How Damon Burton created a Simple Checklist for his Business that Ensures all Tasks Get Done Correctly by his Employees!

OWEN: My guest today is Damon Burton and he is the founder and president of SEO National. Damon welcome to the show.DAMON: Thanks a lot Owen, good to be here.

OWEN: Let’s dive right in. What exactly does your company do and what big pain or problem do you solve for your customers?

DAMON: We do SEO which is search engine optimization. The main thing, we work on behalf of clients just to push them towards top of major search engines like Google to increase their exposure, leads, and their sales.

OWEN: Awesome. How many full-time employees do you currently have?

DAMON: One locally, not including myself. And then we have, actually 3 remote at the moment.

OWEN: Okay. Just to give the listeners an idea of the scale of the business what was last year’s revenue and what do you expect for this year?

DAMON: Right around 300,000 last year and then we should be between 3 and 350 this year.

OWEN: Awesome. The goal of this interview is to get entrepreneurs here who have systematized their business to talk about how they’ve been able to do it. But before you got to the point where you’ve been able to systematized your business let’s talk about some of the lowest point in the business and describe how bad it got.

DAMON: Sure. If you’re familiar with SEO it’s a very technical, detailed industry. For one client there’s a dozen processes that we fulfill each month. When a new campaign first launches there’s actually even more than that. So the first month there could be upwards of a hundred things to work on. Making sure none of those items were missed was the biggest part of getting our business streamlined and scalable, and really ensuring quality control.

OWEN: You mentioned that when you first started the company back in 2007 it was just you. Just give the listeners some background on how you worked, managing everything by yourself.

DAMON: I think a lot of people start in a similar situation. They start where they can. In our scenario we needed a detailed list of processes, and we started with a good old Spreadsheet. We’d have upward of a hundred things we had to work on. As the campaigns progressed sometimes more would come up. When we’re doing with the Spreadsheet or even when it was just me, I’d hit the majority of the things but down the road we’d always find that one or two things that we had missed. That’s why it was really important for us to improve quality control and get beyond the Spreadsheet.

OWEN: You also mentioned during the pre-interview that because of the nature of the business you also had some things that you had to watch out for on the client side, both internally and externally. Can you explain what you meant by that?

DAMON: Yes. There’s a lot of things that go into SEO, but if you generalize them into 2 buckets, the first one’s internally. So, you check things how fast a page loads, are there any broken images, can they optimized to improve load time, do they have properly validated html, is their website mobile friendly, mostly structure stuff. In the other bucket, it’s the things that are external to the side. You build up a brand, you do press releases, you do content, you help the client share their authority and knowledge of their industry, you do outreach, a lot of the things that are separate from the actual side itself but reference back to it.

OWEN: Do you remember the specific time back then when you just don’t know and you’re like, “Man, I have to stop the way things are going and I have to systematize the business.” Can you remember what exactly happened that made you feel that way?

DAMON: Yes. We were growing at a decent rate and back then, at the point where we really started the tipping came when it was just myself and the one other full-time local employee. Even at that point when I had a helping hand we’re growing at a decent rate. I always knew that we needed to have good quality control and we did, but I always knew we could do a little bit better. As we started to grow a lot more rapidly, that’s when I said, “If we’re going to do, let’s do it now.” Even though we’re tight on time as is, we’re going to be even tighter on time in the future. Let’s do it right and do it now. Growth was the tipping point for us.

OWEN: Do you remember the very first thing you did to solve the problems you just mentioned, that lowest point?

DAMON: To solve it, the first thing we did was document things. Like I’ve touched on, we started with the Spreadsheet. We just grew from there. Before documentation and streamlining there would be times when I knew we’re not moving as quickly as we could. We’re still making good progress but a full day would go by auditing part of a new site. I knew it could’ve taken just a few hours instead a full day if we streamlined a little bit better. I think one of the lower points was not feeling like we’re up to par as much as we could be. We’re doing a good job but it felt we could’ve done better.

OWEN: Can you give an example of what you mean by streamlining and being able to do a lot better? That way the listener knows what specifically.

DAMON: Sure. We talked about two buckets, internally and externally. If we talk about the internal bucket that’s really where a lot of quality control comes in. Let’s say we had to go optimize a client’s home page. While we’re doing that, other things come up at the time on our Spreadsheet. We bounce around so we would fix issues on a homepage then we go fix issues on a contact page. Then the next audit point would be back at the home page. We kind of make unnecessary turns when if we formalize things a little bit better than we would do all the homepage things at once. Then all of the contact page things at once. It’s still the same stuff we were doing just by streamlining it into proper phases I guess you can say made us have to jump around less and still accomplish the same, but quicker and more efficiently.

OWEN: You mentioned one of the first things you did was to create a simple spreadsheet just so the listener understands the structure of the spreadsheet at the time when you were using it to systematize the business. Can you walk us through it?

DAMON: Our first approach with the spreadsheet?

OWEN: Yes.

DAMON: Well, I say simple spreadsheet but there wasn’t really anything simple about. That point we had over 100 rows of task that we’d list that we would commonly fulfill for clients. These are all things on a recurring basis. We would have to hit the same kind of things over and over. We used columns to list our clients, and then the intersecting sales between the columns and row of task. We’d identify dates and we’d have reminders to say come back to this. If it’s sounds complicated and inefficient, it actually worked quite well. Had we not wanted to automate reminders about certain processes. We could probably still get away with the spreadsheet. But little things started to add up. So automated reminders and recurring events save us even more time, spreadsheets aren’t necessarily interactive. At that point we’d be on a spreadsheet so we could have something that was a little more dynamic.

OWEN: Before we even talk about how you moved into the dynamic, they need to move out of the spreadsheets because you wanted something more dynamic. You mentioned during the pre-interviews like some of the example things, like the fulfillment items that actually went into the spreadsheet. This way the listener can know what you actually put into the spreadsheet itself.

DAMON: Some examples of what we put in the spreadsheet, does a client have a blog that’s separate from their main site, or is the client setup in our CRM to get our automated communication. So it’s just all the individual task items across the whole range of fulfillment.

OWEN: Okay. I’m thinking that this spreadsheet was just a checklist based on how you’ve been working with different customers. I guess maybe if you did some kind of consultation with them initially you’ll probably figure out some of the things they need to do. The spreadsheet was designed to hit all those checklist points for what they needed to do, and your team was meant to go through each of the steps of the checklist and get them done. That’s kind of what the checklist was serving, right?

DAMON: Yes. It was basically a core checklist that a minimum we should review these items for every client.

OWEN: The issue now came when you realized you had to do a lot of recurring task. So, it needed to be dynamic. Let’s talk about how you progressed out of that into the next iteration of…

DAMON: As we begin documenting our process we had the obvious benefit of streamlining our process. But we later realized there’s benefit, increased efficiency too. There’s so many processes we’ve found out by kind of like I touched on just a minute ago. By arranging tasks with other related task and creating related phases, it saved a lot of time. Like I was touching on, a homepage on a client’s website may require some copywriting updates, and then later some code updates. By placing those task in some phase that we can knock out multiple items while being logged in to the same common area really improved our efficiency and our time. Just grouping similar task together was the next step that increase efficiency.

OWEN: I get that. So first the checklist then streamlining and putting similar task together so that when you’re doing one task then working on a specific task that’s related to another one. When you’re doing you just quickly jump into it. That helped with making things more efficient. The next thing you had to kind of the fact that the checklist itself was not dynamic enough. You had to transition from it. Let’s talk about why and then what you did next.

DAMON: A lot of processes were documented, we transitioned our information to a CRM. Since we’re still small every dollar really counted at that point. We started with a pre-CRM. Everything we needed, individual employee permissions. I could set certain areas to have access for certain client confidentiality and assign the other things based on employee level. Recurring settings and reminders. It worked great for the first 2 years.

OWEN: What free sharing was this? So the listener can know.

DAMON: The very first free one we used was one called ClockingIT, I remember it’s just clockingit.com.

OWEN: Okay. Later on you decided you wanted to move into one that you had to pay for, and the reason for that was what?

DAMON: Mostly, we started getting into the dynamic stuff, conditional tasks. If a client has A then perform B, or if they have X perform Y. A lot of the free CRMs that are really great and amazing, especially for being free. But a lot of times they seem to be missing just one thing. When we started getting considering paid CRM’s I wanted to make sure that our fulfillment list that we’ve been using in the spreadsheet in the first CRM was finalized before we started using a paid CRM. We make sure we’re getting our best bang for our buck. That was a whole period in itself. There’s a lot of testing to make sure that we weren’t missing anything. We didn’t get committed to one CRM and then realize something else was missing. I started taking note of the dynamic…

OWEN: You basically use the free CRM to draft out how exactly you wanted things to work. When you wanted to optimize and scale it that’s when you say, “Let’s go for the paid one.” And then make sure that it can actually work based on a model that we already have on the free one that would actually work when use this one that’s paid. That’s what you were doing first.

DAMON: Exactly. The spreadsheet’s helped us to accomplish the checklist. The first CRM helped us get the added advantage of recurring events and some reminders, so we could remind ourselves of recurring task. The paid CRM really came into play with dynamic task is really what the advantage of moving to the paid level was.

OWEN: Can you give us an example of what you mean by a dynamic task, because the listener probably heard you say that several times already. Can you give us, so we have context as to what you mean by dynamic task in your business?

DAMON: Sure. There’s a lot of different solutions for websites out there. We maybe have somebody that has a website that was custom built. We may have another client that uses a popular content management system, a CMS or Joomla, or maybe they use WordPress. We’re able to do conditional task based on… That would be an example. So we’d say, “Does a client have a CMS?” Yes or No. If yes then the next conditional task would be which one is it. There’s so many out there but for the most part there’s a half a dozen that most people use. We’ll continue with WordPress as the example. The client has WordPress. Simply by us selecting in our CRM that the client has WordPress then it pre populates a whole length of task beyond that that are specific to WordPress.

OWEN: I get it. It asks you a question and based on the question it gives you the next step of series of steps that are related to the answer to that question that you just provided. Like you mentioned, if the person has WordPress then these are the series of steps you have to follow. But if you say they use Joomla as another platform then your team knows to follow another series of steps. I like that. What was that CRM? Feel free to share, because the goal of interview is to give the listener as many resources as possible.

DAMON: Sure. The very first one we started out with ClockingIT. That one was great because it had your standard CRM resources. Then I had some recurring abilities. The next one we moved on beyond that was Insightly. That one’s insightly.com. We actually still use Insightly for some parts of our fulfillment. Insightly is great because it’s free up to 3 users. They have free and paid models. Now I think we’ll touch on this a little bit later. We’re now getting into automating some of the lead generation and we’re going to be using another CRM called [Unintelligible 00:15:24]. That one has a free and paid model as well.

OWEN: Another reason besides the ability to have that dynamic workflow that you mentioned during the pre-interview that made you move over to a CRM that you had to pay for. You wanted to get automated reports, and you also wanted to integrate the CRM system to others tools that you’re using. Let’s talk about that a little bit so the listener understands why you made that decision.

DAMON: When we started moving beyond our first paid CRM, or expanding upon it, we wanted to integrate things even further because we really start to dial in how to streamline things. Now, it’s become ingrained in our processes to always question what else we do to improve efficiency and streamline things. The next phase evolution internally was what can we systematize at this point. When you do SEO you always give benchmark reports to your clients, progress reports. We thought wouldn’t it be great if somehow we could use our recurring task abilities or whatever CRM abilities and associate that with our reporting abilities too. In addition to automating our internal fulfillment we can automate a lot of our reporting abilities now too by merging them all within the CRM.

OWEN: Awesome. Let’s give the listeners some more insight like the specific systems that are running together behind the scenes in the business. I think you’ve mentioned some of them. But let’s talk about them one at a time. The first one is the CRM. Basically you said it helps allow dynamic workflow. You also mentioned, what software are you using behind the scenes?

DAMON: Our CRM obviously, then we have, I guess you’d say, performance reporting software, the kind that gives progress updates.

OWEN: Is that a different one or it’s the same one?

DAMON: That one’s a different one. There’s actually a few different ones we use. There’s different reports we can run based on measuring the traffic increases for our client. There’s another report we can run to measure whether their target words have moved from page [Unintelligible 00:17:59].

OWEN: Okay.

DAMON: In SEO there’s a lot of metrics you can measure. Then we also systematize a lot of our communication with our clients. The best kinds to work within our industry are educated clients. The more we can share with them about what’s going on in the world of search engines and internet marketing, the more efficient it is on both ends. Because they better understand the value in what we do, which in turn makes it… The more educated they get, the better we can communicate with them. We can make the most out of our fulfillment models. We’ve streamlined some of that communication too where if we update our blog post then over the course of the month our newsletter will collect those news updates and mix them altogether into a newsletter.  Send out as a monthly digest so they can stay up-to-date on what’s going on in the search engine world.

OWEN: Awesome. Here’s the thing. What I want to do right now is have you connect the dot behind the scenes. On one hand, imagine there’s a conveyor belt right now. On one hand you have somebody who owns a business, has this problem of maybe not enough traffic coming to his site. That’s on the very end of the spectrum of this conveyor belt. On the other end is somebody who used your service, loves you guys, he’s raving about you guys and telling all his friends about the service. But I want you to connect the dots for the listener as to how that transformation happens for that person and what’s happening behind the scenes in terms of tools you’re using and specific people who are doing certain things to make that transformation happen. Do you understand what I’m saying?

DAMON: Yes, kind of explain our workflow?

OWEN: Yes.

DAMON: The first thing we do is do some competitive analysis and say, “Okay, what words does our client want to target that can bring them the most value.” We don’t want to just push somebody at the top of Google just to say, “Hey, you’re on the top of Google.” We want to push them to the top for words that they can actually monetize. So there’s a value. The more value they get, the longer relationship we’re going to have. The first thing we do is do some kind of competitive analysis to see what other people in their industry are targeting. Do some reports that show the search volume for words so we can say, “Dear client, this word brings in X amount of volume while this word brings in even more.” We can determine where to focus. Once we figure out what we’re going to target then we try and leverage whatever existing strengths the client’s website may have. That’s where some of those side audit reports come into play. We see this page loads quickly and has these values while this page is missing these things. We figure out where to plug in the hole, fill the gaps the first. The real importance in the process of SEO, the first thing you have to do is build a solid foundation. You can do all these press releases and links and get other people to talk about your website and share your website. But unless you have a really strong website for them to share, you’re only going to get so far. The first thing we do is build a solid website or improve it. The next phase, once we got a nice website I guess you could say we try to brag about it. We go out and get other people to talk about the website, and our client’s tools, products, or services. We do press releases and we build brand awareness. We try to get a bunch of gossip going I guess is the easiest way you could relate that. After that it’s kind of a bit of a recurring model. We continue to benchmark our success and go, “Okay, these things worked really well last month so let’s continue that trend.” “Here’s additional outlets where we can increase more gossip. Let’s try introducing those into the pipeline.” You really create a recurring workflow, or monthly recurring fulfillment model that’s specific to whatever your client’s industry is. Some clients may be a mom and pop shop that’s really geo specific to one city within one state. You do things differently for them versus your bigger client that’s national and they have a lot more competitive industry. After you get the recurring stuff going then it’s fine tuning it based on competition.

OWEN: Awesome. You mentioned what’s happening behind the scene from the point where you get the customer, and how you determine what their goals are. You end up building and improving a better website for them. Based on the goals that they had you’ve created a workflow, what you guys need to be doing on a recurring basis for you guys to actually deliver on the promise. I get that. I’m wondering, even before the person becomes your customer, is there some kind of systems you have in place to even get them in there in the first place?

DAMON: To acquire them as a lead?

OWEN: Yes, I’m just curious.

DAMON: That’s actually an interesting question because until now actually, no, we’ve actually grown quite a bit strictly by word of mouth. I always actually laugh because we’re a marketing company and we never market ourselves.

OWEN: The couple, shoe syndrome, right?

DAMON: Yes.

OWEN: Is it the couple’s kid’s syndrome? I don’t know.

DAMON: The shoemaker, yes.

OWEN: Go ahead.

DAMON: We’ve been really fortunate enough to not really have to do outreach for ourselves. Now we’re starting to continue the growth trend. Like I briefly touched on earlier, we’re just now starting our lead generation process so we can continue our growth. It’ll follow the similar evolution where we’re innovating a CRM now. We actually just sent out our first direct mail yesterday. We have a multi-pronged approach where we’re doing direct mail, for offline engagement, and then we’re going to your standard social media, Twitter and Facebook ads. We’re actually just now getting into our own outreach.

OWEN: It’s good that you mentioned this because first of all you started by making sure the operation side of it you got it locked down, meaning that you can apply anybody who’s your right ideal customer to your production and your operations can handle it. I just wanted to share that because the listener can understand that different parts of your business, you focus on them and start systematizing it. Then you move to the next part and start working on creating the system around it. In your case now you are now focusing on trying to systematize the marketing side to generate leads and turn those into sales. Creating a system for the operations side of your business, definitely you must have had challenges. I’m wondering what challenges did you have with it and how did you even solve them?

DAMON: For us in particular we got so many things that go into our fulfillment. It really took all the time to get the process completed. It took a lot of time to get one process done let alone multiple processes across multiple platforms, and then sync all those platforms. One thing I was thinking about is I’m a fan of Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. One quote that I read he had mentioned that I found to be of value. He said, “Done is better than perfect.” Start somewhere then approve as you go is my addition on it. I think done is better than perfect starting point. The problem that we would run into is we had so many things that we would always go. We’d systematize this and then we’d start on it and we’d get halfway down before we go out to the next phase of systemization. I guess you could say it became overwhelming or we either got sidetracked because it was such a drawn out process in our specific case because of how many things.

OWEN: There’s like so many variables. I’m curious, how then did you know, moving forward, decide with all the many variables, how did you make the decision which areas to focus on and systematize, if you have all those variables going on?

DAMON: Our first approach with the processes was if we can start somewhere then we figure it’ll snowball. Once we got everything documented, we were able to just get so far and then it was documented. Even if we’ve got distracted or we have to take the time out we had it documented so we could come back. We had a hard time from there deciding where to apply it to what CRM. Back to Zuckerberg quote, I think done is better than perfect. We just had to start somewhere and organize it by a level of importance, in our case doing the initial SEO is where we always start, so that was very important. We can’t do…

OWEN: Getting onto the initial evaluation stuff, right?

DAMON: Right, exactly. We can’t do the external bucket is done. We started with our internal bucket. And then just documented as much as we could and try to group in phases, which actually worked out pretty well because by the time we finalize our processes we applied them in phases. You just got to start somewhere. And no matter how dynamic your business is and how much you say, “Well, I have a unique scenario and maybe I can’t streamline that.” For me personally, a big step forward was when I… Because I thought the same thing. But when I realize there’s always common denominators, start with those common denominators. Then as your mental perspective starts to warm up to the idea of streamlining things and you realize, okay, I got that first phase done and it actually makes a lot of sense. Now that I understand how to do this better then you can move on to phase 2. And you’ll slowly become acclimated to streamlining the majority if not all of your processes, so just starting period is key.

OWEN: We’ve mentioned some of the tools and systems you have in place. I think some additional ones that you mentioned during the pre-interview. You talk about the CRM that tells your employees dynamically what they need to do based on what data they enter into it. Was it Insightly that you said you mentioned helps with the CRM, is that the tool?

DAMON: Right.

OWEN: You also mentioned that there is a Client Portal. Talk about that.

DAMON: Client Portal is really valuable to us. It’s actually kind of funny because it’s a really simplistic back end. All it is, is actually WordPress. And so Client Portal gives me and all my team all of the details about our client and the campaign that we need. It’ll list out the client company name, owner, management names, contact information, the websites that we’re working with, our goals, the words we want to target, all of the bullet points an employee may need to support our client is within this client portal. So I mentioned, it’s funny because it’s just WordPress, because I think that’s a good take away that a lot of your listeners could listen to is that there’s so many free tools out on the internet that if you need something, if you can’t find exactly what you need, find something that’s close enough and usually you can slightly modify it. In our case, WordPress made for an amazing client portal, and all of us is just a free WordPress installation.

OWEN: Yes. You also mentioned you make use of Dropbox. Talk about how that works for your business.

DAMON: Dropbox is a good quality control tool for us. We’ve synced Dropbox accounts across all our employees and all their computers. Even though there’s just a handful of us we actually have 2 to 3 computers each. So we got about a dozen computers between the three of us. This allows us all to get any files or images, client logos, or materials that we may need. We can treat Dropbox as a repository that all of us can easily access.

OWEN: Okay. I think you mentioned something about templates specifically to the SEO software. Talk about that.

DAMON: Yes. The templates are more specific to us and SEO. We documented all these variables per client, but a variable could be client name is variable 1, client domain is variable 2, but we always have a name and a domain, so they are variables. Now, as we start fulfillment for each campaign across the various software we can just import these profile templates and populate dozens of fields that would’ve otherwise manually had to be populated and taken up significantly more time.

OWEN: Okay. You put that data into the tools you use so you can generate reports instead of having to do manual data entry. That’s the purpose it serves, right?

DAMON: Right.

OWEN: Okay. You mentioned that your employees kind of know what to do. I’m wondering is it only based on the CRM. You do have any other means in which you’ve actually documented procedures or even processes for how they should do stuff? Am I missing something with this?

DAMON: No. Between CRM and the templates, our fulfillment model is basically entirely documented. The CRM tells everybody what to do. and then in some circumstances the CRM prompts them to use templates during the process.

OWEN: Okay. How do you even track and verify the results that your employees are delivering to your clients?

DAMON: The CRM makes it actually easy as far as getting done because in the CRM it marks whether it’s done or not. We have recurring task for each employee that I can export to compare against reports and data. Even though a task gets checked off and says it’s done I can always go back and export to make sure as well. If somebody checks off a task in CRM I can go and actually check that platform, look at the logs or look at the completed task within the platform directly. Even some of those exports, if I want to double check, a lot of those are automated as well where we’ve set it to the programs automatically output that information into a place where I can go review it anytime. You mentioned Dropbox, since we all use Dropbox and then on the same note those automated exports, we’ve actually synchronized a lot of our programs. Some programs may say where do you want to save your data? It defaults to your programs folder or your documents folder. We actually changed our export location on programs to be Dropbox. Instead of when a project gets completed it doesn’t save on that employee’s computer, that actually saves and outputs to our shared Dropbox so everybody could keep in the loop exactly what data is where, or what’s been performed, or what exports or what reports are available.

OWEN: Awesome. How will you say your business has transformed as a result of you systematizing it?

DAMON: Obviously, the answer is just the ability to be streamlined and consistent. I guess two other bullet points are, one, as a company we’re now scalable. I just went to lunch with another gentleman in our same industry yesterday and his problem is scalability. He actually has a larger portfolio but he has a harder time scaling. He has a bigger operation but he can’t scale even more. So I think scalability is one advantage we have over, interestingly enough, even over bigger companies. Me personally, I think it’s given me peace of mind a little bit knowing that we’re scalable. Just on the flexibility of all the things that come with, knowing that your employees are doing what they’re doing and your business is still continuing whether you’re there or not.

OWEN: Comparing back when you started. when everything depended on you, and now where you’ve been able to setup a business that is scalable. With this free time you have, which areas of the business do you now focus on now and why?

DAMON: I’m trying to actually remove myself from production entirely and just focus on growth. We’ve had the documented processes for a while. I think with any business owner you always want to watch a baby a little bit. Now that we’ve had enough time behind us to prove these documented processes work, I’m more comfortable now where I almost want to remove myself entirely from production and just focus on growth. I’ve been the one that’s been developing all the integration for our new lead generation and outreach. At this point I’m almost probably 50% of my time is strictly on growth. Hopefully, within the next 3-6 months I can be almost 100% out of production and just focus on growth, networking, and building our brand.

OWEN: Awesome. What will you say is the very next step that someone who’s been listening to this interview all the way to this point that should take in order to get started with being able to transform their business so that they can actually run without them?

DAMON: You got just to invest the time in structuring things. You got to invest the time in structuring things. You got to have your end goal in mind ahead of time. Like I said before, you just got to start anywhere. Just get things structured. Like I said, find a common denominator, start there, and then continue documenting that until you get some sort… Even if you know that your first round at systematizing and documenting things you’re not going to use, at least complete that process so you have somewhere to start and move on to the next revision. So really just starting.

OWEN: What books have probably influenced this way of thinking for you?

DAMON: I got into these EBooks quite a bit lately. I’m not one of those big self-help guru guys that love all that hype and the whole world. One that i actually did like quite a bit was 4-Hour Workweek. I think a lot of people, specially business owners are familiar with that book or at least heard of it. One thing that I took away from that is that when people start businesses it’s for financial interest. One interesting comment in The 4-Hour Workweek was about people don’t realize they don’t want to be rich, they want the freedom of being rich. I really took to that where the money’s great but I like to grow my business for stability. I’m a big family guy. That book really reached out to me. Another one that probably not a lot of people heard about as much is it’s called Rework.

OWEN: Okay.

DAMON: It’s by a company that actually built a CRM made, founder of Basecamp.

OWEN: From 37Signals, this company, right?

DAMON: Right. Really, the takeaway from that book is that simple is good. Just be good about what you’re doing. And if you’re a small business and you’re a good small business you don’t have to become corporate giants to be happy in life. It’s really refreshing to have somebody say “Go kick ass and be what you are.”

OWEN: Awesome. What’s the best way for the listener to connect with you and thank you for doing the interview?

DAMON: I’m an online kind of guy obviously. I’m the one that’s behind all the social media handles. We’re on twitter.com/seonational, facebook.com/seonational. I love seeing people succeed. So if it’s a small business owner that I can get a pointer or two… I’m here to welcome to people given us a call. All our phone number information is just on seonational.com.

OWEN: Awesome. Is there a question that so far you wishing I would’ve asked you but I didn’t ask you? If so, post that question and the answer.

DAMON: I think maybe if somebody were to ask me what’s a good piece of advice as people attempt this undertaking and they get frustrated and hit a dead end. I think the best piece of advice would just be that’s okay. We had solved many variables as we’ve touched on that, we had dead ends quite a few times. But it never bothered me. I knew that was going to happen. I think by knowing ahead of time that your first attempt won’t be your final attempt, just know that that’s okay, and know that you’re going to take away something from that first revision. That first attempt even if you don’t use it. It’s okay to fail during this process.

OWEN: I’m speaking to you the listener, you’ve been listening to this interview all the way to this point. If you found this interview useful I want you to go ahead and leave us a review, hopefully a 5-star review. You can do that on iTunes by going to sweetprocess.com/iTunes, or if you have an Android you can do that on Stitcher by going to sweetprocess.com/stitcher. The reason to leave a positive review is other entrepreneurs will read your reviews and say, “Why did you leave a review over there?” They’ll come and checkout the podcast, they like it for themselves. By doing that you’re actually helping us to attract more listeners to our podcast we’ll be inspired to go out there and get more entrepreneurs like Damon to come on here and talk about how their business can run without them. How they’ve been able to build a business that is systematized. We all benefit from learning from that. If you are at that point in your business where you’re tired of being the bottleneck and you want to get everything out of your head so that your employees know what you know, well, sign up for a free 14-day trial of SweetProcess. Damon, thanks for doing the interview.

DAMON: You bet Owen. Thanks for the good questions.

OWEN: We’re done.