Love, your business Mom w/ Anna Bullock | 227

In this episode of Biz/Dev, we sit down with Anna Bullock, portfolio founder and the voice behind your business Mom, to talk about entrepreneurship, business strategy, and what it takes to build a business with intention.

Anna shares lessons from working with founders, including how to make confident decisions, build systems that support growth, and stay focused on what matters most.

LINKS:

START HERE (newsletter + everything): https://yourbusiness.mom
PODCAST: https://www.youtube.com/@loveyourbusinessmom
LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annabullock/
INSTAGRAM: https://instagram.com/annabullock_cs
WORK WITH ME: https://annabullock.com/contact

WORK WITH ABx2 AGENCY: https://abx2.agency/contact
FREE WEBINAR RESOURCES: https://www.annabullock.com/content/webinars
FEATURED BY: https://www.annabullock.com/features
EMAIL: info@annabullock.com

___________________________________

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Our Hosts

David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Music by: BLXRR

Transcript

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00:00:00:01
David
I can relate to that. I've been in business long enough to relate to all of that, both the good and the bad. Hiring Gary is something I forget for years now.

00:00:11:02
David
Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, joined per usual by Mr. Grumpy Pants Gary Voight. Hello.

00:00:21:01
Gary
Hey. Hello. Pants. That's funny.

00:00:24:07
David
Oh, look, he's trying to be all nice and stuff. You know better. Anyone who's listening to this podcast knows he's super grumpy all the time. More importantly, we are joined by Anna Bullock, who is known as your business Mom. That is a fun one. All right. So we're going to start with some intro questions, but I gotta get back to your business, mom.

00:00:43:08
David
We'd like to start with some some intro questions on mice breakers. Are you ready?

00:00:47:18
Anna
I'm ready.

00:00:49:01
David
All right, let's do this. Are you someone who's into routine or spontaneity?

00:00:55:05
Anna
I love spontaneity, but I rely on routine.

00:00:59:06
David
Whoa. That's deep.

00:01:00:15
Anna
Yeah.

00:01:01:21
David
So you have plans, and then you ignore them?

00:01:04:20
Anna
Sometimes, if I'm being honest with you. More importantly, I make a plan, and then I see an opportunity. And so spontaneously, I'll follow that opportunity, and I'll adjust the plan. Because I used to be type a hardcore planner, and that limited me from trying a lot of new things. So I try to balance both.

00:01:22:10
David
Fair enough. Fair enough. Are you into do you buy new or buy used? Are you a thrift?

00:01:29:21
Anna
I'm a big fan of buy used only because they don't make things as good as they used to. And if they do, they're very expensive.

00:01:36:06
David
So I am sad to admit that this year is my 30th high school reunion, which is much better than Gary because I think his is the 50th anniversary. But reunions is something that makes you excited. Or is there something you would absolutely avoid?

00:01:49:05
Anna
Oh, nine times out of ten avoid. I tend to keep in touch with the people I want to be in contact with. So reunions are often unwelcome.

00:01:57:22
David
That's fair. It reminds me. So I'm old. And when I graduated college, Facebook just started becoming a thing. But it was still college bound and our college was not invited. I would take A and M we went in there, and so we was probably several years after I was out of college, that they opened it up to the public.

00:02:17:18
David
And I remember we would all get excited because we'd go find our high school friends that we hadn't kept in touch with, and we found out what they were doing. And then we all quickly realized, yeah, that's why I stopped talking to you. Right. I think a reunion is a little bit like that, but I don't know. We're still debating whether we're actually going to go or not.

00:02:38:13
David
That is not what this is about. All right. One more. Are you a lake person or an ocean person?

00:02:45:01
Anna
Ocean. Every time.

00:02:46:20
David
Ocean every time. Okay. All right. Fair enough. What about Great Lake?

00:02:51:14
Anna
I don't even think I've been. Where. It's great lake.

00:02:54:04
David
The Great Lakes. Oh, up in the north.

00:02:55:19
Anna
Oh, the Great Lakes. I thought it was like a lake called Great Lake. I was like, no, I haven't been to those either. They sound lovely. There's just something about the ocean. I'm a big beach person.

00:03:04:10
David
I've only seen a great like, once I was in Chicago, and that is so weird. One. You know, it's freshwater in two. It's a lake, but you can't see the other side. It's so big anyway. And there's a beach, which is also strange. Okay, so tell me about your business, mom. That's a very interesting title.

00:03:24:02
Anna
Yes. So I have the kind of elevator pitch that explains what that means and is hard lessons and surviving in business with the warmth and brutal honesty that only a mother can give. And the context behind that is. I have worked in many industries and areas. I did like hospitality and fast food and babysitting and things in my younger years, got into corporate, worked my way up, and ultimately ended up going into business for myself right around the time that I had my first child.

00:03:52:18
Anna
So we worked at this company. I was one of their star employees, very underpaid, very underappreciated, and they would not give me a couple of nights a week off opposite of my husband, to pick up my daughter from daycare, which I thought was a pretty simple ask when you're like, giving me awards. And I'm like, valued. And I've been here a long time.

00:04:10:05
Anna
So I started working for myself not long after that, and I had my second child right after I started my business, which is a really big risk, and I don't advise if it's not how it works out for you, because it was hard to get through that. But becoming a mother just really changed how I interact with the business world.

00:04:26:13
Anna
And even though it makes me really focus on survival, it also makes me treat people with a lot of empathy, because you probably, if you do have kids, know what it's like when you're trying to get things done and someone comes home with a 102 fever. So it's just really embodies the energy that I bring to things and the expertise, because even with my clients, I don't treat them patronizing, but I do give them the guidance and support to one day run on their own with like the systems we build, much like I am doing with my own kids, with life.

00:04:53:20
David
You've said that before. All right, all right.

00:04:56:01
Anna
The first part. Yes, the last part was ad hoc.

00:04:59:00
David
That's pretty good.

00:04:59:15
Anna
Thank you. I think about it a lot.

00:05:02:05
David
So how does that come practically? Is this I know you have a podcast named that, but how does it outside of that? How does that practically turn into business? What does that mean in a real day to day?

00:05:13:20
Anna
So my current expertise that I rely on the most is I, both in corporate and in freelance for many years, have really worked in every position of business, whether that sales and marketing, whether that is like C-suite and leadership, whether that is project management and basic entry level tasks. And so I have a unique ability to understand when there's an effort on the table, all the different parties involved, what they're thinking about, what they care about, and where those friction points are.

00:05:37:13
Anna
So when I was just Anna, the worker, and I was just doing work and working with clients without this kind of ethos of being your business mom, I was getting things done. But when I started leaning into that ideology and leaning into that brand, if you will. It made me approach projects more holistically. So as your business mom, you could come to me if you're like, hey, I'm just not managing my projects well.

00:05:57:01
Anna
And we'll focus on your scheduling, your time, blocking your systems for tracking. But you can also come to me and say, hey, we're growing a team and no one knows what's going on and no one has a visibility. I'm going to start sourcing tools like Asana and ClickUp, helping you build those out. So it allows me to flex the plethora of skills that I have.

00:06:13:13
David
So no one is searching in Google or AI or wherever they're searching nowadays for for your business moms. So what are they searching to find you?

00:06:24:00
Anna
So I have been very blessed that I get a lot of my clients through referrals and inbound, where people just see my LinkedIn or they know me from a previous client when they're searching for the type of work that I do. If you want me to describe it, SEO terms, I would say the main work that I do is systems building.

00:06:39:15
Anna
So that's everything on the back end of your business and whatever software you're using that also is your. So the things you write that we translate into the software and the workflows. And then on the other side of it, it's also strategy. I'm great at helping people identify risk, helping people solve friction in their teams. So it's a little bit of everything.

00:06:56:07
Anna
But people typically find me when they're looking for like better project management, right. Better growth strategy, those kind of keywords.

00:07:03:12
David
Okay, okay. That makes sense. So what is some business mom advice that you give regularly?

00:07:11:06
Anna
Oh, when I give regularly is that we need to define what is urgent. Because if you've ever seen someone with their task list, there could be like 60 items on it due today that are listed as urgent. And there's no way that all of those are the urgent thing that, like the business closes if this doesn't happen. So that's probably the most common advice I give, is what is the true priority?

00:07:31:00
Anna
What determines priority in your organization? And then the second would be whatever you think you need to get this done, double it and then double that. Because whether you have a team, you need to rely on people who might call out and things like that, or you're ambitiously doing something yourself and you say, oh, it'll take me two hours to enter that data, but then you have one issue with the input, and then it takes six hours and now you're behind.

00:07:50:20
Anna
So that's the other very common advice that I learned the hard way.

00:07:54:04
David
Nice. So what is the motherly advice that you give that everyone ignores.

00:08:00:20
Anna
Oh okay. I love that question actually. So that people ignore I would say the first is actually related to the first piece of advice about priority. Because I work with a lot of founders, I work with a lot of team leaders, but I also work with their teams. And so often I will meet with someone and I'll say, hey, you're telling me your priority is profitability, for example, right?

00:08:23:14
Anna
But you're not doing x wise things in accounting, right? To speed up how these invoices are going out. You're not doing x, y, z things with team management to project out. Oh, we're going to need someone to come in and do this work. Now you're behind on projects. Now you're not profitable because your clients are mad. So I would say the most ignored is people looking within themselves and with the business and truly deciding what the priorities are, and if their decisions are aligning with them, they often ignore that advice and then come six months later when things are on fire.

00:08:50:17
David
I can relate to that. I've been in business long enough to relate to all of that, both the good and the bad. Hiring Gary is something I've regretted for years now.

00:08:58:23
Anna
It seems like.

00:09:00:05
Gary
Yet I'm still here for some reason.

00:09:02:11
Anna
It's you might need to talk about your priorities, David.

00:09:06:16
Gary
I always important enough.

00:09:08:15
David
But yeah, not important to actually fire. And so I was like, I'll do that tomorrow. It's what is that Princess bride most likely. Good job Wesley I'll kill you in the morning. Something like that. Is that too old of a reference? Did I just say my, you know, Princess, do you look bewildered? Come on, you don't know.

00:09:24:14
Anna
I don't know, Princess Bride.

00:09:26:10
Anna
But I got the reference.

00:09:28:17
Gary
I just remember Andre the Giant being in it. That's basically it. And then the little guy who became immune to poison.

00:09:35:08
David
You need to go see. You need to go see Princess Bride again. That's. That's homework. No.

00:09:40:08
Anna
That's okay. I can watch a movie.

00:09:42:01
David
That's a great movie. I just saw Supergirl. It's. Man, just so you know, let's see here. But this is you. Your business mom persona, as it were, is your podcast. But you're also. You have another business, right?

00:09:53:13
Anna
Yes. So that is the fun part of this. The business mom stuff came at a point of really big transition in my business. I used to just brand myself with all of my technical skills and my project management expertise, and I would just call it Anna Bullock Custom Solutions because I was making a custom solution for each client, whatever that need was.

00:10:09:15
Anna
And I've really outgrown that. I'm at a place in my business where, when it comes to operational work systems and strategy, I've now developed an agency with my co-founder, Abdullah. We have a very curated team, depending on project needs, where we just realize even though we're both experts in the field, we don't have time to do the level of execution we want to because we are really in the thick of the strategy and developing new processes in our industry.

00:10:33:09
Anna
So ABx2 Agency is what we run, and that is for a lot of what my traditional clients would be through, which is like we need to track our work, we need to time, our time, those kind of things. I am branching out with my skill set, and I've been working with a lot of clients and really enjoying the creative side of my skills.

00:10:49:11
Anna
So people who are growing their business, they need strategy, support. They need a little help with the branding. Not like a full fledged design studio, but looking at your agency or your business growth in the lens of strategy and design and branding and how it's going to impact you. A lot of people just get stuck on ideas. I'm really good at pulling ideas out of people.

00:11:07:18
Anna
And then because I have the project management experience, helping them make a real plan and not just have a canvas sheet of, someone told me that my brand would be better if I did these things, so that has been soft launch. I haven't publicly launched it yet, so it depends on when this episode comes out. But yeah, I've just diversified.

00:11:23:08
Anna
And now instead of being a solo working professional, which I did for half a decade, I'm really a team leader and I'm really good at finding talented people to help me support. I lead the charge, but I'm able to bring on people to get things done more quickly and a little bit more effectively than just one person.

00:11:43:19
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00:12:09:06
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00:12:27:22
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00:12:39:00
David
So you have a concept called the expansion trap. Tell me about that.

00:12:42:10
Anna
Yes. So all credit to my co-founder Abdullah calls this the expansion trap. And what it means is growth is great for business. I have a client who says, very well, no matter what our mission is, no matter our ethos as a business entity, our goal is to make money, because if we are not making money, we're not really a business.

00:13:00:04
Anna
We're just people who have a shared goal. That's fair. And what happens is businesses need to grow in order to achieve that. Most of the time. And when you're growing, it often is more of a trap than it is an empowerment to increase your revenue and increase your profitability. Because let's say you're growing a team. If you didn't think about the steps to onboard that team, how much time that was going to take.

00:13:19:16
Anna
If you didn't vet them properly, then your team becomes a trap because they're doing bad work and you're staying up till two in the morning to fix things that you promise to clients. If you bring on a lead generating firm. There's so many of those now and you're like, I want to grow this way, and we're getting all these leads, but you don't properly hire to do the projects or you don't properly vet the leads.

00:13:36:12
Anna
That becomes a trap as well because you're growing. You've got a great pipeline, but what are you doing with it? You can't do anything because you didn't think it through. And so we have this ethos of building your systems to actually track not what you think your process is, but what do you actually do day to day? Keep track of it, communicate it to your team, and then you can properly project what your output can be and where you're going to need to bring on support or change processes to actually grow.

00:13:58:05
Anna
Then it's not a trap. Then you're just making money and growing your business.

00:14:01:14
David
So what is the warning sign that someone is headed for that trap? What's a practical? You see it coming? You. I know from what work we do, I can. I call it telling your future. When I know where you're the path you're about to walk. And I'm about to explain it to you. I know when I've done that right.

00:14:19:12
David
And they're all nodding that I've done my job well. So I assume you have something along that same want. What is when you tell someone their future, what are you seeing?

00:14:27:12
Anna
So the warning signs are often a really common one. Is the proportion of meetings to production time. This varies by industry, but we often find that even like creative agencies or even like I worked with the IT firm once that had their team in meetings half the day. If you're meetings are overwhelming, your schedule and your deliverable to clients is not just consultation.

00:14:47:17
Anna
That's a great warning sign because your team doesn't have time to execute the work from those meetings. Another great sign is if you have founders or team leaders who are doing a lot of unpaid extra time. So you'll often notice they're really passionate to build a company. They're like, yeah, I'm just working 24/7 and that's that's great.

00:15:04:23
Anna
But if you take on two more projects, you're going to run out of you. You're going to start falling behind on deadlines. So those are the two biggest ones that I see. Another one that I think is less talked about is the need to communicate status. And what I mean by that is if you're working on a task and let's say you have, let's make it simple.

00:15:21:19
Anna
It's like an article that's going on your website and you're like this big company and that's like your content team. You have a calendar that someone in leadership helped craft to say, these are all the articles we're going to put out. You have copywriters doing research, writing the copy. You have a designer making the graphics, and you have someone other in development or design putting it on the website.

00:15:38:21
Anna
If all of them have to talk to each other to know what they need to work on, that's also a sign of the expansion trap, because you're not properly tracking in an easy single source of truth the status of things. I shouldn't have to look at Greg or whoever and say, are you done with that article? I should just know because the article should say ready for design and I should just click it in whatever software we're using.

00:15:57:21
David
Okay, yeah, I fall and I think all of those at some point.

00:16:02:11
Anna
Most people do.

00:16:04:17
David
I think.

00:16:05:00
David
As a founder, you're wired.

00:16:08:03
David
To the point where one you probably don't mind working with your spouse will be the one who tells you to stop doing that. Yeah, my my wife gets mad at me because I don't take holidays most of the time. There has been a coup inside of Big Pixel for the last several years. To add more holidays to our schedule, we're up to six now.

00:16:29:12
Gary
You're the only one that would refer to it as a coup when the rest of the rest of everybody's everybody else. Because these days off, bro.

00:16:36:19
David
Hey, they also don't get a week off for Christmas. I'm just saying. I'm just saying many entrepreneurs think they need more customers when what they really need is better operations. How do you help someone recognize the difference?

00:16:49:03
Anna
It's the same way that I've had to do it for myself over many years, but I wish I had learned sooner. You need more customers if you have nothing to do, so you need more customers. If you're you're charging money, you're profitable, you're getting the work done on time and you're like, oh man, I still have four hours a day and no client work to fill it.

00:17:08:04
Anna
That's easy. You need more customers, right? You're doing great work. You're on track if you need better operations, which is I'm on record like 90% of the time, probably higher. It's harder to see because let's say you're like, oh, we're strapped for cash where we got good projects. We got ten clients. Right now we're paying the team. They're doing good work.

00:17:27:02
Anna
Often you either are not charging enough, right. So it's like you actually need better operations on the sales side to properly price these projects for the labor that you're going to put out or you're not hitting your deadlines. And then clients are getting frustrated, your team is capped and you're like, okay, well, I'm paying everyone and I'm still not making money.

00:17:43:16
Anna
Just bringing in more clients is going to make that worse and you're going to start losing money. So I think it has to do with like, how much time do you and your team have where there's nothing to do? If there's always something to do, then you just need to focus on operations until you get your time back.

00:17:55:17
Anna
It's not a popular answer because it doesn't grow your bottom line immediately like some of these. Oh, I just brought you $75,000 in contracts, but it does make it stable. And that's a big thing for me.

00:18:05:07
David
You know, you say.

00:18:06:06
David
That I feel as the founder. Yeah. There's a lot of busy work, like you say. Oh, you have nothing to do. Then you need more clients. Oftentimes, I find, especially early, early days, there was a lot of navel gazing going on that I thought was productive business work, but it really wasn't. And so I almost I don't know how you see the difference there, but there were a lot of times where I thought I was being productive when I really wasn't doing anything important.

00:18:36:06
David
And so you're what is that? Oh, I'm going to butcher the quote. It was don't mistake movement for progress.

00:18:44:18
David
Something like that.

00:18:46:10
David
You're jumping up and down. You're moving a lot, but you're not moving forward. I think a lot of people, especially new founders who have no idea what they're doing, get stuck in that. They're doing things that aren't moving the needle.

00:18:58:06
Anna
That's an extension on something I mentioned earlier, which is like when I was talking about priorities. I think a lot of founders and even sometimes team leaders working for them out, not accurately assessing what they do in a day or assessing what they're working on. So, for example, I can sit at my computer and as a founder, there's many things I need to do.

00:19:19:07
Anna
I need to post content, I need to reach out to clients, I need to make sure we're working on deliverables. There's a million things I need to do, but I might get caught up and I've made this mistake. I might get caught up going, oh, but the new website for the new thing we're doing has to be perfect.

00:19:30:14
Anna
It has to be really good. So I start spending all my time on that. But it doesn't matter, because by the time the website is done, we're starting at ground zero because we didn't spend any time continuing to nurture leads and get client relationships. So there's no magic answer. And I find that a lot of consultants brand their work on this is the thing you're missing as a business owner, and that's how they make money.

00:19:49:17
Anna
But that's part of the problem is that as a founder, you think I need to go build a bot that's going to send cold emails and that's going to be efficient, because then that bot, I'm assuming, was supposed to send emails in the future and all that kind of stuff, right? In reality, you didn't stop enough at the beginning to do proper discovery of yourself, right?

00:20:05:15
Anna
Because you just decided to do something to realize you didn't need a bot or to send emails. What were the emails supposed to give you? Were they giving you feedback on your product? Were they getting you customers? What was the goal of that cold email?

00:20:15:18
David
I was trying to do less, so I was hoping to get a couple of meetings where I could do demos and whatnot.

00:20:22:02
Anna
Okay, if you all for the demos, you want those leads, you just want the feedback on the tools for people to get interested and want to use it. Right.

00:20:30:01
David
Vengeance itself. Okay, cool.

00:20:31:16
Anna
So of course, I feel like that's the common founder story. But I will say with the bot, it would have been more effective, right? And of course, in hindsight, maybe it's bias, but it would have been more effective to say, okay, I want leads. I need some feedback on this. I'd like to get paid for it. You could very easily actually post a preview demo to your socials and say, hey, here's a sneak peek into what we've been building at X startup, whatever the company is called, and there will be people in your DM's inbound because people love proof.

00:21:00:07
Anna
They don't trust cold emails. They don't even trust real emails. I even get a double take. When I got the intro for this podcast in my messages, I was like, let me go. Make sure it's a real podcast. Let me see who this person is, right? Because you just you don't. People are crazy and they're always phishing.

00:21:12:11
David
So it's not a real podcast. This is all very this is a serious phishing scam. We're all bots.

00:21:19:11
Anna
You're going to hack into my computer while we're chatting, right?

00:21:21:15
David
No.

00:21:21:22
David
That's what Gary's been doing. He doesn't.

00:21:23:19
Anna
Of course. Why? He's so quiet.

00:21:25:09
David
He's useless. Other than his ability to hack into people's computers. Live. Right, Gary? That's what you do?

00:21:32:05
Gary
Yeah. You built a bot to send cold emails to people who hate getting cold emails from bots.

00:21:37:23
Anna
And that's what I'm saying is, I think it's.

00:21:40:06
David
I can't tell you how many people told me and still told me you can find it anywhere in the internet. Cold email still work, right? That don't not send cold emails. Okay, cool. The difference is you have to send a lot more than you used to. So I was like, okay, I'll send 50 a day. And I did that for a couple of weeks and I got nothing.

00:21:58:20
David
And I was like, clearly this is not working. So I at least had the wherewithal to go. Stop.

00:22:03:21
Anna
But okay. It's, you know, how restaurants and like, coffee shops will have a sign outside. Oh, we're doing a ham sandwich special today, right? Sometimes a business owner might put that sign out and no one comes in the store. And other times somebody might put a sign like that out, and it just it goes viral on TikTok, and suddenly they're a super successful business because they got all this new foot traffic.

00:22:23:15
Anna
You're focus so much on cold emails do work. And that's been proven to me. But you're not assessing. Okay, maybe I put up a ham sandwich in a neighborhood that's predominantly vegan, right? Or predominantly doesn't eat pork. Or maybe it only did well because our barista is really good at signs or whatever. There's people don't think about. There so many factors.

00:22:42:03
Anna
I feel like you're focused on one factor, and that's a common mistake founders make is like, oh, cold emails work. I should do those. I get that in my every day. Oh, I can help you send cold emails.

00:22:50:20
David
But here's the challenge. Here's where I want to push on it.

00:22:54:01
Anna
Do it. I like pushing.

00:22:55:04
David
If I'm not getting feedback to tell me that it's because my sign out front is misspelled as I'm doing something stupid, but really obvious. But no one's telling me anything. How does a founder improve? Right? How does a founder go from. Because I'm just doing the best I can write. I'm barely literate. I'm writing my ham sandwich thing and I put it out front, but literally everyone walks by it.

00:23:18:16
David
They make fun of me because I'm an idiot, but they're not saying that, so I have no idea. I'm an idiot. I think it's a great sign. It's a stupid example, but it proves the point, right? I'm shooting out emails. They might be trash. No, I didn't have misspellings on them, but they might be trash. Or they might be mistreated or whatever.

00:23:35:12
David
But how do you. That's where I don't get this. Like, everybody talks about AB test this and go and try these 12 things. But if zero people get back to you, you're just screaming into a vacuum.

00:23:48:02
Anna
Absolutely.

00:23:49:01
David
That is where I find when I've been doing my startup. And this is where I found a lot more empathy because I was big pixel at a very different kind of thing. But that is it. I don't know, I still don't. My startup is still struggling with that is how do you get past the vacuum where you get that feedback, where you can at least, you know, fix your spelling mistakes, write or put better art?

00:24:13:04
David
Or again, I'm just murdering this analogy, but whatever, you know what I'm saying? That's where I don't see that, and I have not gotten a good answer on that. I just keep trying. No.

00:24:22:20
Anna
I'm going to tell you something different, okay?

00:24:25:03
Anna
Because you could.

00:24:25:17
Anna
And you could prove me wrong in six months and then you get 400 responses, right? That is away. I'm a fan of diversifying the approach. And what I mean is not like that's not a trademark. It's not a thing. I'm not going to make you believe me again. But you tried cold emails. You didn't get any responses to know if it worked.

00:24:42:00
Anna
Other than one person told you to shut up and they do that when it's a real email, you opened a door. It turned out to be a vacuum. Okay, that sucks. It doesn't mean you can't go back to it later. It doesn't mean you can't reproach cold email. But if you got absolutely nothing, you take the point of it.

00:24:54:17
Anna
Which is why I asked you what the goal was, which is getting your demos out there and getting customers, and you go, okay, what are my other doors? What are my other channels? And you can go, I'm going to take the same messaging, same idea. I'm going to make a preview video and postage my LinkedIn. I'm going to go to this like Triangle developers or Triangle marketing people, whatever your industry or startups in, I'm going to post it in one of those random community threads and just say, hey guys, like trying to get some feedback on this.

00:25:16:21
Anna
Anybody have thoughts? I'm going to go talk to people in person at some conference and show them a video on my phone? There's a lot of the ways are stupid, but brainstorm 100 different channels. Pick the ones that seem to make sense to you. Because I'll be honest, part of the best feedback I ever got and don't sleep on this is from friends and family.

00:25:33:15
Anna
So the work I was doing by myself that I now do more in the context of the agency is really important work. It's super impactful work, but it's really hard to explain to people. I feel like we've even to an extent struggled to explain it on this podcast. Right? Because I'm trying to find the words and one thing that my friends and family would tell me, like, I had a friend who told me that she just tells people I have a job about job for jobs because she just couldn't explain it.

00:25:54:15
Anna
And I started realizing, oh, okay, that's where I found the word systems. Systems wasn't enough because some people treat systems as. Oh, you're super technical and you're going to do everything in the back end that, like the people we hire it for, does. So then I had to start explaining, okay, I focus on the systems in your business that help you get your workflows documented and automated where possible, make them visible.

00:26:13:13
Anna
So it's a lot of trial and error, but like the people closest to you are a great way to start if you're failing. But also, the agency didn't start getting clients until we started putting out content. So we would go to ClickUp webinars and we would demonstrate things that we built and people would come. Oh, that's super cool.

00:26:28:11
Anna
My business needs something like that. I did a webinar where I said, can Bob the builder fix his leaky pipeline? Because I just like to be fun with it. And I literally had a guy text me and was like, I'm Bob. I also have a very technical, like in-person business, and I'm struggling to manage my pipeline, and we did great work together.

00:26:43:21
Anna
So that's something else I would encourage. It's not to like it could be some special thing about your email, but if you're out of data, doing more of it is cool, but only doing more of it is bliss. You need to say what's another way I can take the same goal in the same message, put it in a different format, get it to a different group of people.

00:27:00:05
Anna
And so that comes in communities, channels, podcasts, all that stuff.

00:27:04:07
David
On the spot.

00:27:04:19
Anna
So I'm here.

00:27:06:09
David
Let's I magically think there's 12 channels. Okay. I start at one and I go through when do I move from channel one to channel two? Let's say channel one is cold emails. How many emails do you send before you say this is not working? Because I find a lot of people I sent ten, why didn't I get any responses?

00:27:25:06
David
And you're like, that's barely trying, right? Yeah. Practically speaking, how many? And I know obviously the number is different per channel, but how many emails should you send before you're like, okay, I'm going to move to LinkedIn. And then how many LinkedIn ballpark do I start reaching out and doing things before I'm like, this sucks. And then how many blah blah blah.

00:27:45:08
David
Is it 100 emails? Is it 5000 emails? Is it 25 LinkedIn posts? Like, when do you say because you're in the vacuum, right? No one's telling you squat. So when do you have to pull the plug on yourself?

00:27:57:22
Anna
That's a great question. So for email I often find cold email to be like my last resort strategy. So I have bias there. But for cold email I would say 400 is a good sample size for the fact that you didn't get any responses. I like numbers that you know how like percent is from 1 to 100. If the division on that is super simple, like if I sent to 50 people, so one person is 2%, that doesn't feel big enough.

00:28:20:02
Anna
So I would say 400, probably a safe number to go. Okay, maybe this isn't the right route, but you could thug it out until 1000. After 1000, then it's okay. Every single person did not respond. I now have 100% times ten like this isn't working. So that's how I think about email because it is a mass volume. I would also question who you sent them to where you got these emails from, because if they're like past clients or if they're like industry friends who might be interested, then I would say the 400 is a failure rate, but if they're just like random emails you got from research, then I would say you might keep going

00:28:50:20
Anna
to the 1000, because that context matters when it comes to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a patience game, and I don't think people realize that it doesn't work like a lot of the other apps. So you would need to post about like your product and the different things you're building for at least 1 to 3 months before you would know if LinkedIn was a viable channel for you.

00:29:07:08
Anna
When it comes to communities, you don't want to just show up in a community you're part of, and the first thing you ever say is, hey guys, come look at my product. I'm trying to get feedback on it and you've never contributed. So I would say from the community perspective, if you're in like for example, I'm not a social media person by trade, but I have to do it for my business.

00:29:23:07
Anna
I'm in this thing called social club, so I learn from those people, but when they have questions about process and things like that, I give my insights so that when I have questions about social, it's super natural for them to answer my question. So I would say for communities, there's not really a time limit. Depends on if it's like on slack, in person, etc. but people have to see you and don't quote me.

00:29:41:08
Anna
You can quote me, but I'm not the person who said this. Somebody told me, it's like they have to see you for seven times or seven hours before they trust you so much that into your community, before you feel like you can get valuable feedback.

00:29:52:09
David
Nice. Okay. That's good. Rules of thumb.

00:29:54:21
Anna
Thank you.

00:29:56:08
David
All right. Gary is up.

00:29:58:10
Gary
In it. Now with all this experience you've had working with these clients, what would you put together as your top three pieces of advice you would give a new founder when they're starting their business?

00:30:08:14
Anna
Absolutely. The first piece of advice is be really clear about what is in your expertise and what's not. That's to make sure you're like marketing yourself as things you can actually do. The second piece of advice would be to get really comfortable not being liked, because you are going to meet founders or clients or whoever it is that your market is, and you're going to want every single one of them to want to sign a contract and work with you.

00:30:33:15
Anna
And they might. But if you are doing things in the discovery and interview process to appease them or to lean to what they're asking for, and it's not true to your process or what works for you, you're just going to end up biting that whether in profit or reputation. And then the third thing I would say is something I already said earlier, which is however much time you think you need to do this, whether it's grow your business or how your first employee take that, double it and double it again because you just don't know until you start.

00:31:00:01
Gary
Excellent. Now, if anybody wants to learn more about you or loving their business mom, where can they reach out to find you?

00:31:09:20
Anna
Okay, to be clear, it's love.

00:31:11:11
Anna
Comma, because it's like signing a letter so they don't have to love me. It's like I'm telling them things. Love, your business Mom.

00:31:16:11
Anna
So just making sure that, yes, you must love me.

00:31:19:23
Anna
Know if they want to learn about if they want to learn from other smart people like you guys who I interview on the podcast, then they would go to YouTube and look for love comma, your business mom, it's the channel. It's literally at @loveyourbusinessmom on the channel extension, we have new episodes all the time. I have a million episodes I'm super behind on because to that point about the lesson of it takes longer than you think.

00:31:38:13
Anna
It takes a lot longer to put out a podcast than people think it does, but that's where they can go there. When it comes to me, the easiest place to find me is either at my email. That's just info@annabullock.com. I check that every day and then when it comes to interacting with me, LinkedIn is my most common channel.

00:31:53:04
Anna
And that's just look up Anna Bullock on LinkedIn. It'll say your business Mom in the headline, I'm pretty easy to find.

00:31:59:04
Gary
All right? And we'll make sure that those links all get into the show notes for everybody.

00:32:03:14
Anna
Awesome.

00:32:05:10
David
Very good. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been a lot of fun.

00:32:09:06
Anna
I have enjoyed it. It was great getting to know you guys.

00:32:11:14
David
All righty. And on that note, we are done for this week. We'll be back next week. Thank you everybody for joining us. We'll be back next time.

00:32:18:18
Ad/Outro
That wraps up this episode of the Biz Dev Podcast. Thanks for listening. Let us know your thoughts. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at hello at the Big Pixel Network. Connect with us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. Businesses A production of Big Pixel, a US based provider of UX design, strategy and custom software.

00:32:41:22
Ad/Outro
This podcast is edited by Matt McCracken. Yes, that is his name and me, Christy pronto, marketing guru for Big Pixel.