#01 - Vision to Life Newsletter: Starting to Build in Public

Read time: 8 min

(These will be MUCH shorter going forward. Thanks for reading.)

Friends, 

This is the first of what is hopefully a weekly update on Vision to Life's growth journey as we build the most impactful learning ecosystem on the planet for small businesses and startups.

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Why build in public? 

1. It brings an impactful source of accountability to drive progress. I’m more likely to eat the daily frog & drag milestones across the finish line if I owe you an update every week.
2. It’s an opportunity to showcase our approach to launching & growing businesses by eating our own dog food. Much of what I write about will be topics we teach inside the community. My hope is that you learn something each week and/or pass it along to someone else who can benefit from the information. 
3. Pausing to write a weekly update creates more objectivity in my head & crystalizes my thinking around the business. It’s my best chance at seeing the company from “outside the jar” so I can make data-driven decisions, also something we teach inside the community. 

Aside from this first issue, I’m committed to keeping them short (under a 4-min read, this one is an 8-min read 😳) while also trying to inform, teach, & be authentic about what’s going on with the company - the good, the bad, & the ugly.

Getting the format right to achieve all of that succinctly will be an iterative process. So, this one will be a little longer than normal as I set expectations & provide a baseline update. 

With that in mind, thank you in advance for your patience, your interest, and most of all, your time. You can unsubscribe at any time at the bottom of any email you receive from me. If you're not receiving value, you'd be doing me a favor by unsubscribing. It would provide some much-needed signal as I'm making all of this noise. Conversely, if they are helpful, let me know with a quick reply from time to time. If there's a topic you'd like covered that would aid your business, please send those over too. 

Here goes:

On the personal front, it’s the weekend after Halloween, which kicks off my annual weight-gain challenge from eating the kids’ candy that they try to hide from me, unsuccessfully. 

Here’s what went down this past week at Vision to Life, organized by company swim lane, which is a useful mental model I apply to so many aspects of a business, (i.e. planning, problem-solving, pitch decks, process creation... you name it and I'll probably drop it in a swimlane to examine it).

Here's what ours look like:

Vision to Life's Company Swimlanes + Departments:

1. GENERAL & ADMINISTRATIVE (G&A): The business of running the business.  (People Ops, Finance, IT, Legal)
2. PRODUCTS & SERVICES: How we deliver value. (Research & Development, Engineering, Product & Service Delivery)
3. REVENUE: How our target market finds out about us & become customers. (Marketing, Sales)
4. CLIENT SUCCESS: How we keep our promise to our customers. (Proactive Outreach, Reactive Support)

The swim lanes branch into smaller departments and sub-departments and use this approach as part of quarterly planning to determine where we need to focus our efforts. The sub-departments are highly unique to every business, and mine are still a work in progress, but it really helps me assess & prioritize the most impactful initiatives so I can spin my wheels as little as possible.

SIDEBAR:  I was going to dump this update in Chat GPT to shorten it up, but I didn't want these updates to lose my voice. AI has made the content scene a bit of a swamp and it feels like authenticity is lacking in a lot of what I'm reading. I decided to launch this newsletter on short notice (this weekend), so as the saying goes, if I had more time I would've written you a shorter letter. I'm also actively working on overcoming my strong perfectionism trait  - it often prevents me from calling things good enough to ship. Done is better than perfect, as my good friend Duck often reminds me, and I want these updates to be authentic. 

***VL Build-in-Public Update: week ending 11-2-24***

GENERAL & ADMINISTRATIVE (G&A): The business of running the business. People Ops, Finance, IT, Legal

• People Ops:

  • Laura (my wife) is getting more involved with the business which has been really nice. She’s currently helping with direct outreach on social (mostly LinkedIn). Her traits (low autonomy, high sociability, high patience, high follow-through) are ideal for executing daily tasks & anything relating to client interactions. While her job description is still being defined (more on that under the product update), she’ll be heading up the new-member onboarding experience & community support, which should be right in her wheelhouse.

  • We brought on a firm to help with offer creation & all things go-to-market. More updates on that below.

• IT: We’re onboarding a new CRM with our new go-to-market firm. I’m a little antsy about the addition to the tech stack and breaking up the customer journey pre and post-sale between two platforms, Pipeline Accelerator & Kajabi, but they’re managing it so we’ll see how it goes.

NEXT WEEK IN G&A:

• Next week we’ll be trying to nail down an official job description for Laura. She has a personality trait profile such that if her work isn't getting done, it's my fault, so I need to get clear on what that is. With clear direction she's one of the best in the world. We're also attending a short training for the new CRM and its functionality around webinars, funnels, & automation. 

PRODUCTS & SERVICES: How we create value by solving a problem for our customers. Digital Products, Productized Services, Services

• Digital Products:

  • Course: “Financial Literacy: From Statements to Budgets” was updated this week with quiz questions at the end of each section. This bolsters the learning experience for people wanting  to understand their financial statements & build a budget for cash planning.

    • If you or anyone you know have always wanted to cut through the jargon and understand the basics of reading financials, this course is for you.

    • I had major imposter syndrome earlier in my journey when I didn't know how to read or glean insights from them. Mismanagement of cash is the #1 killer of small businesses - I've experienced it first-hand as a founder and seen countless others do the same. Half fail in the first five years - we're aiming to reduce that failure rate with Vision to Life's ecosystem.

    • This course was just released and it's 50% off through the end of this year ($199 -> $99). Learn more about this course here.

• Course: “Entrepreneur’s Compass: Crafting Your Business Blueprint” has been stalled at 80% and on the back burner, but we made the decision to include it “as is” in the paid community for now as there’s a lot of great guidance for business owners to create & de-risk their plan. Once it’s complete (just need to finish a couple of lessons & record the videos) it will be for sale as an affordable standalone course, just like our Financial Literacy course.

• E-book: Quickstart Planning Guide is near completion & is about ready to be sent to our Creative Director who will make it beautiful. I wanted to have it finished and ready to use as a lead magnet, webinar leave-behind, or even sell as an impulse buy on social to get people into the ecosystem, so we’re pushing to get that completed this month. I'm currently the bottleneck. 

• • Verticalized LLM Agents: (That’s a mouth of sand, but these are just AI chat bots highly-trained on our methodology & frameworks). We’re creating a cluster of these agents that support the Vision to Life ecosystem. These greatly reduce the time it takes to perform specific operating fundamentals that often go overlooked because they’re too complex, time-consuming, overwhelming, or even blind spots. We currently have four of these LLM agents trained or under construction. This will be a heavy focus in our productized service and is currently my favorite part of the business to work on. 
    • I highly recommend setting up your own internal LLM agents inside your business. It can be done quickly in Chat GPT and it has a simple no-code interface for customization. 

• Productized Services: 

• Community Membership Program: There was always a plan to have a community as part of the Vision to Life Ecosystem, but we’ve recently turned our focus to this being our main offering. I think we’ll always sell one-off digital products, but they’re meant to be entry points into the larger community. I hired a go-to-market firm that started last month to help with the offer creation, go-to-market strategy, and its execution. They’re throwing me in the deep end and providing guidance on building it on the runway, which is a good thing - I need the nudge. I’ve had some feedback from clients that wanted a middle-ticket offering ($400/mo range), but this firm has convinced me to focus on one high-ticket, community-based offer for now, starting in the $3K / mo range. We'll see how it goes & pivot as needed. They know this market well and are helping get it launched - (another nice form of forced accountability). The community membership program experience will be managed out of Kajabi’s community module, which Jenah from our team is making great progress on setting up.

• Services: Consulting

• I’m taking on fewer consulting clients than ever due in part to being heads-down building products to get to market, but also because I’ve not been building a pipeline - classic consulting feast or famine. I plan to eventually shrink this revenue stream to one or two clients max (my current cap is around 8) as our revenue starts to come more from our products & community. I have bandwidth for two more Frac COO clients through the end of this year. 

NEXT WEEK IN PRODUCTS & SERVICES:

• We need to finish the Quickstart Planning Guide ahead of the upcoming webinar. We also need to crystalize the paid community offer & update the website & buyer journey to match. This will require a good bit of deep focus work this week.

REVENUE: Marketing & Sales

• Marketing

New go-to-market firm: Revenue is a swim lane I’ve historically partnered with someone else on, whether it was a co-founder or an agency. All things marketing for the past 18 months has been my binge and I know that it’s currently too big & too important to try and do on my own. It’s not a swim lane I’ve been naturally drawn to either, perhaps because its very nature is public-facing and I consider myself to be a pretty introverted and private person. After a false start and parting of ways with a partner running go-to-market in mid-2023, I just recently sought and contracted a firm that specializes in growing these exact business models. We’re making quick progress on offer & funnel creation as well as content. 

I spent Wednesday with them recording two months of content for our YouTube channel. Yes, I overdid it with the audio-video setup, but that’s what I do. As my good friend Chuckles says, “anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” Our good friends Ashley & Nick offered up a lovely space to record (thank you!). The first thing the interviewer told me was that my shirt matched the walls. 😐 Laura also pointed this out to me during setup and wondered why I didn't wear the green shirt she bought me for the interview. 😬 I should have content back from them and published by the second half of this month. Here’s some other content they’re building out…

... this is a carousel template for Instagram and LinkedIn. I’m leaning towards the blue, mostly because the one on the left reminds me of the YouTuber "Blippi". If you know who that is, then you feel my pain and now have his theme song in your head for the rest of the day..., "Blippiiiiiiiiiii!". If you don't know who that is...

Feel free to chime in on the design if you have strong thoughts - I can be led. You'll start to see these carousels on our social channels soon. 

• •  Social Media: We finished setting up all of our company social properties this week as part of onboarding with this new firm. For whatever reason, I’m more comfortable posting build-in-public & behind-the-scene updates on Instagram, but we'll be posting content on all of them so you can pick your poison by clicking any of the links below:

• • • YouTube

    • LinkedIn

    • Instagram

    • Facebook

    • X / Twitter

• Funnels Under Construction: Part of their program is to build our funnels and manage our campaigns, particularly around driving attendance to webinars at the top of our funnel (a.k.a. TOFU). My hope was to use Kajabi, where we host our website, digital products, newsletter, marketing campaigns, etc., which has a lot of the same functionality as the tool they’re implementing, Pipeline Accelerator. But I didn’t want to pass on the value of them managing the whole process, so it’s increased the size of our tech stack, especially on marketing. Depending on how wonky this makes the customer journey, and how hard it would be to build out in Kajabi, I may or may not keep it after the first six months.

• Webinar: The first webinar we’ll be doing in a few weeks is for busy owners that haven’t prioritized quarterly & annual planning in the past, but want an easy way to get started on planning going forward. This event will be managed by our go-to-market firm, including all the tech related to driving attendance (email & text mostly). I’d also love to have our Quickstart Planning guide ready to go for this event as a leave-behind. 

• Biz Dev:

• LinkedIn Outreach: Laura is hitting up 100 new target customers a week. Her outreach is currently yielding a half dozen calls a week, many for referral partners, which is part of our go-to-market strategy. We’ll keep making the daily effort here to build awareness and distribution channels.

• Sales:

• We’ve never run any revenue through the Vision to Life entity as it’s all been consulting until now, but starting with the launch of our first Vision to Life offers this quarter, we’ll be running revenue through there for the first time. So, as of yet, there are no sales. I hope I’m not giving this same update about no revenue 6 months from now. 😳 

NEXT WEEK IN REVENUE:

• Continue outreach and taking meetings with prospective clients & professional services firms that make good referral sources. We have a meeting scheduled with a company called The Referral Partner Academy on Tuesday. It's supposed to be a good way to bring on high-ticket clients without large, upfront acquisition costs, but we'll see. Curious to hear about their revenue-share model. If anyone knows anything about these models, please ping me.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS

• Proactive: We have V-1 of the initial onboarding process, which Laura and Jenah, our amazing EA, will be helping execute. Laura has been customer-facing in corporate sales her entire career, mostly with named accounts, so she’ll be amazing for new members’ first impression. 

• Reactive: This isn’t something we’ve given a ton of thought to, but Laura and I are both well-versed on this company function. It’ll initially be managed through a shared email inbox. 

NEXT WEEK IN CUSTOMER SUCCESS:

• Nothing to focus on for this swimlane until we have customers onboard, so it's not a focus next week.

Alright, that was a lot, so if you made it this far, then thank you and I hope you feel it was worth your precious time.

Selfishly, it’s helpful to get it all out of my head and in a format where all of our audience, especially our team, can see what we’re building towards. But I'll definitely be sawing the length of these updates in half (at least) going forward.

Was this helpful? Interesting? Too much information? 

My gut says yes on the TMI, but it's time to ship it anyway.

Reply and let me know - they go straight to my inbox. I'm looking to learn from you too. 

See you next week. 

Scott

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