#185: Building Your Dream eComm Team

Episode: 185

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Brenda Ruby – Former COO of successful company Snow

Subtitle: “Building Your Dream Ecom Team”

Final Show Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWjlgiI9M60

Back on Lunch with Norm… Brenda Ruby joins today’s Lunch with Norm to talk about the importance of building a great team, how culture plays a role in eCommerce success, and best practices to hiring. Brenda was part of the initiation of Snow, brand that she helped grow as the COO going from $0 to a 9 figure multimillion-dollar e-commerce brand, Now she serves as partner and advisor to Snow and now is out on her own to consult the next big startups in e-commerce and helps other brands.

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In this episode, we discuss:

• 0:00 Intro/Housekeeping                    
• 3:10 Welcome Brenda Ruby                   
• 6:10 When to Start Growing your Team    
• 9:14 Having Same Passion with the Team        
• 12:16 Understanding Policies and Procedures
• 15:37 Finding People for your Dream Ecom Team
• 18:16 Building Company Culture
• 23:19 Mistakes when Hiring an Employee
• 24:49 Tips for New Sellers Building your Ecom Team                            
• 27:31 KPI’s for Measuring Job Performance
• 31:52 The Importance of Creating a Detailed Job Description
• 34:00 Managing Team Expectations

• 42:00 Coordinating Meeting Times with Different Time Zones
• 43:48 Managing Employees Expectations

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• Sellers Tools – https://seller.tools/
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Norman Ferrar  0:01  

Hey everyone this is Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with Norm the Amazon FBA and Ecommerce podcast.  Alright, on today’s show, we’re going to be talking about something really cool how to build your dream ECOM team. Our guest today is a returning guest. And she has helped grow snow from zero to nine figures in less than four years. And she acted as the Chief Operating Officer. She’s also grown multiple teams and developed award winning products. She’s led partnerships, she’s got involved with high level tier influencers like the Kardashians, and we’re talking about Brenda Ruby, so I can’t wait to talk to her. But before I do, I just wanted to give a great big thank you to our sponsor, global wired Advisors, a leading digital investment bank focused on optimizing the business sales process. For more information, please visit Chris and his team over at globalwiredadvisors.com Where are you boy wonder?

Kelsey  1:18  

Hello, Happy Wednesday.

Norman Ferrar   1:20  

Happy Wednesday. Now just before we get into everything right? You might be taking over this podcast. Just putting it out there.

Kelsey  1:28  

Possibly, maybe. But we’ve been having some WiFi issues with the beard guy here. So we’re keeping our fingers crossed that it holds up for an hour, but we will see. Yeah, but anyways, jumping right into it. If you haven’t yet, please smash those buttons and share this episode to friends and family. Anyone in the Amazon e comm sphere. We do have a really great price today as well. So I think you guys really enjoy that. And let me see if you’re interested in full episodes of the show. Go on over to our YouTube channel. And you can find our whole catalogue of episodes. We have over 180 episodes to date. So, full episodes and daily highlights are all there. And if you’re interested in some private group sessions with me and norm, as well as free SOPs, some freebies like a lunch with Norm mug and a whole bunch of other goodies. You can go over to our lunch with Norm website and click on the membership button and you’ll be able to see everything there. Everything that we have to offer if you’re interested and welcome the beard nation, Daniel from Brazil, Amazon Lambo Guru, I know that must be Simon and Dr. Cas. Alright. Welcome, everyone. And we can get started. Oh, you’re on mute.

Norman Ferrar   2:57  

No, I’m not there. Okay, so any questions, just throw it over to the comment section. And get ready. Sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and welcome. Where are you? Brenda? 

Brenda Ruby

Hello

Norman Ferrar

How are you?

Brenda Ruby  3:12  

I’m so happy to be back. This is my third time and every time I like a really good coffee conversation. So thank you for having me.

Norman Ferrar   3:21  

Now, did Kelsey ever send you your mug and m&ms?

Brenda Ruby  3:24  

I don’t have my mug, Kelsey. I’m gonna need that.

Kelsey  3:29  

You know, somewhere read on that.

Norman Ferrar   3:31  

Oh, there we go. There we go. So next time, you’ll have your mug and some m&ms. So for those of us who don’t know you can you just give a little bit of background information?

Brenda Ruby   3:43  

Yes, so my name is Brenda Ruby Mendez. And I am from Phoenix, Arizona here. And I am and a daughter of an immigrant so came to the US four years old. And all I knew was go through the educational path. And I did that very well. I went to Arizona State University and graduated within three years in the accounting industry because that is the most guaranteed industry you can get into. And I went to work for a quick second at Deloitte loved a great company. I had a company car before I was 21. And I was like what is this American dream. And it wasn’t quick before I left that in join a marketing agency. And that’s where me and my current partner of snow started snow, built the marketing agency and then quickly exit that to start snow as soon as it took off. I feel like all agencies start to work with E commerce internally to do what they’re telling their clients that you can do. And so that’s what we did. And snow just took off a snowball effect from the very, very beginning and I grew that to 100 million in four years. And through that I develop teams I develop products I talk to suppliers, I would go to sleep at 4am just reiterating the packaging, I created the packaging with a lot of love. And after that I left a year and a half ago, due to burnout and just not having my my life back. And after that, I gained all that experience. And now I do consulting for startups, and I help them avoid just not just the burnout, but also the mistakes, the millions of dollars of mistakes, I did it at snow that I learned. So that’s what I’m doing now.

Norman Ferrar   5:30  

You know, just kind of keeping on topic today, that burnout is part of it. That’s why we need a good team, you know, so they can take that off of your hands. Would you agree?

Brenda Ruby  5:41  

Yes. And that is exactly it. You know, I miss working with the team right now and growing a team and having my weekly meetings with them. But that is exactly what you need behind you to grow to grow a brand.

Norman Ferrar   5:56  

Right? And I don’t even know where to get started here. Because there’s so much I love growing teams, I see huge mistakes. And we can get into that a little bit later. But let’s talk about first of all, when do you even start? When do you consider growing your team?

Brenda Ruby  6:14  

When do you consider growing your team? Yeah, I’ll let you know a little story of when I knew I needed to hire somebody else. I was doing customer service, just like everybody else. At the beginning we do we wear a lot of hats, and I did customer service. And I knew I needed to hire somebody else when I would go to sleep at 3am doing send us tickets and they would not go down. And then I would go to sleep and wake up and there was more, there was a lot more. So I knew my time wasn’t decreasing the outcome. And I needed to duplicate myself. And so I took a low notepad. And I during a week I wrote down everything that I was I couldn’t do anymore. Everything that I was doing, that I was just couldn’t get it lower or couldn’t get a better outcome. And so I had a list of like 20 things, of course, but I said, the biggest ones because we focus on the customer experience. I said, I need a great team on customer service to help me with this. And now that I know the ins and outs, and I know the questions and I develop those questions and templates. Now I can go on and hire a team for that. So I knew that when I just couldn’t handle it myself.

Norman Ferrar  7:33  

So if I understand what you said, you you’ve created a task board. So you just jot it down every task. Yeah, something during the day, you’re jotting it down. The next step, would you take those tasks? And would you put them to dollar values like 10 100 1000 and just say, Okay, these are the $10 jobs, I got to get them off my plate.

Brenda Ruby  7:58  

And that is very important. That’s a great point. Because some of the task my time now that I knew the company and and now, me doing customer service isn’t really driving the company forward me in another area of the business is moving the vision forward. So I had to what it’s really important as an entrepreneur to understand when you’re working in the business rather than on the business. So understanding Yes, the fundamentals of your company. So you can develop the best SOP so you can develop the best systems and processes and train somebody else how to do it. And eventually, obviously hiring the right person, they’re going to do it better than you. So get so understanding that yes, we got that. But also knowing that your time and where you’re best at in the company at that time, you need to get there fast. So you can drive that company forward instead of holding it that

Norman Ferrar   8:58  

you’re an entrepreneur, you start off this really great brand. And by the way, if anybody’s not seen the packaging for snow, check it out. It is absolutely 100% The most incredible packaging out there. But anyways, how did you get people that are doing your customer service to have the passion that you have or your partner has about snow?

Brenda Ruby 9:25  

So it took it took a while because just at the beginning entrepreneurs have a hard time delegating and letting go of what they used to do because they think they can do it the best. And to a point yes, but again, if you hire the right team, they’re going to teach you how to do it and they’ll surprise you. So the way I made sure that was a is one I built the the responses of the frequently asked questions, and I would train them very well and I looked for people that that had the soft skills and What I mean by the soft skills is they, they actually enjoyed their work they they had, they wanted to be part of the mission of the company, which was delivering confidence. And so I, there was a lot of employees at the beginning, not only in customer service, but in the whole company that came because they were, there were customers of snow. And, and they had tried the product, so they believe it in it. And they were the the byproduct of getting confidence through the products. So I made, I made it a point to build the templates, this is the way I do it, this is the way I talk to them, if they have a really hard problem, we get a really challenging customer service ticket, they will still come to me. But the biggest point in customer service that I develop was having a weekly and a monthly meeting of the whole team of customer service team and and we would go through some tickets, some of the challenging tickets, and how do we address them, so everybody gets to learn. And then the tickets that people just rave about us and loved us. And let’s bring up the positive tickets. And let’s look at the responses. And also, if you have a software like gorgeous or send send us that handles customer service, you’re able to look at the data. So we would bring up the data. And we said it took two responses to close out this ticket. And so that was amazing. Let’s let’s look at let’s look at how Linda was able to respond to the customer in only two tickets to get their result. Oh, let’s look at Sonya who took 10 responses, and that customers still not satisfied. Let’s talk about him. Let’s see how we can bring it down closer. So looking at the analytics is also important. So I

Norman Ferrar   11:53  

like what you were talking about with your frequently asked questions. So your customer service team had a go to template for canned responses. No, no, I’m not talking about canned. I’m just talking about knowing how to handle the response. So that’s a really great and that’s really efficient so that you’re keeping your message on point. The other thing I’d like to know you talked about social are SOPs, policies and procedures. Very important. Where did you learn? How did you start to understand SOPs?

Brenda Ruby  12:26  

Well, I’m gonna bring it back. I am an accounting major. I love spreadsheets. And I love being super organized. And I need the steps and I need to be certain. So it was a very natural skill set of mine too, to make sure that I have everything that I need myself through all the documents, and I love Google Drive. Still, to this point, a lot of my startups and myself uses it. And so I would have these really nice folders and within those folders, I would have all the worksheets and spreadsheets for employees for for vendors for everything, right. So the way you are going to teach your employees the way you you communicate in they communicate with you, the way you run things, it’s your mirror image of what they’re going to be like, and you set the tone from the very beginning. So for me is like these are the folders this, this is where all the steps are this is the video, this is a tutorial, and I made sure that if something new came up, or there was a new way, or I hired a really good manager now to manage customer service. And they thought of an amazing way, I made sure that we added that in so that we can all learn from that. And so it trickled down it was almost like a rate, a gray waterfall of how you start things and how you pivot during that time.

Norman Ferrar   13:58  

So before we get in to some of my other questions, please if you do have questions about building a team, make sure you throw them into the comment section there. And if Kelsey is on his job, we’ll get to them later. And then we have a giveaway today. So Brenda, why don’t you talk about what and this is a really great giveaway. So talk about your giveaway.

Brenda Ruby  14:21  

Yes, so I’m going to be doing one hour consulting on just diving into any challenges or any new marketing strategies for their own business and a branding audit, and the branding audit. I actually love to do these for fun and I do these to all of my clients on my onboarding. I go through their social media, their website and their customer, their customer journey, just to see if there’s any gaps or any ways to improve that and any ideas on how to how to make it better. So I will be going through their branding and doing the little art Get on that.

Norman Ferrar   15:01  

All right. So consultation and the brand audit. That’s fantastic. So if you’re interested in that, and I definitely would be, look, you’re talking to a seller that builds something from zero to nine figures in four years, I think I’d pay attention. Anyways, that’s hashtag, we’ll have Kelsey, if you’re interested in getting a second entry. That would be just take two people either in this channel or outside. And we’ll get to that. So once again, please ask questions. We’ll be taking them starting at around 1240. Eastern Standard Time. So now let’s talk about the actual process itself, hiring those people. Now. I’ve talked to a lot of people and I’ve done it myself where I’ve gone to online, online jobs.ph, I put in an ad, I go to Craigslist, I put it in an ad, and you get 700 applications. And then you have to sift through the application. What’s your process of finding good people.

Brenda Ruby   16:03  

There’s multiple different ways, one referral are great, because you already know they have been vetted, and they are referred referred as great. Another one is, this one’s kind of off. And it might not work for a lot of people, but either your brand or your personal brand is so well known that they come to you with that respect or any with admiration with knowing the the vision of the company. So that that helped that as well, because while I was at Snow, I did a lot of speaking at the university. And so I got a lot of interns from the university, which were, we were like, five minutes away. And so they they came on that way. And then just like the one you said, putting up a listing, I also have found if you want the even greater people you can do a sponsored listing ad on. So I use indeed, I’m sure there’s a lot of companies out there, but I use a very targeted type of ad as well, to get great people, you are gonna have to go through a lot more because your ad is being seen a lot more. And then I also find, if there’s way too many, and if it’s not as a high level type of role, like customer service, instead of an executive role, then I have a VA or an intern, go through those resumes, because it could be 200. And, and I tell them, just jot them down to give me the best 10. And I’ll interview them. And then I do two to two or three types of interviews. So I interview them, myself, I get to vet them, I get to see their great fit. And then they go on to this is a really important point they go on to, if they’re gonna be a great fit they’re gonna come on is like, Yes, I like them. I have an interview with at least two other team members. And so it’s a team member interview. So I need to make sure that that person fits the company culture. And that is very important, important that not only you but them, but also the team that they’re going to be working with.

Norman Ferrar   18:15  

Very good. So, you know, keeping on that thought of the company culture, how are you building the company culture through the years.

Brenda Ruby   18:23  

You know, that’s a really big challenge as you’re growing, because there’s different stages. As you grow, you go through the startup where everybody has different roles, and then eventually everybody moves up, and then they, they get to manage more people underneath them, and the company changes itself. So it is really important to keep that company culture. And the way you do that some of the ways you do that is you got to take care of your employees, you got to listen to them, you got to have those fireside chats where you you get to know them, you get to know them outside of work. You have these team bonding activities outside of work, you have these dinners, you have these mini celebrations on someone’s birthday, you have these bonuses, structure, compensation, structions incentive structures, apart from obviously taking care of the employees listening to them, really investing in them, you also got to set the tone from the very beginning and throughout of the company culture. And the way you do that is through developing really strong core values. You should already have these at the beginning from your brand guideline and understanding where you want to take the company and who you are as a company. And so a really great book is Delivering Happiness, actually have it. And they talk about those core values. And they talk about setting really strong core values. So anybody that comes in you it’s a little cheat sheet and your blueprint of this is what I need to hire that has these core values. And this is who I can fire if they if they don’t follow these core values, whether it’s transparency, communication, having a great time, and it’s all about people, so but that’s, that’s how you keep the great company and culture,

Norman Ferrar   20:15  

I think it’s important to that just people in general know that you have their back, you know, the feeling of being secure. So a lot of Amazon sellers, you know, we’ll hear a lot of people talk about going out and building your VA team. Okay, so it’s not an employee, it’s a VA contractors. And I also hear a lot of people talk about, well, you know, you can negotiate them down to $2 an hour, I am not that person, I would much rather build that team making sure that that family or that person that’s in the Philippines, or in India, or in the Ukraine, if they’re, if they’re saying $3 an hour, and I know it’s a $5 an hour job, that’s what I’m giving them. And one of the things that we want to make sure is that we also check to make sure that we set them up to succeed and not to fail, you know, if they don’t have the right computer, or if they don’t have the right Wi Fi, or if they’re in the Philippines, not this isn’t right off the bat. But let’s say it’s a year into it, and they’re having problems with, with storms, some of our VAs have generators, some don’t. But we definitely make sure that they have the right, the right equipment to succeed, if they’re, if they’ve got the right stuff will provide, you know, the equipment to make them succeed. And what I’ve seen is that, you know, if you, if you set somebody up, and they’re secure, and they know that now they’re, you know, they, they can work with you, they don’t have to take on that 10 cent dollar or 10 cent more job that comes through up work or whatever. Now you’re building loyalty as well. And from our standpoint, like as a company, that’s how we really build up the security and that kind of family thing. I mean, you know, if somebody has to take time off because they’re sick, or they’re at the hospital or their family members, look, go, you know, we’ll make sure that we cover you off somehow. But I think from my end, that is so important. If you nickel and dime and try to get something for free. Your loyal employee will take the next 10 cent job that gets posted on Upwork and say that they’re sick. Yeah, that’s what happens. Yes, yeah. So anyways, it’s great hearing what you were saying about building your culture as well. So what about your knucklehead printer? That’s that’s a great point. Thanks. So yeah, the the video I told you my internet i

Brenda Ruby  22:59  

Listen, everybody worked on your company’s it’s an extension

Norman Ferrar   23:05  

sorry if I seem like I cut you off. I don’t know if it’s my internet or your internet. It’s probably mine being glitchy. But anyways, I think I cut you off about five times there. Let’s talk about mistakes. What are some mistakes that people make when they’re hiring employees or contractors

Brenda Ruby   23:29  

they accept people do when hiring employees or contractors is desperately hiring the wrong one too fast. And what I mean by that it’s especially at the beginning we’re so desperate to fill in that role and we need the help and we’re all doing multiple we’re taking on multiple roles at a time and and what happens is we fire we hire too fast and we’re going to have and that doesn’t get done and so you’re going to have to fire and you’re going to try to work work with it and it just doesn’t work out because one they weren’t the right fit or you just needed to fill on that role. So I do see the biggest mistake is hiring too fast. And I got this lesson from also Sara Blakely. She says hire slow fire fast.

Norman Ferrar  24:28  

That’s so true. That’s so true. How much money do you waste? If you have an employee that you know is not the right fit? I mean, that could kill you. So that’s that’s that’s great. And you know, Sara Blakely is one sharp cookie. Okay, so what about any other tips that you can give to new sellers that are out there?

Brenda Ruby   24:56  

I would always say understand What you need help with write it down the roles, the level, the difficulty, the level of the roles and always say you, you can always hire consultants, contractors, freelancers where you’re not hiring someone for six figures right off the bat. And it’s such a scary investment, right, but it can take you forward. So I would say, try to hire those consultants those freelancers to give you the right answers right away. And then maybe you need a VA for this role, right? Maybe it’s three VA S instead of one full person, that they can do the exact job because right now that money needs to go towards marketing. And so hiring the right person, the type of person, maybe an executive, you do need the greatest executive and maybe that comes off as a referral, that’s really going to take over your whole operations, let’s say, so making sure that you hire the right type of person, in terms of, Do I need a VA for this? Or do I need a consultant for this? Or do I need a full time person or a part time person for this role, that’s really gonna give you the output that you’re looking for, to to drive the company growth.

Norman Ferrar  26:22  

So if you’ve, if you’re starting out, and you, I think this is a mistake that some people make, they hire that full time person as a VA, thinking that they are an expert in everything. And like you were just talking about, you might hire three people, one person might have better skills in Facebook advertising, social media, and then just your customer service. And you might give them, you know, 10 hours a week each or whatever it takes. But you’re not putting all your money into one person who can’t really do anything. They’re trained as a VA in simple skills, not in complex skills. So that has helped us like we’ve got a lot of vas, but not a lot of full time vas. There’s a lot of part time people and we we try to target people that know how to do social media, because Chelsea is not that great. Why he is he’s okay. You should take a look at Kelsey social media, then if you give them a failing grade, it’s not coming from me. Okay, so other things, let’s talk about reviews. How do you do job performance? Like how do you measure that?

Brenda Ruby  27:39  

KPIs and so depending on the roles you want to humans on our own, we’re incentivized, we want to grow we want, we want to develop personally, we want to learn and so you set KPIs, and there’s, there’s a lot of templates out there. And there’s a lot of ways you can go about it. But always incentivize, always measure them, have them have quarterly goals for themselves and for the company. Say, Hey, if you if you achieve your your quarterly goal, you have these types of prices in terms of you can I can, the company can sponsor a course for you to learn and again, that’s helping the company down the road, or gift cards or bonuses, whatever that is, but always incentivize always have those KPIs always have those goals set for themselves for them to reach. And always making sure that they have the right support the right resources, and the right mentorship within the company to achieve those goals. And having that little extra gap of challenging them to to really make sure that they’re being challenged and growing.

Norman Ferrar   29:00  

The incentive doesn’t always have to be cash doesn’t

Brenda Ruby   29:04  

No. You just have to understand the employee of what they’re driven by. And that could be books that can be personal development, that can be something else just understanding your employees.

Norman Ferrar   29:20  

What about a probation period? Do you do you put people on probation for the first month, two months, three months?

Brenda Ruby   29:29  

When we hire that’s a that’s a given right away. It’s it’s a three month trial period just to see. Again, the training is going to be a while so we have to consider that time. So it’s like a relationship we have to know we fit we have to know if we’re both a great fit and it’s not only every it didn’t doesn’t fall on the employer. It can be everything doesn’t fall on the employee. It can also be the employer and they’re just not a great fit. And the last thing you want to do is have somebody just resent the employer because their skill sets aren’t in that role. And it doesn’t maybe it’s the wrong industry for them, right? You just have to know that if it’s not gonna work out, cut it faster. But yeah, I always do a three month trial period, just to understand if work great fit.

Norman Ferrar  30:20  

So let’s, let’s just take a wage, let’s, let’s take $15 an hour. Okay, so you’ve got a wage of $15 an hour that you’re paying out, you’ve got the probation period going after they graduate from that probation period? How much do you would you give them and I mean, that could be $10 an hour, that could be $50 an hour, I’m just using 15, as an example. So do you increase their wage after the three months.

Brenda Ruby   30:52  

So that does the pen up front, I do give myself a little gap, where I say this is between this in this in the first three, six months, if you if your performance is on, on track with the role, then yes, that can be as you say, I’m going to start you off at 13, after the three months or six months, depending on your performance. And if this is a great fan, we’re moving forward, then I’ll bump you up to 15. And after that would be just temp, or whatever that is. But yeah, you want to keep keep the room and then also structuring it for maybe it’s not the third round, maybe a bonus at the end of the year, or maybe is based on KPI performances that they get a bonus.

Norman Ferrar  31:44  

How important is creating a job description, a detailed job description.

Brenda Ruby  31:54  

It is really, really important and more important on again, the core values and where this company is going, and really selling them on the mission to really see if they’re here for the company. Or if they’re just here for that paycheck, right? That’s really different. And there’s nothing wrong with just having someone come in and just wanting the paycheck and leaving at a certain time and being done with a job. Usually who I work with startups, we need someone that’s in it for the mission and in it to really grow this brand. And in it for Hey, it’s going to be okay, on some days that I can help a teammate, outside of my role description. Because I’m a team, I want to be a team player. So that’s important for us. And that’s the company culture. And I am very upfront in the interview. And I say this is a startup up. And sometimes there’s gonna be different roles that you play in. And we want someone that wants to grow and learn outside of the role. Other than somebody that just wants to be in this very structure, box cubicle type of job. So I am very open and transparent on on the company. And then I want them to be as well. And I make that environment and I build that trust within 30 minutes for them to say yeah, I’m just looking for a nine to five job searching great. Or I know if someone said I want to, I want to grow with the company. And I eventually want to become an executive for this company. That’s the type of person I’m looking for.

Norman Ferrar  33:36  

Perfect. Now, I think this is important. I’d like to get your take on it. Managing expectations. So I’ve seen a lot of a lot of issues that come up with employee relationships, because managing expectations doesn’t happen, like right from the get go. How do you manage expectations?

Brenda Ruby   34:01  

That it’s a really challenging scenario, managing expectations, not only in the workforce, right, like in just friendships, relationships. And again, going back to going back to the huge pool we are so the way we manage expectations is, again have weekly or monthly sit down with the team, but one on one. So I used to take, I used to take walks with employees up around the warehouse and just like hey, is there something going on? And you just know, just know that energy just another way they carry themselves? Maybe they’re kind of down? Maybe it’s not even about work? Maybe it’s outside of work and something’s going on. So I have a really close relationship with employees where I say, hey, talk to me what’s going on is just meeting you. Is there something that we didn’t perform on because they can be Testing you as well, and employees have that entitlement to, to set expectations for the employer. But it’s just an open dialogue is an open communication. It’s building that trust is building that that environment to say, hey, if there’s anything I’m happy with right now, let’s talk. And I’ll let you know my point. And I’ll let you know if I can meet your expectations or if that’s something that right now the company can do.

Norman Ferrar   35:29  

Very good. So just, if you haven’t heard the giveaway today is going to be a session, a consultation with Brenda, and a brand audit, which is going to be incredible. If you’re interested in that hashtag, we’ll have Kelsey tagged to people and you’ll be able to have an extra ballot now. Kelsey, I haven’t been able to look at the comments section. But lots of questions.

Kelsey   35:58  

Yeah, we have about five or six questions right now. Let’s go for it. Okay. All right. And if you haven’t already, if you’re have a question about hiring branding, Assistant processes. Furthermore, we’re in the comment section, and we’ll get to them. But uh, see our first one from Amazon Lambo guru, I’ve built a team and grow, it’s growing well, but some of our team isn’t keeping up. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in training these snails and neglecting the champions, how do you avoid the situation?

Brenda Ruby   36:33  

Yes, we, we want to focus on the tabs on the A players, right? Because there they will, they’re going to take the company for but you cannot neglect these, quote unquote snails. The way you do this, again, if you don’t have a way to duplicate yourself in in the way of building these tutorial videos, I would have like 50, little five minute tutorial videos on how to do things. And the way you set expectations at when you hire, quote unquote, these nouns. You say, if you have a question, these are this is a list of people. You you ask that question Google’s and their YouTubes in their. Sonia are managers and they’re you, you if you have a question, you ask all these people before you get to me, so you need to build those gatekeepers in front of you. So you you’re you don’t feel like you have to continue continually being there for people that are going to waste your time at that moment. And again, you’re training them on how to search for answers on their own. So build that communication waterfall where it’s like, if you have a question, go to these 10 people before you come to me. And there’s a Google folder, and of that question hasn’t been answered, then we’re going to create a tutorial for them. We’re going to create processes for that. So if if that question his answer, again, is not is not going to come from me.

Norman Ferrar   38:04  

You touched on this earlier in the podcast where you said, you know, there’s different things that incentivize people. So the people that are not performing that, well, you know, maybe they just have the wrong motivation to you know, if you can figure out what that is, that could definitely help out. Oh, one other thing that that we’ve done is we have a five things five strengths of the week, five weaknesses of the week. And then training, like any training that you took, and how could it be implemented into the company. And that way, we just kind of get a feel of what people are thinking we’ve got a finger on the pulse to see if people are happy or not. But you know, that’s that’s something that you can do. But some people you just can’t motivate maybe you don’t have the right people and like you were saying, Brenda, you know, hire smart and fire fast. You know, just fire fast. Sorry, Simon. I mean, that’s my thought. Anyway.

Kelsey  39:09  

Our next question is from Dr. Cause, Brenda, I am your number one fan big props to you and your story. You are an inspiration. What are your recent top of funnel trends you’re seeing these days? Are there any actionable items coming into q4? Love your work?

Brenda Ruby   39:26  

You know, I don’t have any. Anyone’s at the top of my head. And again, I work in strategy with a lot of startups right now. So I don’t have anyone write any of the views. An action item for q4. It would be to focus on content is focus on content. That the content is getting shorter and shorter and shorter so you can get people then one second two seconds, really delivering that message through Video Content user generated content that’s going to be my biggest one for q4.

Norman Ferrar  40:08  

So building out your influencer base. So yeah, yeah. Okay, and it doesn’t have to be the Kardashians, it could be nano influencers,

Brenda Ruby  40:17  

nano influencers because that’s the closest to organic.

Norman Ferrar  40:21  

Right? Kardashians would be your second move right?

Kelsey   40:27  

All right, from Jessica Rabbit, do you prefer to hire local or USA people to overseas people for certain are different test jobs? How do you coordinate your team meeting times with different time zones represented?

Brenda Ruby   40:42  

Both. Again, it does depend on the role I hire a lot of VAs in the Philippines are amazing all over. And I prefer locally if I need them to be in person. And depending on the role, if it’s a high enroll that I need them to be in person is going to be in the US. So the way I coordinate time differences is I have my timezone. And then I have the overseas timezone. And then we just measure them. There’s so many apps out there that though allow you to do this, and you set it right from the beginning, you go through that headache of 10 minutes, like alright, what’s our timezone? And where can we set these meetings and just have an ongoing calendar invite. And they’re very flexible, they’re very motivated to work and they’re very loyal. And so it is never has been a problem is just a matter of getting that on the calendar right away.

Norman Ferrar   41:42  

Yeah, and there’s, there’s an app, very simple app that you can use to try to coordinate with the best time is especially like, if you got people in Australia, people on the West Coast. I mean, it could be a nightmare. But you could use a app called Doodle, and doodle will coordinate, it’ll send out an email to everybody. And they can just click off there times that and then all of a sudden, it syncs it up, what will be the best time for everybody. But I mean, that’s, that’s if you’re everywhere. I know, in the Philippines, for us, we’re 12 It’s 12 hours. So it’s pretty easy. You know, we either coordinate going to bed, or waking up in the morning to coordinate overseas in India. So I have my senior project manager over there. And also our operations manager for PR reaches over there. And they work when we hired they worked Eastern Standard Time. So they do go to bed early. No, they don’t. They always these people are workers, like I’m talking about Manna and Vandana if you’re listening, they work their butts off. Like they I tell them to go to bed, you know, and they’ll just keep going to finish a task. But they’re awesome. So anyways, but they they knew coming on board, it was Eastern Standard Time. And you know, they’re committed to it. So they do go to bed a little bit late, but at the end of the day, they get to sleep in early and you know, I was sleeping later. That’s how we that’s how we coordinate when it’s very difficult time zones.

Kelsey   43:18  

But this is interesting from Simon, I had to sign on my door 1440 This is the number of minutes in a day, all staff knew that each a minute is precious, so I better be the right person to ask. Let’s see. Okay, our next question is from Daniel, how do you set up and manage your employees expectations? Do you offer a career plan performance bonuses, or anything other to keep them motivated for the long run?

Brenda Ruby 43:46  

I guess Yeah, we did. We did touch on employees expectation, it’s all the above. And it’s right from when you hire them on the job description to their performance. And watching the numbers and understanding how they’re working and just getting a feel and a check in for like, Hey, Are they enjoying this role? Because of the enjoy? They’re going to be better at it? And am I giving them all the resources that they can to perform the best at their job, and if I am and they’re still not happy and their expectations just not there, then you have that conversation with them.

Norman Ferrar  44:26  

You said something a little earlier on when you were setting up your SOP you would put if you need help talk to so I think it was Sofia, Google, you know this, this this page that page. And that’s important too because if you make it a an environment where people are always coming to you and saying, Hey, we have a problem. What do you think that’s a problem? You know, you want to make it a more of a performance based culture where Okay, look, it might not be the right answer, I might be able to help you. But the first thing you should do is solve this bloody thing yourself, and then come to me with a solution. And if it’s the wrong solution, or if I could add anything, I’d be happy to do it. But let’s figure this out. And that’s something I like to add about SOPs, by the way, when we’re creating an SOP, it’s fairly long. So we do these steps. And it says, instead of five steps, you know, we we talked about dragging your mouse over here, click this button with a screenshot, but it might be 25 steps. So the person can say, I messed up on step 19. And, for the most part, it’s either a revision, that when update to a system, that Amazon’s you know, change something, or the SOP was written wrong. So we can go and say, Okay, let’s correct that. But for, but if it is an issue, the person goes, comes back to us, and says, look at this is the problem I had, this is what I think we could do to solve this. The issue, such what a difference it makes in culture and performance, you know, you don’t have to get involved in every minor little thing.

Brenda Ruby   46:13  

And the goal here is to make your team self sufficient in for to think for themselves. So I used to, if they come for me with a question, I used to guide them with questions myself, and I say, how would you solve it, I want to know how you would solve it. And they would come up with a solution just because they’re not you’re letting them know, it’s okay to think for themselves, and they’re not afraid. So make your employees self sufficient.

Norman Ferrar  46:43  

You know, what I, we should touch on this. There’s a cultural thing, too. I find in the Philippines, that a lot of the times, when you first hire somebody in the Philippines, they don’t necessarily want to do that. They’re afraid to do that. And by giving them that freedom, basically to make those choices, and they’re not going to get screamed and yelled at which is awful. But you know, just that they they are free to make the choice. And if they’re wrong, it’s not a big deal in this company. It’s okay to make a mistake. We’re going to go back there, and we’ll make sure that this thing gets resolved. But that person takes the lead on it.

Brenda Ruby  47:27  

Yes.

Kelsey  47:32  

And our last question for today, from Simon COVID. Chaos has created a huge pool of freelance experts, not Bas, do you advocate using freelancers over employing?

Brenda Ruby   47:47  

Again, we touched a little on this on understanding if maybe a consultant or freelancer would be better for this job, depending on what growth, urine and your company? And I would go towards that at the beginning. If you can, instead of hiring someone full time. Maybe they don’t have you don’t have enough work for them, or you can afford them at this time. So yes, I love freelancers. And they, they’re huge poll right now, because everyone’s working from home. I agree with that.

Norman Ferrar   48:24  

Okay, so I think that’s it. Is there anything else you would like to say? At all? How’s that at all? It’s an open question. For you, Brenda.

Brenda Ruby  48:39  

You know, is it’s simple guys. We’re over complicating this and just please hone into your core values and your what you what you want your company to be in where you want your company to be, and really sell that to whoever you’re bringing on. And hire the right people and be okay with saying, hey, this person didn’t work out. But you need the right team to to move your company for because nobody does it alone. And you need a really strong team. So develop those really core values. And there’s so many books out there to to learn leadership and manage ment. But at the end of the day, we’re all humans, and we all just want to be listened to and understood and having that structure right at the beginning for your company. Setting expectations is going to take you a long, long way.

Norman Ferrar   49:31  

Kelsey just grabbed a couple of books from the house the other day was gung ho and raving fans and their older books, but they’re really good. Oh, yeah.

Kelsey  49:42  

They’re all five more others.

Norman Ferrarr  49:46  

Yeah, behind me that those are in case the millennials are listening. Those are called books. Alright, so I think that’s it. Brenda, have you seen the wheel of Kelsey? I have. Okay. All right, here we go.

Kelsey  50:07  

Alright, here it is. Alright, thank you everyone who has entered days we’ll have Kelsey, I’m going to give this a spin. If you are the winner, please message me. Kay at lunch with Norm calm, and I’ll connect you with the consultation with Brenda. So here we go. Right one. We have Kelsey, and the winner is

Norman Ferrar  50:46  

Brian. Oh, nice.

Kelsey   50:50  

Alright, so congratulations, Brian. Brian, I have your information. So yeah, I’ll connect you with Brenda be nice and easy. And that’s it. Okay, I

Norman Ferrarr  51:01  

noticed an ad there. Kelce. Did you not pay for the premium subscription? Add? Yeah, there was a helium toe was

Kelsey   51:10  

there? Yeah, maybe there? Yeah. They’ve been getting more business now. That way,

Norman Ferrarr   51:14  

I don’t know. Maybe. Who knows. Alright. So Brenda, thank you for coming on. We got to get you back on again. Good luck with everything that you’re doing. And I really appreciate that giveaway. Brian, you don’t know what you got here. You know that that hour and the brand audit is worth a ton. So anyways, Brenda, thank you.

Brenda Ruby  51:36  

Thank you. And I’ll be back.

Norman Ferrar  51:39  

Fantastic. We’ll see you later. Okay, so I hope you really enjoyed that. On Friday, we’re going to be having Chris McKay back. And, look, there’s lots of stuff going on on Amazon. Right now suspensions, he’s going to be talking about a couple of new trends that we’re starting to see and that he’s getting involved with. So anyways, um, he’s gonna be here on Friday to talk about all that. So please, you know, stay tuned. That’ll be a good one. He knows this stuff. Anyways, I like to thank our sponsor H refs, Webmaster Tools. You know, when you listen to our podcast, we talk about a lot about making sure that you have a website, nobody can find your website. Well, you know, it’s not worth much. Anyways, you’ve got to make sure that you have SEO health and the easiest way to do that is to find an application. And this one is free. So H refs is here to help they monitor your SEO health backlinks, keywords, all for free. And now you can just sit back, relax, listen to the podcast. While href does it for you. You can sign up like I said $0 at h refs comm slash AWT. That’s H R E F s.com/awtrightboywonderalrightthankyouguyssomuchforjoining. Today’s

Kelsey  53:08  

episode, Daniel, Amazon guru, aka Simon Roz. Oh, like everyone. It’s been great. Cindy, I noticed we had some new viewers today as well. So that’s awesome. Also, if you guys are interested in connecting with Ruby or Brenda Ruby, go to her Instagram. It’s Ruby calm, and you’ll be able to check out her answer. It’s great. It’s if you’re looking for to be a content creator. She has great Instagram too. So definitely check it out. But um, anyways, yeah, looking forward to the next episode. If you’re looking for the full highlights, and full episodes, have lunch with Tom go over to our YouTube channel. It’s got everything over 180 episodes. And also let me see our membership area is open in our website on our website lunch with norm. So if you’re interested in small group discussions with Norman i, we just had one yesterday with a great group of people who like Roz and Simon and a bunch of others. Really great chance to ask your questions that you have about amazon.com We’re also giving away a free SOP that we do every month next week. So definitely sign up if you’re interested in learning more about Amazon EECOM. And yeah, that’s it.

Norman Ferrar  54:26  

Any Netflix recommendations? Oh my gosh. Yeah, we will we’ll get a whole list together for your Simon. Okay, so, so join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. Guys, thank you for watching. Just love this community. Thank you for your engagement. We couldn’t do this without you. And we will see you next time. Entrepreneur entrepreneur

Transcribed by https://otter.ai