I wish I could say every customer left us and went on to a traditional bank line, and this and that. The reality is some business owners make bad decisions. Our goal is to limit those and make sure that they move on and do the right thing. Plus, it was a very narrow-sided view from the sales person because they get an ongoing commission for as long as that company’s a customer and the larger that customer does and the more successful they do, the better the sales person did. But they’re so driven on finding the next deal that when you follow-up with them and say, “Well, how’s everything going on with so and so? We sent you a report last month, it looks like their sales dropped 30%. Have you contacted them to see how you can be of assistance for this and that.” The answer constantly was no. The answer was “No but I sent you 10 new leads today.” Well, leads are great. It’s the old thing about we’re burning a hand or two in the bush, this is actually a customer let’s take care of the other customer.” But that’s where we had to automate things, was when you’re dealing with us the goal is eventually to be helping out 30, 40, 50 companies a day, find that right fit for them. And we were talking about that you’re talking about a lot of follow-ups. And if you don’t have the systems in place that are going to work to that volume, you’re going to drop the ball, and your customers are going to suffer, your business is going to suffer. In our case, your lenders are going to suffer. Everybody across the board is going to suffer and you’re going to put out an inferior product. And if you’re putting out an inferior product what’s the point?

OWEN: And I’m curious. I understand the issue when you described having employees as sales agents and need some commission [Unintelligible 00:36:24]. And now you said that one of the thing that helped was first of all, isn’t an automated system to kind of craft out the, what’s the word for this now, the pipeline of how things should go. But then on top of that you said making use of contract sales people. And I’m kind of curious as to why that work instead of–

BRANDON: With contract salespeople, typically the guys that come to us are people that are traditional factoring brokers, and they come across the deal that they don’t have a place to place it. And that’s, once again, one of the flaws with the system, which is why we created the way that we did was a lot of these guys have their stable [Unintelligible 00:37:08]. And that’s who they work with and that’s who they’ve got a great relationship with. And as soon as there’s something that doesn’t fit one of those tables they’ll call somebody else they know and they’ll essentially outsource the customer. So we do run across those from time to time. They’re typically more vested because they don’t have a salary to fall back on that one account is their salary. So they typically do the follow-ups more. The catch always from our perspective is we’re basically everytime we’re handing them a new blending relationship, which is fine as long as it looks out for the best interest of the customer. But if you only have a limited table then the doctor is only seeing the results of what you know. So that’s where more of our contract sales people come in is they’ll call and this guy might know trucking factoring and trucking financing backwards and forwards. And now he gets a call on a, let’s say a subcontractor and he doesn’t know who to send it to.

OWEN: Yeah.

BRANDON: Those are the guys that give us a call because when I was a sales person with one of the biggest factoring companies in the world, they would send me the deals and I would pay them a commission. So now, well, yes you can utilize our resource and they go on and they look at the information. And then they tag it, they say this particular one is our customer that we’re sending through you. And then we pay them essentially a finder’s fee.

OWEN: And they’re also responsible for working it through all the steps in the pipeline that you designed.

BRANDON: Exactly, from beginning to end. Our system automates and follows up with them, they’re in-charge of the day-to-day communication.

OWEN: Awesome.

BRANDON: So they’re getting hit both ways, they’re getting hit email, and everything else, from our side and they’re getting the one-on-one contact from the broker.

OWEN: And also now let’s see if we can dive into some more details about the systems and stuff. So what systems do you set-up to enable your contract sales people as well as you and your wife to know exactly what to do?

BRANDON: This is actually going to be– it’s so simple.

OWEN: Simple is great.

BRANDON: Yeah, simple is great. Basically, the way it works is a company goes on to our website. We’ve got our CRM attached to all the contact forms. So when they put in their information it’s automatically generating everything in the CRM. We’ve got rules so as soon as they check the boxes that once again, each funder is connected with the salesperson, the documentation and everything. The rules sit up to where as soon as it goes through, an email is generate, sent out saying, “This is the paperwork requirement you’re going to need. This is who’s going to be contacting you, this is the follow-up, and the task is set-up 24 hours later.” If we find out they haven’t been contacted, then at that point in time we set-up the next rule. And the next rule is we’re sending a follow-up and if we don’t get a response every other day there’s essentially the deal going out. And it goes out for, I should guess it’s 6 days, and at the end of 6 days we don’t want to be harassing. So if you’re not responsive then we’ll let you know that we’re moving on but we’re still available in the future, but we don’t want to harass anybody. The same rules apply to our lenders. If we don’t get an update from our lenders as to where they’re at, a task automatically follows up and automatically sends out to the lenders saying, “Hey, you haven’t let us know what’s going on with this account.” Because lender might turn around and give us some very valuable insight that helps us with that one customer run across things or the customer will say that their– In this industry, when they go into our website and it turns out that they’re actually in a different industry they thought they’re a manufacturer but in reality is they’re a distributor because they don’t actually do any of the manufacturing.

OWEN: Yeah.

BRANDON: They have it all third party manufactured in China. So they’ve gone with a complete wrong funder. Well, that insight from the funder then allows me to reach out to them and correct the situation, once again, making sure that they’re connecting with the right people.

OWEN: Awesome.

BRANDON: So, it’s simple.

OWEN: I like that. And also you mentioned that you make use of a wiki as well. What goes into that and–

BRANDON: Our wiki is going to our special projects. So in November we decided that we were redoing our website based on all the feedback that we’ve gotten both from the lenders and from the customers. When we send out our surveys it tells us this, this, and that. With the program being redone we wanted to make sure that our marketing efforts were going to mirror and give us as much exposure as possible on it. So we set-up a wiki that allowed the programmer to let us know constant updates as to what was going on that was going to let our social media person know exactly where the product was, if there are any delays. It was going to allow the SEO team to know– when we’re doing this we paused, or not the SEO team but the pay-per-click group to pause so that they [Unintelligible 00:42:33] when to get those campaigns active and when to look at new pages and everything and start promoting those for the SEO guys to say, “Okay, we need to focus on this, this, and that.” So what we do is we set-up the scope of work, we let everybody know essentially the programmers doing this, when this is done, here’s your project, here’s your project, here’s your project. When your project’s back done, send it back, so we’re just going to one place and we’re following up with each and every member of the party so that we’re not playing this constant– okay, well, you’re on a sales call or you’re on a call so I missed you, or you were doing this, you’re doing that. We can go to one place every day and know exactly where everything is in every single stage.

OWEN: So you set-up the wiki just so that it’s like a bucket where all the communications is happening inside of there. And based on the timeline of what the specific task is the person handling the task when they are done with this, they can now hand it off to the next person who is in the next timeline. But you guys are all tracking it all with the wiki. I’m curious, what’s the name of the tool that you’re using for that?

BRANDON: Once again, Zoho has a little wiki.

OWEN: Oh okay, so they have that too.

BRANDON: They have it also. I looked at several of them but that was the one that I just kind of played around with. And once again, it’s to keep everything simple. If I can go to one place–

OWEN: I totally understand. And so, how do you track and verify the results being delivered by your employees?

BRANDON: Conversion rates. At the end of the day it’s just that simple. I’m a numbers guy, it’s all about conversion. If I got you focusing on this industry, I want to see X amount of leads coming out of that industry. Especially with subcontractors they all give you promises. Typically what I do is I take that promise, I cut it in half, double the time. And if they can’t fulfill that then we’re on to the next contractor.

OWEN: Okay.

BRANDON: My first experience with an SEO contractor was that we were going to have the top 10 phrases in our industry. We were going to be within the top 4 within 30 days on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and everything else. At the end of 5 months, according to the reports that they sent us we’ve made it all the way up to page 26 on Google. And even with that guarantee that’ll let us out of the contract they still wanted to know why we were leaving. With it what we found was they were really good at handling local businesses, and that’s what their accounts were, they didn’t really have the scope or the information to do national campaigns. So, the next thing we went and we outsourced to a company that was going to focus on local campaigns all over the country. And the guy guaranteed me that we were going to bring in 400 accounts a month. I told him that if he was absolutely phenomenal, let’s cut that down to 40 accounts, but realistically I was looking at 20. He brought in 2 accounts. So what I’ve learned is I tell every single subcontractor I’ve ever worked with, I say, “Don’t sell me the moon, sell me reality. And I’m going to cut it in half, I’m going to double your time but I’m not going sign a contract.” I’ve made that mistake–

OWEN: Yeah, deliver results and we can go this and that. And one of the questions I should’ve asked earlier that I didn’t ask before was given that creating systems, you’ve mentioned all the challenges that are involved with creating systems especially in your type of industry. What keeps you going knowing fully well that yeah, you’re trying to build a system around every different aspects of the business, and also the challenges. But what keeps you moving on with this goal, this decision?

BRANDON: This is going to sound really, really cheesy.

OWEN: Cheesy all the way, go ahead.

BRANDON: It was actually our very first account when I left big corporate. I got a phone call from the owner of the business who is a small company just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He had roughly 18 employees. This was around March 2010. Most of his employees have been with him for more than 10 years and he wasn’t going to be able to make payroll. He wasn’t going to be able to cover any of his bills. He had been turned down by 10 different finance companies. And it wasn’t that he was a bad account he was just talking to the wrong people over, and over, and over again. We were able to get him financing the Thursday before he was going to have lay everybody off because he wasn’t going to be able to pay them anymore. And he actually teared out and lulled up a little bit on the tone and I actually kind of lulled up a little bit afterwards. So the reason I do it, like anybody I’m motivated by making money to take care of my family, and the idea that I can help these other business out. Our very first slogan was we’re going to rebuild the economy one business at a time. And that’s what we try to do. Every account that comes on we want the account to grow. For us personally we make more money the bigger the account gets. For them they make more money. It’s a win-win for everybody and we want every account to have just what they need to succeed. At the end of the day everytime I get that phone call that somebody’s getting groceries, or birthday presents, Christmas presents, or this or that, that otherwise would have been unemployed. And it’s not easy to find a job these days. The idea of feeding your family gets you up in the morning, the idea of helping somebody else is what keeps you going at it so until 2 in the morning.

OWEN: Yeah. And now that your company has been transformed as a result of you systematizing your business– I didn’t ask that question the way I planned it but how would you say your company has been transformed as a result of you systematizing your business, that’s what I meant to say.

BRANDON: Okay, here’s the easy answer. When my daughter was 3 years old she went to preschool. And they said, “Tell us what your mommy likes doing?” And it was “Mommy likes playing with me and mommy likes doing this and mommy likes doing that.” Then the question was what is daddy like doing? And it was “Daddy likes conference calls and emails.” Now I’ve actually got the time to– I think I’ve been to 80% of the field trips as a volunteer parent this year and I’m part of the Dad’s Club. And I’ve even started teaching her how to play beach volleyball, which is something that I’ve always enjoyed doing. Riding bikes and for the first time in 5 years we’re taking a vacation as to where I can honestly say that I’m not just going to an office with a different view. But I’m actually going to get to do stuff with the family.

OWEN: That’s awesome.

BRANDON: So systemization has been the big game changer.

OWEN: And since now you have so much free time and able to even go on vacation and stuff like that, which areas of the business do you know focus on and why?

BRANDON: Our focus in on marketing, our focus is on getting our message out there. With the new app coming out my focus is going to be about getting lenders to [Unintelligible 00:50:15] lenders I’ve used as a generalized term in this interview. Traditional lenders, when they’re turning down an account, that’s really where we see the real growth of our business, is they understand their customer. They’ve been dealing with their checking account, they’ve been dealing with them. They’re an expert also when it comes to finance. So our big push is with this application. Getting bankers to understand that one day say no I can’t loan any money. They can hop right on their tablet, they can actually go over the options and say, this is a bad deal because of the collateral position. This is a great deal because of the paperwork requirements. Now they’ve got the systems in place to actually help the customers. Now I can actually go out and focus on making sure the customers know that there is a place where they can get help.

OWEN: And I can definitely understand why you’re focused on marketing because you’re trying to invade this space that’s been traditionally used to doing stuff in a certain way. And you have the challenges that you mentioned earlier where the challenge on one hand to educate even against the brokers as well as the lenders as well to do the new process. I definitely see why your focus now is really to ramp up the market and get all the different parties that are involved to know that, “Hey, there’s a different way of doing things.” I see that. So what will you say is the very next step for someone who has been listening to this interview all the way to this point to take in order to get started with creating a business that can run successfully without them having to always be involved?

BRANDON: Take a trip to the dollar store, buy as much poster board as you can. Don’t forget to get paints and stuff to keep the kids occupied so this is going to take a lot of your time. But just think about your business, think about everything, and think about how to make everything consistent, and game plan based on that. And don’t consist in the mediocre. Think about what’s going to make it the greatest, most consistent. And that’s it, at the end of the day that’s what’s going to separate you from your competition and that’s what’s going to lead to success. But if you’re going to make a system, make one that works. Think about every scenario– treat it like a book report, spider web it out and say this is what I need. And then find the right person that’s going to be able to provide that for you.

OWEN: Awesome. And so I’m curious, I always ask every guest this question. So I’m curious, what books have actually influenced this way of thinking?

BRANDON: I’m a huge Jack Welch fan.

OWEN: Oh yeah.

BRANDON: The GE Way, Straight from the Gut, those are some of my go-to books. My favorite line is Jack Welch said, “Take your back office and make it somebody else’s front office and hold them to the highest standards.”

OWEN: And that’s kind of what we tried to do. Is we’ve tried to be that back office and we’ve tried to do that to our back office.

OWEN: Awesome. And so what’s the best way for the listener to connect with you and thank you for doing the interview.

BRANDON: Not a problem. The best way, you can visit us at nationalfactoringgroup.com and go under Contact. We do monitor that. Or you could email me directly brandon@nationalfactoringgroup.com.

OWEN: And final question for you, is there a question that you wished I asked you during the interview that I maybe have somehow slipped my mind. If so, post the question and also the answer.

BRANDON: I think you’re very, very thorough. I think I would say–

OWEN: And it doesn’t have to be about systematizing the business, just whatever you feel free–

BRANDON: I was going to say one of the big things that we’re getting pushed a lot on is systemizing, essentially using stuff like HootSuite and systemizing more of the marketing side. We’ve always focused on systemizing the operations side. But there’s a lot of push right now to systemizing uniform the marketing message. I’m sure you go into that with other people but with us, our pre-interview is more operationally.

OWEN: Yeah.

BRANDON: But I’ve got stuff on that as well. [Unintelligible 00:54:38].

OWEN: Yeah. And you the listener right now, you’re interested in something like that, I did an interview with Justin Brooke on how to systematize content marketing. And most people, they always talk about content marketing but they focus on the content creation and content post into your website. But he really broke down the system as to how after the content has been created, how you now promote the content at scale. And then turn those content promotion into eyeballs coming to your website at scale. And also turn those eyeballs to your website into leads that sign-up for whatever free course, or whatever that you’re giving to them. And also when they’re now inside of your system as leads how to nurture them into sales. So if you listen to this rare interview right now and you’re interested in something like that check out the interview we did with Justin Brooke. And at this point now I’m speaking to you the listener. If you’ve enjoyed this interview all the way to this point I want you to go ahead and leave us a review on iTunes and to do that go to SweetProcess.com/iTunes. And hopefully you can leave us a 5-star review. The reason why is because when you leave us a review you expose this podcast to other entrepreneurs like you. And the more eyeballs and listeners that we have checking out our interview because they say you review, well, the more inspired we are to go out there and get people like Brandon come in here and breakdown how their business works so that you can learn actionable tips as well. If you found this interview useful, share with other entrepreneurs as well. And final thing I’m going to mention. If you’re at that point in your business where you’re tired of being the bottleneck and you’re trying to literally get everything out of your head so that your employees know step-by-step what you know and how to get stuff done without you, well sign-up for a free 14-day trial of SweetProcess. Brandon, thanks for doing the interview.

BRANDON: Hey, thank you buddy.

OWEN: And we’re done.

BRANDON: Alright.