Dr. Jeremy Weisz 12:27
In that particular case, you this person has a very high client lifetime value, like we’re talking, you know, millions of dollars, and they lost at least six months already that they could have gotten a client maybe two. So that could mean millions of dollars for this business, just because they’ve been thinking about it and haven’t done anything, right? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, that’s why we’re talking about this question, right?
John Corcoran 12:57
And the criteria, yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re pushing, pushing it off and that’s that’s definitely a consideration. Number six, what is the impact on internal resources? Now, this is one that I really like, because I think a lot of times, owners, CEOs of businesses, don’t realize the impact on their their team, and it can lead to attrition team members leaving if they’re torn between different projects, a lot of times, they they like working on the work that they were hired to do, and if they are forced to divert their resources their tension between different projects, then that really can. Can drain morale. It can, you know, cause them to feel unfocused. There’s a lot of things that can have a big impact on those, you know, your biggest asset, which is your team.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:48
I feel like there’s kind of two scenarios here. One scenario is the team is just doing their work, and they have a normal workload, right? And you throw this on top of their normal workload and it really affects their job, right? And we’re cognizant of that with our team, like, Hey, can you do this? And it’s like, oh, it’s one more thing I have to do. And the other scenario we find is maybe they don’t have as much work right now for the other team member maybe has a lighter load right now. And we’ve seen it happen where, well, then all of a sudden it gets busy, right? And that project is no longer the priority, right?
John Corcoran 14:32
And in the in the podcast context, when your podcast is your business development, it’s your networking, it’s your lead generation, it’s your SEO, it’s your content marketing, it’s when it’s serving all these different purposes, and then you get busy because you get to onboard some new clients, and then the team members stopped doing it, and you look up and it’s been six months and you haven’t put out a podcast episode, and all of a sudden, leads are not flowing in, and new clients are not coming around. You know? Well, what happened? What happened? It was that it had an impact on internal resources that were split between different priorities. And so it got dropped by the wayside. And then that affects all those different things that we mentioned, that it affects your business development, it affects your pipeline, it affects your leads, all that kind of stuff. And so it has a big impact. That’s number six.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 15:19
Talk really quickly about the timeline piece, because the fast track, I think about this a lot like, Do you want a proven fast track and a proven plan in fast track things? Or do you prefer to learn to figure out yourself? You know, for me, you know, obviously, from a podcast perspective, we talked about that, that person could have had their podcast going, like, four months ago, right for me and my health journey? Like, can I get healthy and like, know enough to figure things out myself? Sometimes I’m just like, listen, I just need to hire someone who has the exact plan and just put me on it, and I’ll just get there a lot quicker with approval.
John Corcoran 16:03
I mean, that’s a perfect example, because you’re someone who knows more about your little pinky finger than most people that I know about health, about what’s good for you. And yet, when you got serious about getting fit, you hired a personal trainer. You know, you hired a personal trainer to hold you accountable to actually do the things that you knew you wanted to do, and it’s been really transformative.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 16:29
I have specialized knowledge information, like, Could I go on YouTube and watch a bunch of videos, and I studied stuff for like, you know, 15 years, but they have specialized knowledge in this realm, that is not my specialty.
John Corcoran 16:43
Yeah. It could be something like, Oh, you’re lifting that weight in the wrong way, and you’re going to injure yourself, you know, and you’ll be out of commission for two months, you know. And then, boom, there goes the entire routine, yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 16:54
So that’s a great point of control. So the seventh one. So after you know what’s the impact of internal resources, the seventh one is, what’s the level of control and customization required? Talk about that. Yeah, control.
John Corcoran 17:13
I think with that, it really has to do with, how are you at delegating to a specialist? Is this something that you need to have control over? Are you like that throughout the business, where you need to have your fingerprints on every different thing that’s going on, or are you able to delegate? Are you able to let someone you know? Can you provide the guideline? And of course, you know your vision is throughout, but you know that it’s going to get across the finish line, even if you’re not watching every different piece of it. So those are some considerations, like, How much control do you need to assert upon it, or can you trust? Can you delegate?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 17:59
Yeah, and that’s what I find like a muscle that I have to use and or people have to use to get okay with it. Yeah. Eight. What are the risks associated with each option, right? So we’re talking, you know, versus in house first, outsourcing reliability, which kind of goes back into the, you know, some of these kinds of overlap, right? Because if your team is overworked or they get busy, it’s not that the team members are not reliable, it’s just like they have other priorities that take precedence over this, right, and so, or even different skill sets, right?
John Corcoran 18:39
They might like editing video and do it in their spare time, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to produce show notes that are up to a caliber that you’re going to be proud of representing your company.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 18:54
Yeah. So what’s, you know, the quality and reliability risks as an option, right? I mean, it’s, I was talking to a really high level executive at a publicly traded company, okay? And they’re doing consulting, and we got on the call, and they were interested in doing a podcast, but that’s not what we’re referring to. He’s like, look, I created this website for my consulting business, and I’m thinking, why would you get, can you create a website for yes, you can. You can go on like Wix and like, do it. But like, is this representing you from a quality standpoint? And I was just, I was nice about it, but I was just like, listen, there’s professionals that this is, they could just craft you like an amazing website. It doesn’t have to be crazy expensive either, but so it’s, it’s a risk people check out what you just did, what you know, and be like, Oh, this, this is not for me.
John Corcoran 19:58
Like, this didn’t have a bunch of. And Blinky icons and a little counter at the bottom and all that kind of stuff.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 20:04
Yeah, yeah, that doesn’t really help with the reputation.
John Corcoran 20:06
There’s risk involved. Um, yes. Number nine, what’s the strategic importance of the task?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 20:11
So, number nine, what’s the strategic importance of the task? Yeah, that’s a great question. So you know, is this task really that important, right? I mean, maybe you just don’t do it at all. Like, in our case, obviously, you know, like you said, there’s so many benefits from a podcast perspective, like, there’s a lot of strategy that goes in. In, is it going to require a hands on approach to execute all these things, right? Right?
John Corcoran 20:42
Or, you know, which parts of the approach require the hands on component to it. You know, in the podcast context, a lot of our discussions that we have with clients are, what should you be spending time on, and what should you not be spending time on? And I’ve seen people, you know, they, you know, start doing podcasts, and they spend all this time on things that don’t matter, you know, like they’re spending the time adjusting the font size on the website. Like you are far too important to be spending time on that, you know.
Or maybe they enjoy creating little video snippets, and so they do that in their free time, but a client is worth 2 million bucks. Should you be spending an hour, two hours on the weekend, doing that if you enjoy it, it’s a hobby, that’s fine, but should you be spending your time on that when having another conversation could lead to another $2 million client? That’s a much better use of your time, you know, and that’s really gets to kind of that strategic importance of what you should be spending your time on, the most strategically important uses of your time.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 21:49
Um, number 10 is, what is the potential for long term relationships. So, you know, could outsourcing this help build relationships with external partners, and they have a bunch of relationships in that industry that might be really valuable in the long run. Yeah,
John Corcoran 22:07
We’ve done that before, where we’ve hired people, hired vendors, and we’ve hired companies. We paid them because we want to develop a relationship with them and their network beyond the service that they provide 100%.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 22:22
And Number 11 is, what’s your client lifetime value, right? Yeah, yeah. Because, if you know, maybe it’s not that big, and it needs to be, there needs to be something in there for it to make sense for a company to, you know, hire partners for it. Yeah. So these are some of the questions I like to talk about and we’ll talk about, you know, some of the reasons we found why companies, you know, DIY it or handle it in house. But I do one of the biggest, I remember, one of those podcast episodes I did that was the most resounding example of this in house versus outsource. Was Mobileye right? Mobileye is The founding engineer on and Mobileye is a chip company that helps fuel an autonomous vehicle, self driving car, essentially. And Intel, what they realized was they had all of the chips in some of these self-driving cars. And Mobileye had one chip in the car. And Intel was like, Wait, why do we not have all the chips? Like, literally, why? What’s this one chip like? Why don’t we just figure out how to create this one chip so we have all of the chips in the car that run the car.
And so they evaluated and talked to Mobileye, so they had to make a decision. Do we create a whole team around this expertise of creating this one chip, or do we outsource and buy Mobili as a company? Okay? Um, I’ll have to fact check this, but I believe Intel bought Mobileye for $15.2 billion maybe it was 15.3 Listen, a point one decimal place. John is 100 million, so I don’t want to get that wrong, but let’s just pretend, for argument’s sake, it’s $15.2 billion that means Intel thought it was cheaper, more effective to buy the company for 15 point 2 billion than to create a separate division and team and everything like, let’s say they go, Oh, we’re going to invest 10 billion. That is still 5 billion last in payment for Mobileye. But they found it when you mentioned this before we hit the record about data Head Start, yeah.
John Corcoran 24:59
And they put it on. Of time, some of the other factors we just talked about, the questions we just talked about, were probably weighed into that. You know, Mobileye had been doing it for 10 years, longer than Intel had. So it probably would have taken Intel 567, all the mistakes.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 25:12
That Mobileye had figured out in those 10 years, and they shortcutted it. They fast tracked it.
John Corcoran 25:22
Yeah, it was strategically important, right? This wasn’t like, you know, this wasn’t like a side mirror in the car. This was a key component of the car, and will be a key component of the cars going forward and in the future. So strategically important to them. So, yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 25:37
So a lot of these questions, like, we take it through this example mobile I probably had long term relationships that they built with different car manufacturers now that Intel has so, you know, take those questions through any you know decision as far as that goes. So let’s talk about the reasons we have found why DIY companies are handling a house. One of the main ones is cost, right? Talk about that, and on the surface, what? Why? How are people evaluating cost?
John Corcoran 26:10
I mean on the surface, oftentimes they think that it may be saving you money to take it in house, especially if you’re using, as we mentioned earlier, a fixed resource, someone who’s already being paid. But the truth is, if they’re working on this project, they can’t work on this other project. They’re torn between different projects. There’s, there’s hard costs involved in that person’s time. If they take longer to complete that project, then it’s going to actually end up costing. Can cost you more, right? So that’s definitely a consideration. I, you know, an analogy would be like, you know, coast to coast travel.
Like, if I want to go, I live in San Francisco, if I want to go to New York City, you know, I could drive myself across the country, you know, and that would probably be less expensive. Or I can hop on a plane. The tickets are going to cost me something more, you know, I’ll still get from A to B, I’ll get from coast to coast. There’s two different ways of achieving that, but the cost will be significant. You know, I’ll be stuck driving myself cross country for a week. That’s a significant cost to me, and I have to pay for gas, and there’s wear and tear in the car and all kinds of stuff. So there’s other considerations that go into cost.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 27:17
The next one is a team member. We hear this a lot. Hey, I have a team member. They have a lot of free time. They’ve also maybe expressed interest in, you know, doing some of these tasks. What do we think about that?
John Corcoran 27:34
Yeah, and that has happened more frequently as our world’s podcasting has become more popular, and, you know, people are interested in listening to podcasts and stuff like that. Oh, I like listening to podcasts. I’d like to be involved in this project. A couple of considerations that you should think about is, you know, if, if, even if a team member says they want to stop and they want a manual that manages that process, you’re going to have to manage that person, and probably other people too, that don’t have that expertise. This is what happened to me my first four or five years doing the podcast. I didn’t even realize it, if you’d asked me at the time, but I was basically project managing it, and I was doing a crappy job of that. And then it was when Jeremy and I had started a business together, and I was like, Jeremy, I see you putting out two episodes per week of your podcast. You’ve been doing this for years and years, I’m totally inconsistent with mine.
What am I doing wrong? And he pointed all that out to me, you know, that I was needed to manage people. I had no real good, defined process for it, and we totally revamped it, and it became far more effective for me. You know, another person, another consideration, is that person, that team member, could leave. They probably will at some point leave. And if all that knowledge is baked in that one person, we’ve seen this happen over and over again. Podcast just grinds to a halt. We talk to people all the time that, you know, we look at like, oh, they come to us and they’re like, Oh, I had a podcast. It’s, you know, and we look at it, and the last one they published was two years ago, and it’s like, Well, what happened?
We’re like, oh, well, I have this team member who was working on it, and they left and nothing was documented. There were no SOPs and the boom led to a halt. Boom business development lines, so drives, you know, grinds to a halt. You know, these things end when that one team member leaves. And then, I think I touched on a second ago, but that person may not have all the expertise that you need. You know, even if they’re interested in it, you know, that doesn’t mean they have all the expertise.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 29:26
Yep. Another um, reason we have found companies do it is um. They’re a micro they like and they don’t want to delegate. They need to control different pieces of the process, all the pieces of the process, and they really kind of micromanage the process, and they want control, um, again, if it’s someone’s core competency, I totally get it right. It’s like, that’s what they do. But outside of the core competency, you know, it needs to be done. Delegated right to get done, right? And so that is a key, key factor. Something like, you know, I need it a specific way every time, which, again, like for any agency you’re working with, they can follow your guidelines and take what you need and execute on it.
But, you know, let them do what they do best, because they’re the expert. Right? When I go into the coach for health, I’m like, hey, just tell me what to do. Like, I’ll just listen to what you’re the expert. Tell me what I need to do, and I try to be as coachable as possible with the process. Yeah, so, and the fourth one is, this is, we’ve had people come to us and they’ve done the podcast before in the past, or they’re doing currently, and they said, Oh, I’m not getting ROI. I tried it already, and it doesn’t really work. And that could be for Facebook ads agency, that could be for email. I tried doing this, but it didn’t work. And what, what? What do we talk about in those cases?
John Corcoran 30:58
I mean, In many cases, there could be a lot of different failure points, and we oftentimes think that we’re the best at diagnosing where we went wrong or we went awry, but oftentimes we need the perspective and an outside expert to come in and see what we did wrong. You know, in terms of the podcast, we’ve done other episodes where we talked about the million different things that people could be doing, doing wrong could be a lack of consistency on reaching out, following up with prospective guests. It could be not having a structure for doing the actual interview. It could be the questions that you ask. It could be the strategy of the types of guests you have on. We’ve seen lots of people that interview, you know, b b V level celebrities you know, rather than interviewing their you know, best client, who they’ve had for 10 years and who has referred tons of clients to them, you should interview that person. So a lot of times we see people making those sorts of mistakes or not, not reading a sponsor message describing what they do.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 31:57
I mean, a guest strategy, like there’s so many strategies that they’re not employing, that there’s so many failure points, right? And so that goes into having someone who’s an expert team, that’s an expert to help. The best example I love with this is we did an event, and someone in the room suggested, oh, you should try Facebook ads, right? And that person said, Yeah, we tried, but that didn’t work. And then someone else in the room was a Facebook ad agency that drove 10s of millions of dollars to their clients every month, and it’s just sort of funny. And they were speaking up and were like, Hey, I think you should try this. And we kind of interrupted and said, hey, just so you know, like you say, doesn’t work. She drives 10s of millions of dollars every month. So maybe it’s your process that doesn’t work. It’s not Facebook ads, it doesn’t work. So is an example.
John Corcoran 32:57
So those are some of the Yeah, go ahead, yeah. And you know, we carry these biases throughout our lives. You know, when you talk about getting fit, getting healthy, losing weight, people try different diets. They don’t work. It doesn’t work, right? And then, and then some new health regime comes along with it that might work for them, but they don’t want to try it, because they have this baggage in our head about the time that it didn’t work, or the multiple times that it didn’t work for us previously.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 33:21
So yeah, those are all the last ones really, you know someone who comes to us in their, you know, or your agency, and they basically express that they’ve got it all figured out. So they don’t see the value in the expertise and strategy, and they feel like, okay, I can, I can figure, I can figure this out myself, and I don’t need you, right? So it’s more of a mentality, perspective, um, the last thing we’ll talk about is like, so when you’re thinking of evaluating an agency, an external partner agency, what are the things you should look for in evaluating that company, yeah.
John Corcoran 34:03
And, you know, one is, how much expertise experience do they have in this specific field? Not every different thing under the sun, but this specific, you know, field for us, in the B to B podcasting context, you know, combined 30 plus years of experience working in this area. The next one is strategic advice should really be under, you know, underlie everything that you do, and it should really come first, especially in the B to B podcasting world. You need to have the right strategy, or you can do everything else flawlessly. If the strategy is wrong, you will not be doing it for very long. You will end up very frustrated.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 34:47
That goes with any agency like we focus on making sure it makes sense for the business and the strategy and the same thing goes say, Oh, I just want a website. Well. You want to actually drive leads to your business. I just want a podcast. Well, you want it driving partnerships and revenue for your business, right? So focusing on the strategy first is an agency that thinks of your goals is really important. Number three, external accountability, so important.
John Corcoran 35:19
And I think we don’t even realize how important it is. Again, going back to your, you know, fitness journey, having a health coach to help hold you accountable, in spite of everything that you already knew about healthy habits, it’s really critical. Because, you know, in the B to B podcasting world, it’s not like you build a website and you’re done. You know, a podcast is a journey. It’s something that you need to do over time. It’s not something that you do once and you’re done. And so you really need to have someone who’s going to have the outside stature to hold you accountable. And it can’t be an internal team member that works for you, that reports to you, because they’re just not going to hold you accountable in the way that someone outside of your organization will.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 36:04
That’s why we’re so part of what we talk about and do with clients is people get assigned that personal trainer for their business development, which is their outreach strategist. The fourth is to provide the execution to ease the burden on your team. So an agency that’s actually going to save you and your company tons of time by executing on these things so you don’t have to, um, and then the fifth one provides you with a streamlined, deliberate process, yeah.
John Corcoran 36:37
And here’s where you can see whether someone’s thought through these pieces or not. And you know, Jeremy, we and our team have collectively put in our 10, proverbial 10,000 hours into this process, and we have very defined thoughts and ideas about how these things should be done, because we know what works and we know what doesn’t. And so we even built software. We built a tool to go with our podcast co pilot that puts all of that into play and into practice.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 37:08
This is one of my favorite ones. It’s the last one. What you should look for, you know, an external partner agency is actually practicing the craft, right? So in our world, you know, let’s say you hire a company to help you their podcast, and they don’t have a podcast, or they don’t release a regular podcast, yeah, it’s like me hiring a super overweight trainer, okay, which I’m sure there there’s good trainers, but like if they practice what they preach, then I want someone who has a proper diet.
They’re working out a lot, and I want to strive to be like them, right? And so, you know, same thing with if you hire a website design company, and you look at their website, and it’s horrendous, yeah, then I get it. It’s like, what’s the saying with the cobbler’s kids, or whatever, Cobbler’s kids, yeah, yeah, don’t have shoes, but still, like, yeah, it’s, it’s kind of funny. Like, okay, you do this, but you’re not practicing it. Like, obviously, doing two episodes a week for over like 15 years, right? And so we eat our own dog food, yeah, so to speak.
John Corcoran 38:26
So just to wrap up this episode, I think that obviously, having done the work that we do for so long, we have strong thoughts on how to see success and what leads to disappointing results. And you know, but that’s what comes with time. Comes as expertise. It comes with having done it for as long as we have any final thoughts on that, Jeremy.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz 38:56
No, I think we kind of laid out the questions, and we use these questions internally when we make decisions in general and we don’t want to overburden our team the same way you know we advise people not overburdening their team. So hopefully there’s a lot that someone can glean from these particular questions and answer them for themselves.
John Corcoran 39:17
All right, thanks, everyone.
Outro 39:22
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.