How Jeet Banerjee Systematized His Marketing Agency Business so that it Runs on Autopilot and Generates over $275K Annually

Owen: Hi, everyone. My name is Owen McGab Enaohwo and welcome to Process Breakdown Podcast where I’d bring on successful entrepreneurs so that you can learn from them how exactly they were able to create businesses that have systems in place so that they can basically run their businesses on auto-pilot with them without having to always be involved in the business. I’m sure you want to learn how to do exactly the same thing on your business and my guest today is Jeet Banerjee and he’s the founder and CEO of Vintelli which is a marketing agency that provides affordable SEO services for small business. Welcome to the show.Jeet: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be on here.Owen: Yes, before we get started, let the listeners know a little bit more about your company in what do you do. So what does your company do and what is the big pain or problem you are currently solving for your customers?

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. So basically, what our company does is we’re a media agency that does search engine optimization for small businesses. The way that we do it is very different from the traditional companies. So this idea came about when I was working with my previous company JB Media Force and we offer traditional SEO. I had a lot of small businesses, people our great guys that wanted SEO services but just couldn’t afford it.

Typically, it cost anywhere from $200 to a couple of thousand dollars a month and this was a lot to ask for startups small businesses, local businesses, things like so I decided that I really want to help these people but I just didn’t know how because I couldn’t help them and lose money, that would not be a smart business decision. So that’s when I stumbled upon Vintelli when I thought if I could eliminate 50% of the work in SEO by taking out their website and ranking a profiles similar to Yelp or something, like a Facebook profile that I’d be able to cut cost but I would be able to give them the service that they’re looking for.

So what Vintelli essentially does that it’s a cost effective solution for small businesses to get visibility on the search engines. So a business comes in, they create a profile on our site, all of our website and we take that pick on our website and we rank that on the search engines which should make it much easier to do.

Owen: That’s awesome and so how many employees you currently have in Vintelli at this point?

Jeet: So at this point, we have 7 attending employees that are on payroll and then we have a lot of freelancers and sales people and things like that, that work with us as well.

Owen: And just so the audience will understand the context or the level of business you’re currently doing in this very business, what was last year’s revenue and what you expect to generate this year?

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. So in 2012, our annual revenue was 275,000 and this year we’re projecting to hit around 350,000 but in terms of that revenue, to give you a breakdown, that comes from two legs before Vintelli was translated into a new SEO company, we used to do traditional SEO so a lot of contracts are kind of carried on to where it’s on today.

Owen: And one thing I like about the fact that I’m interviewing you now is that you had a previous traditional marketing agency company and now you have this new version which is Vintelli. Before now, you have last one which is called JB Media Force not too long ago and you sold it and if you like, share with us more details about the sale if possible and maybe what kind of revenue that was generating at that time?

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. So yeah, I run JB Media Force for 2 years and that company kind of definitely runs on auto-pilot and to give you a background about JB Media Force and kind of what I was able to do with it. We started that company as a high school senior. I grew that company to about 15 employees plus in 2 years. In terms of revenue, we were doing a low 6-figures when I sold the business so yeah.

Owen: And what are the personal bonds of the business? What did they like the most about the business because obviously there must have been something valuable for them to make a decision to buy it.

Jeet: Definitely. So the thing that they loved about it was that there was no cost marketing so basically we would be getting clients in every week. Basically, everything was on auto-pilot and it wasn’t something that was very expensive for them. So there is a system in place that work and it just needed someone to oversee and manage and then there was no expense in terms of marketing and overheads in that regard. It was just the expenses of building and paying employees and things like that. So it’s a very automated system that had been in place.

Owen: Okay so I’m glad that you’ve said that this is not the first time that you’re working on creating a business where you are automated and have systems in place. You’ve done it before in the last business with JB Media Force which is sold and now you are currently again doing it in this new business which is Vintelli.

Jeet: Yeah.

Owen: And so most dive in to this new business now. What would you say has been kind of the lowest points that you have in this new business and describe how bad it even got?

Jeet: Yeah definitely. I think the lowest point is when we’re actually trying to build the technology. We had a lot of trouble building out this technology because when you’re working on a project like this, it’s not even all about the developers and their coding, you’re really relying on search engines and Google and Yahoo and if they’re going to be willing to accept our system. So we had a lot of trouble actually making our system where it would work where Google and Yahoo would accept it.

After we got about 100 businesses that was a catastrophe because Google and Yahoo kind of saw this as a spam type of thing so they stopped indexing our pages on our website so we definitely need to work around technologies contacting these companies and working around those things. So let’s say that was probably the lowest point but we’re able to bounce back by just working hard and staying persistent.

Owen: You also mentioned in the pre-interview that one of the issues you had was managing time in regards to excessive work that you had to do for this new business. Can you go into more details on that as well?

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. So especially, when you’re building a new business, there’s so much that you have to do in place. It’s great to have an automated system but creating that automated system can often take a lot of time and it takes a lot of energy initially so that’s kind of the biggest thing that we struggled the way for this figuring out because we were trying to build a great product plus we’re trying to streamline something that can be automated and kind of run on its own. So putting those two things together definitely took up a lot of time and just being able to hire people, put people in place, training sales people, things like that took up a lot of my time.

Owen: And then I think one of the things that the listener wants to know now is how exactly did you solve the problems you just mentioned during the lowest point of the business if you can dive in that, that would be nice.

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. So I mean in terms of managing time and example training sales people, things like that, instead of training lead sales people individually, we decided to come up with kind of like a PowerPoint and kind of like an automated system in a presentation so we would hire people in bunches instead of hiring one at a time we could hire maybe 5 to 10 at a time, bring them all into one room, deliver one presentation to them which is automated and already created and have them kind of learn from there instead of me going out and spending 3 to 4 hours a week with a sales person. So that’s how we kind of solved our problem. In terms of automating, there wasn’t any easy solution for that. I would just definitely go into the process and just kind of staying strong and so we’re able to kind of figure out what we needed to do to get everything in place.

Owen: Okay, so maybe we should dive into that time process that you had a little bit for the sales people so that it can have maybe more context too with it. So you said that if so trying to hire them individually, what is behind that actual process itself?

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. So initially, what our idea was we would take individuals in one by one for an interview and we’d sit down and we hire one sales person and be very cautious and see how they perform but what I realized is that wasn’t working very well for us because sales people, they quit like anything and it was a waste of time.

So we then decided to do as when we were going to be in the hiring process, we decided to hire 5 to 10 of them at a time and our goal from this was to find one quality sales person that would make our whole effort worthwhile, so we would come in, we would bring in 5 to 10 sales people. We would hire these sales people and from there, basically we take out the best ones and then we held kind of like a presentation in front of them and we train them all together instead of training them one-by-one, human-to-human interaction. What we did was we created an automated presentation that showed them what they needed to do step by step and we have that play essentially in the presentations.

Owen: And we’re also going to dive into some of the backend systems that you have because I know you mentioned during the pre-interview that you actually have employees, like a documented procedures in place for each of the different employees and we’re going to dive into that as well later on. You also mentioned that one of the issues you had was not having the right customers. For this new business, had to focus on basically getting the right quality customer instead of quantity, maybe explain that as well how that play a role?

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. So I think in the beginning, what happen was this product was created for small businesses, local businesses and startup companies but when bigger businesses started finding out about our product, they all wanted to jump onboard. And initially, we thought “Yeah, that’s a great idea.

Let’s bring on these big businesses” but the thing that we didn’t realize was that with big business you need to give them a lot of customer support and the cost goes up.

So we made a big mistake of getting our services out to these big businesses because we didn’t know that the cost that would be going along with it. So we were focused on just getting quantity of customers, how many customers we can bring in. What we didn’t realize is kind of the luggage and the extra baggage that these guys brought on. So it was kind of the shift to realize our focus in small businesses and local businesses, those are the only people we want to sell to because those where were the most profitable.

Owen: Let’s go behind the scenes of your business and talk about this current business, Vintelli. The systems that you have in place that literally allows you to run your business on auto-pilot. So let’s jump in, take it from where you want to start and we’ll go piece-by-piece and look at your marketing agency and see the different systems that you have in place.

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. So I mean I would start first from the website, from the customer standpoint. So everything our website is automated. There’s not necessity for a customer to call us, talk to us while they signup anything. They come to the website, they create a profile, they signup, they pay, they get access to the profile or website and follow some steps, everything that they need to do so that our team can begin doing the SEO.

So they come in, they fill out the profile, once the profile is filled out, it shoots or trigger notifications in my development team in India and my development team in India is the one who’s in charge of being the SEO and marketing for like the optimization. So once they get that trigger of the e-mail they go into the customers profile, they check it out and then they start optimizing keywords and everything on their own.

So in this whole process there’s no real interaction for me or my partners with either the customer or the team and even going before that, our sales people even how the procedure were they go out to business. They go out there and they sell the product and they do whatever they need to do and they don’t even report to us as when they need an individual sale. It’s kind of reporting to us at the end of each month. “Here, there customers are brought in, here’s what they pay and here’s what I sold.”  So in that regard, everything is kind of automated and streamlined where it’s not happening on a day-to-day basis. It’s happening more every few week for every month where it makes it much more manageable for my team.

Owen: So based on what’s going on out right so far from you now is there is a sales department. So the sales people, they go out and literally going on sales and bring people into the system and then behind the scenes of the developers, what do they do?  They create software?  What do you mean by it?

Jeet: So [11:52] the team it does actually. They’re in charge of actually doing the SEO for each individual profile.

Owen: Okay.

Jeet: So the customer comes in, they sign up, they pay. My team in India is the one that actually starts optimizing the keywords, doing backlinks, article submissions, etc.

Owen: Okay. So basically, they’re boiled down to two teams, the implementation team in India as well as the sales force team that go there and going on sales. Those are the two main teams. Am I losing anything out in this?

Jeet: No, that’s correct. Yeah.

Owen: Okay. And in the pre-interview you said that everything that is done in your business, you basically broken them down to step-by-step procedures and everyone who comes in, they know what steps they have to take and what points have to be involved in. I’m just curious, how did you create this step-by-step system for your business?  I mean give us some more background as to what happened to the process for you creating that.

Jeet: Yeah sure. So what we did we kind of dissected all the different areas of the business. So for example, for our sales teams, we actually have two types of teams; the customer support team and the sales team. So for the customer support team, we created one set of manual and documentation. So if John for example decided to quit or was on vacation for two weeks and we need to replace him, I could bring in John number 2 who had just come in, read this manual after a few hours and know exactly what to do.

So this training process is instead of sitting down and manually training these people. We’ve created documentation and manual but they can study and once they study these manuals and these guides, they’re ready to take on the job and they’re ready to start. So that we’ve got one guy for customer support, we’ve got one guy for sales people. Kind of what pitches to make?  What sales mistakes to avoid?  All our information about the business and then the same thing goes for SEO team.

One of our SEO guy is fully in charge of just doing backlinking and other guy is in charge of just doing quality assurance. Making sure that all the profiles are ready or the customer has made any mistakes. So we have all these different systems and these different roles in the company and for each role, we have a manual and documentation that clearly outlines and defines how they need to perform the job and each time someone gets replaced, we just e-mail them over the document, they learn that document, they ask questions and instead of spending 3 to 4 hours with them we spend maybe 20 to 20 minutes with them. So it really shortens the learning curve.

Owen: And I’m curious too because people listen to this might be saying “Okay, is this the situation where the only reason you knew how to create systems for the different roles that you have in your business is because you are doing it yourself.”  Is that the case that is because you’re doing it yourself, that was like you’re able to create procedures?  Or if not, then explain how it happened?  You understand the question I’m asking?

Jeet: Yeah. Some other different courses that I did created, the menus that I did create was because I already knew the systems because I’ve done it before but there were certain things in SEO that I haven’t done before such as backlink or article submissions that I didn’t know. So what I did was I brought in qualified experts either that join them, my company has an employee or I got a third party sources—people that have like an SEO job in a corporate firm or something like that and I pay them out of pocket to create this manual telling them to share their best tips, how to do the right SEO, etcetera?  So you don’t necessarily have to have all these skills, you just have to be able to reach out and network with people that do have the skills that can maybe put together these guides for you.

Owen: Okay and in the case of the ones that you actually, with one who, based on your own experience, you were able to create procedures for how they get done, can you give an estimate of how long it took you to create?  I’m just curious if you have that data available.

Jeet: So I don’t have like a specific data or like specific time frame just because we created different things like the latest thing we’ve created was the sales people thing. So what happened is we didn’t go into this project with the mindset that we’re going to automate all these things. These things just kind of happen like it would become a pain. It explains it on every single time like, “Let’s automate this.”

Owen: So it becomes a bottleneck, that’s what you’re saying when it comes to bottleneck?

Jeet: Yeah, exactly. Starting the problem came up and we said “Can we automate this?” and we were able to, we did it. So it’s kind of like that.

Owen: Okay. And in the situation of when it was stopped where you mentioned that you have to go hire somebody. I’m assuming is when they came aboard on that, you just went out to hire somebody who had the skills?  Is that how that worked?

Jeet: Yes, so let’s say like for backlinking, we had a lot of people that would do backlinking, join for two months and then they would quit and it was an extremely day hassle. So we decided to go out and find someone who is a very good SEO expert, one of the top SEO guys in the game. We reached out to him. We
paid him a couple of thousand bucks. He wrote up this guide like it’s kind of employers manual for SEO with thing they didn’t know, etcetera, good practices and he basically gave this to every new guy that joined as the backlinking role in the company. So now, anytime someone quits and a new person comes in to fill the backlinking role, we have this guide that this person created that we send after them.

Owen: One thing that the listener might be wondering now is “Well, if it’s something that I know how to do myself, I understand how, okay, I can just dive in, roll my knees and I’ll just go ahead and start creating procedure for it.”  But in the case where I don’t know how to do it, first of all I need to hire somebody who knows how to do it, then how do I really judge that okay, there might this friction there like you’re going to hire somebody who knows how to do the task. How do you get them onboard to not comment and document it even though you have no idea how they are doing the task because it’s not something that you are skilled at. You understand what I’m saying?

Jeet: Yeah, so what I did was the actual employee that I hire for my company wasn’t the one that did the documentation. I actually found a complete separate 3rd party that did the documentation. I actually found a complete separate third party that did the documentation that I would give to my employees because that was also our concerns as well.

Owen: Nice.

Jeet: Yeah.

Owen: I’m glad I asked that question because I was just thinking myself that my listener might be wondering how do you do that and so I think now the next question is you’ve gone in a situation where you documented all the different procedures in your business and you’re creating systems on how stuff gets done and one of the things that you mentioned is that you’re doing it based on when it becomes the bottleneck, when it becomes something that it’s taking a little time, your time and someone else on your team. It’s not because of thing where, “Okay, let’s dive in and create a procedure so that it’s always predictable, we know.”  And how do you now track the results that being delivered because there’s one thing to document the procedures and all its increased systems in place for how stuff gets done. There’s an aptitute to track and verify the results are actually being delivered. What measures or system you have in place to do that?

Jeet: So in terms of results and stuff, what we have is kind of a manager that oversees that’s just focused on driving results out of the team for each of our section so we have a manager for the sales team and we have the manager for the SEO stuff and their job is exactly to act like a leader where they focus, they push the team to motivate them and drive them to kind of perform better and they’re all about measuring results, measuring the progress and tracking everything. So we’ve got one guy in place for each of those systems who just solely focuses on getting results out of the team members and telling me who’s performing and who’s not performing.

Owen: So let’s jump to that, going into that a little bit more because you say for each of those different parts of your business, you have one guy in place who’s taking ownership for tracking them so can we go into that a little more details so that the listener can see how you’re doing it and figure out how they can definitely get someone in place to do the same thing in their business as well.

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. So both of these roles basically got filled because these were the first people that kind of joined my business, they originally joined as one with the sales guy that the other guy was in charge of doing SEO. We’re kind of the people that are staying with the business for a long time.

They were loyal, I gained their trust and they were really performing well and that’s when I decided “I’m going to promote them. I’m going to give them the job to be a manager because I trust them. We built that relationship,” so I think for other people trying to do something similar. It’s very hard to jump in and just needing someone who’s going to be a manager but you need to find people where you can build a long term relationship with them, work with them on a smaller level, see how they’ll do for you and then kind of push them and give them a better role if you feel then that they’re fit. So that’s what I definitely recommend.

Owen: And are you tracking their results based on some kind of metrics, in terms of revenue or what’s the key way that you’re tracking the results of the employees?  You understand the question?

Jeet: Yeah, so what we have is a project management software called “Basecamp” and what we do with “Basecamp” is we have each of our employees belong there and submit reports at the end of each week which are then graded by my managers and then those graded reports are what comes to me and my founding team, my partners, so that’s what we have in place to kind of measure and track these guys.

Owen: Awesome and I think based on what I’ve heard you say so far, it’s kind of like 3 or maybe several different phases. It went from the situation where on the ground where people or actually the people in the team in India, they do most the actual work. You went from the level of actually documenting how they
do their work and having that delegated to them.

So now the next level which is the manager level where, “Okay, if you no longer do the actual work itself that you are having to manage them, that’s another role that you are having to take over but you also find a way to delegate the role of being a manager to someone else and now you are I’m assuming is you have more free time and I’m curious, with all these free time that you have, you as the owner of the business, what do you spend your time the most time now with all these free time?

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. So for me, I actually run on a few different startup companies. I’m also on the advising board for many different startups. I do a lot of consulting and things on the side so by automating my business, it gives me the opportunity to be able to dive into other things that I’m passionate about and even do multiple projects. So that’s kind of what I do with my free time.

Owen: Definitely. And so the very next step that someone who’s been listening so far can take in order to get started with kind of replicating what you’ve done in your business or you think of the single, very first thing that they should do to get started?

Jeet: I think the biggest thing to do is to figure out what is the biggest problem or what is the biggest manual hassle that you have right now and just automate that. I think a lot of people automates that, they try to automate everything and if you do that, it can be catastrophic but I think you should focus on the one biggest problem that’s bugging you the most. Solve that problem and automate that and then kind of take small steps and eventually, you’ll be able to automate your whole business but I don’t think you should kind of go out there and do it all at once. Just take small baby steps, solve one problem at a time and eventually you’ll have a completely automated business.

Owen: And these interviews, I always want to do like tools and resources that you are using that also can the listener can go and check out that can also help them maybe implement some of the ideas that were shared, what tools would you recommend that the listeners check out if you are trying to automate your business and basically the systems for their business?  I’m just curious which ones you maybe recommend of what to use right now.

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. I mean in terms of the tools and researches the biggest one that uses that project management software that I was talking about.

Owen: Basecamp?

Jeet: Yeah, you can use “Basecamp” and another new one that’s really good that we might shift over to soon. It’s called Asana, Asana.com. So these are two really good tracking softwares that really can automate a lot in your business. I know a lot of different companies and many industries that have found ways to implement this into their day-to-day activities so you can be creative and just find a way that put in your business. It can really automate things fast.

Owen: In regards to the actual management of the project of how the work gets done, in regards to you said, you mentioned that you documented all the steps for the work, what are you going to use?  Take behind the scenes of how you document into actual how work gets done.

Jeet: So the way that we’re documenting all our stuff is pretty basic. We use Microsoft Word and convert it into PDF and either has them as PDS have them as PowerPoint depending on who we’re doing it to. Sales people love PowerPoint and then our technical guys love PDF. So we kind of get it based on their personal preference.

Owen: And I like that too because you noticed how they learn based on their role and you’re building your procedures to kind of cater to that type of learning ability I guess and this also base on the kind of role they’re in as well?

Jeet: Yeah, exactly. Definitely you have to cater your automation like your guides and manuals to how you think that they’re going to understand the information best.

Owen: Do you have anything in place to make sure that as the people actually adoring the work, they come across ways to get stuff done better, do you have any measures in place to get that feedback from them so that it becomes a thing where they take ownership of the work and help you improve your systems, I’m just curious.

Jeet: Yeah, definitely we do. What we do is that the beginning of each week, every Monday, so today or for likes 8 to 10 my managers actually have a meeting, we have a team meeting and our company is very casual. It’s a very open-minded environment so we basically have like an open discussion board where people can discuss all the things that they’re happy about, all the things that they’re pissed off about, all the things that they want to change, any ideas they may have. What they think they should do for the business?  So we kind of have these meetings every Monday for 2 hours where it brings our team closer together and it makes our company stronger because we come back with feedback, we come back with ways to solve problems better and all these different things.

Owen: And I’m curious too, is there an example of something like mind-blowing that you never figured or your managers didn’t think about it, the people were actually on the ground doing the work were able to bring back to you guys says, “I think we need to do it this way, this different way because we might be able to improve results.”  Is there any example that comes to mind?  If not, let me know.

Jeet: Yeah, one of the examples is that in the beginning we did everything with PowerPoint. So what we give our technical team PowerPoint’s they told us that they would like to open it on their cellphone while they did the SEO stuff especially when they first started out in the beginning so it would be easier for them to keep track and PowerPoint was the hassle on the cellphone. So they asked, made the suggestion to turn it into a PDF, make it where they can access it on their mobile phone and then so that they can do both at the same time to be more efficient.

Owen: Well, I like that and so one of the things that I know on myself and other entrepreneurs including yourself, we’re always influenced by both books out there that help to build us. In terms of this aspect of building a business that you literally can run on auto-pilot in a sense or maybe delegating some task to machine and have a machine automated or delegating task to people on your team based on the systems that you created, which books out there will you say have influenced you the most and why?

Jeet: The biggest influence that a book or the book that influenced me was the Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco.

Owen: I love that book.

Jeet: Yeah and that book doesn’t necessarily talk about automation but it just tells you about the fastlane and I think automation is all about the fastlane because he talks about how most people take the slow lane to acquire wealth and to do work. They go every day, they’re working every single day whereas the wealthy people, they believe in investments and they believe in passive income and systems that make money without them really doing much and that’s what really triggered to start thinking outside the box. When I read that book, I already had my business but it wasn’t automated so I was figuring what I could do to take my business from slow lane to fast lane and that’s what really motivated me to do automation on my business.

Owen: Thank you very much and so Jeet, what’s the best way to get a hold of you?  And thank you for doing this interview.

Jeet: Yeah, definitely. My personal website is probably the best place. It has my contact information, my blog and my social medias. My personal website is JeetBanerjee.com.

Owen: Thank you very much. And so, listeners if you so far have enjoyed this interview, please feel free to share with everyone else who you think will find it useful and if you are in the process where you want to get started documented procedures for your business, feel free to check out the free trial of SweetProcess and get started documenting procedures for your business. And finally, if you’re not at that point where you want to start documenting procedures but you want to know, then give a checklist so that you know which recurring and repetitive task on your business, other ones that you focus on and start documenting them, go ahead for the blog. SweetProcess.com/blog and download the checklist. Hey, Jeet. I really appreciate you doing this interview and thanks for being here.

Jeet: No problem. Thanks for having me and this is great.

Owen: We’re done.

Jeet: All right. Awesome.