The Proffitt Podcast
Are you thinking about starting a podcast? Launching a YouTube channel? Repurposing your old blog content into something fresh? Hi, I'm Krystal - host of "The Proffitt Podcast." And I'm happy to say you've come to the right place!
Business owners and content creators dream of building a platform where they can connect deeply with their audience, and marketing feels easy. But I also know what it's like to feel confused and overwhelmed.
Join us weekly as we strip down those processes and remove all the overwhelm with new tips, simple strategies, and great conversations with creators like you. Tune in to hear how I help creators start, launch, and market their content confidently. The motto here is, "We all have to start somewhere."
The Proffitt Podcast
The NEW Guide to Mastering Business Data
Unlock the secrets of business success with Kari Poppleton, the insightful CEO and founder of Kari Poppleton Consulting. Have you ever wondered how data can transform your entrepreneurial journey? Discover how even accidental entrepreneurs can leverage audience feedback and organic traffic strategies to boost decision-making and efficiency. Kari shares her compelling story, revealing how she harnessed her love for numbers to turn her passion projects into thriving ventures. Learn why understanding your audience is paramount and how genuine connections can elevate your business offerings.
Navigating the post-COVID business landscape can be daunting, but Kari offers invaluable advice on strategies for growth. From the significance of attending industry conferences to the delicate balance between organic and paid traffic strategies, find out how to harness these tools for maximum impact. Whether you're an introvert wary of networking or someone keen to understand the nitty-gritty of audience research, this episode is packed with insights to guide your business decisions and enhance your strategy.
Transform operational chaos into streamlined success by mastering the art of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and understanding financial metrics. Discover practical tips on delegating tasks and maintaining clarity in your business operations. Kari's approach to embracing data as an exciting tool rather than a tedious task will inspire you to see your numbers as a beacon of insight. Plus, get a taste of personal transformation, as structured routines not only optimize business but bring clarity to personal life as well. Ready to unlock the potential of your metrics? Join us and see how paying attention to the right numbers can lead to sustainable growth and success.
Click the "Send Krystal a Text Message" link above to send us your questions, comments, and feedback on the show! (Pssst...we'll do giveaways in upcoming episodes so make sure you leave your name & podcast title.)
Looking for a podcast community that supports you on your journey? Check out Podcasters Connect today.
You know, what's really cool about all the software that we have today, like what we can use for content creation, is I'm actually looking at the takeaways and Riverside. So y'all know this I use Riverside to record my podcast, whether it's solo or interview, and I'm actually looking at the summary for today's episode and the takeaways from this interview and I'm like, oh my gosh, these are incredible and I kind of want to just read some of these off to you because they are so good. Okay, are you ready? So I'm actually going to like tell you about the interview and then you're going to hear it. We talk about audience feedback is crucial for understanding your market needs. Okay, okay, we've talked about that before. Organic traffic strategies. You can implement or complement paid ads effectively.
Speaker 1:Understanding your numbers can lead to proactive decision making. Do I have your attention yet? Like, are you interested? An organization and business leads to greater efficiency and clarity, and creating a sustainable business model requires knowing your metrics. Okay, like holy moly, this conversation is so good because I'm talking to Keri Poppleton. So Keri is the CEO and founder of Keri Poppleton Consulting, specializing in digital marketing, metrics, data and custom dashboards. She is a certified director of operations and certified dashboard designer serving online business owners, course creators, coaches and those with memberships and subscriptions, putting the numbers they need to make informed decisions at their fingertips via customized automated dashboards. Okay, like I gotta tell you, when you like, just first bring up like data and metrics, like it's not super sexy until you tell me, oh, if you just look at your numbers, crystal, you could increase your revenue by 5x. Or if you just paid a little bit more attention to these numbers over here, you can make a bigger impact in your community or with your content, and that, my friends, really makes me perk up and gets me excited about numbers. So I hope that you enjoy this conversation that Keri and I had, because it is incredible.
Speaker 1:So let's get right to it. Welcome to the Profit Podcast, where we teach you how to start, launch and market your content with confidence. I'm your host, crystal Profit, and I'm so excited that you're here. Thanks for hanging out with me today, because if you've been trying to figure out the world of content creation, this is the show that will help be your time-saving shortcut. So let's get right to it, shall we All? Right Profit Podcast listeners. I'm so excited to have Keri with us on the show today. So welcome to the show, keri. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2:I'm super excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Yes, this is going to be so much fun because I have heard y'all loud and clear like listeners of this show are like we are allergic to metrics. Metrics scare us, we don't understand them, and they're either checking them way too much like every single day, every hour of the day, or like once a year. So this is like the broad spectrum of everybody we have here, like they are all over the place whenever it comes to metrics and how they feel about them. But, carrie, how did you like kind of stumble into the numbers game, like is this something that you've always been obsessed with? Or did you have like a certain like catalyst moment in your own journey where you were like, oh, I actually need to pay attention to numbers more than I am today?
Speaker 2:That is such a good question. So I think I've always kind of been a numbers nerd. I was a math and science girl, like that's totally. You know that was my jam.
Speaker 2:But I kind of put that aside for a long time and didn't really think about how that kind of applied to other parts of business. So the first business that I owned was actually a handmade business, and while I kind of started looking at some of the numbers there, I honestly didn't use it a lot to make decisions. I was kind of still going a lot off of gut feeling and just trying to remember what things had happened before. And I don't know if you've ever found this in your business too, but sometimes, you know, we'll think, oh, remember when I launched that product, or I'll remember that you know I changed the price on this at this point, or whatever the case may be, and a month passes or three months passes and we have no recollection whatsoever of those kinds of things. And so I realized as I started tracking more and more things, hey, this information is actually really useful and I can actually use this, you know, to actually make decisions.
Speaker 2:But kind of the really big pivotal moment for me was as I stepped into being a director of operations, in a fractional way, for a couple of different online businesses and realizing, you know, as we were trying to find numbers to be able to make decisions, we'd be in conversation saying, oh, if only we knew X and I would think it can't be that hard to find that number. And we'd start digging into their numbers and they were selling on multiple platforms and using multiple different social media platforms and all that kind of stuff, and realizing how genuinely difficult it can be to even just find a simple number when your online ecosystem is so complex. And that's when I started thinking like there has to be an easier way of figuring this out and of tracking this on an ongoing basis that isn't so frustrating and I like numbers and I was finding it frustrating, so for people who don't particularly enjoy them, I can't even imagine how frustrating that would be.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Well, we all have to know like what were these handmade products that you were making. You left that out and we need that detail.
Speaker 2:So good question. It actually was a very accidental business. My husband always jokes that if I write a biography, it's going to be called the Accidental Entrepreneur because I just started making some things for my kids.
Speaker 2:So I was making accessories basically, and then a mom group that I went to the mom saw it and they were like, oh, we want to get you know, we want to see them too. And then they're like, well, now our friends want to be able to buy these. And it kind of just accidentally happened and I had my products in a couple of stores, you know, a couple months later and it just kind of it just kind of happened and spiraled a bit and finally that business kind of ended up making props for newborn photographers. So it kind of was a little bit of a winding route and listening to kind of what the market wanted for that, but it was very much a creative outlet, which was amazing.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, I love this so much Because, again, like I mean this it goes back to and I love the concept of like the accidental entrepreneur, because I feel, like so many of our listeners, they've even stumbled into that where, you know, maybe they had started something as like a hobby or a passion project, and then people are like, oh no, we really love what you're doing, like, keep doing this and, by the way, we want to pay you for stuff. And they're like, wait, what I'm not, I'm not the expert, and that's kind of the mindset that so many of our listeners have. Like they struggle with that imposter syndrome of like wait, but I only have this much experience, or I'm not, you know, the the go-to person. I don't have a PhD in this, so how can I really talk about it?
Speaker 1:And I'm like no, no, no, like you can see from Carrie's journey and so many other journeys, it's like you just have to take that next right move and I think, as long as you continue to enjoy what you're doing, like one of our mottos around here is chase fun, like, not just like find it and like, oh, go, look for it.
Speaker 1:It's like no, no, you chase it down like a rabid wolf and you look for those things that light you up and make you happy. So I love that numbers make you happy and you've just, you know, figure out how to listen to your audience in that way. But I'm so curious, like in kind, of the pivots that you've had in your own journey, like how did you get feedback? Because this is a question we get a lot. You know people are saying well, either their content is siloed where they're just people are just listening to them on their podcast and they don't have like a huge social media presence, so they can't get a ton of feedback that way. But have there been any really creative things that you've done in your journey where you're actually hearing from potential clients or members of your audience?
Speaker 2:I think in that first business it was a little bit easier because it was more kind of face to face selling. I did some things that were craft shows and things like that. So like you really got to talk to people face to face and you got to see what they were looking at and kind of see the thought process as they were deciding. And you know, one example of that is, you know, having, I think, 20 different options for a particular item that I was selling and I realized that people would look at it and they would stop and they would get completely stuck because they had too many choices to choose from, because, like they would pick two or three that they liked and then it was like their brain shut down and they would just walk away.
Speaker 2:But some of those things you just can't know without talking to people, right? So I think there's always so much value in actually going to your audience and trying to talk to them and I think sometimes, especially as our audiences grow, we feel maybe a little bit removed from that and feel like we can't send out a survey or say to them hey, I would really genuinely love to hear from you, to hear what kind of content is resonating with you? Is there a struggle that you're going through that you know you could be supported better? You know, in the way that I'm presenting my content or the topics I'm talking about and really asking people, I think that that seems kind of scary for some reason. I think when we're putting content out in general, yeah, it just kind of seems a little more arm's length.
Speaker 2:But I think there's so much value in trying to get as much connection as you can with people and literally ask them the question, and I think of places that I engage with. If someone genuinely wanted to know my opinion, I would actually be really touched by that and really want to be able to share, not only to help them, but ultimately that also kind of helps me too, because then they start creating content that's even more geared towards where I'm at. So I think that can always be a good thing. It's like literally going to the source and just really talking to them.
Speaker 1:Oh always be a good thing. It's like literally going to the source and just really talking to them. Oh, I love this so much. And you know I talk a lot on here about trying to go to conferences and I think that you know, after COVID, like after the pandemic, like it's been so hard for people to feel comfortable and like a conference space. Like I actually have a really good friend of mine who's like she's running her own studio and we were talking about like a industry conference and she was like, yeah, but what is your return on investment? Like I literally had to convince her to want to be around other people in the industry.
Speaker 1:I don't know if that's. She's kind of an extreme introvert too. We'll set that aside for a second. But I'm like no, you need to get around other people to see what they're doing, like see, like get ideas and like feel that energy and, yes, even for someone that's extroverted, it's exhausting. I get it. So, all you introverts, I hear you loud and clear. But also, I mean you just can't replace those face-to-face interactions with people that are either doing the same thing that you want to do, or they're trying to do it, or they're peers, or they are your ideal audience, like it is just. I could not agree more. I think that face-to-face interaction is priceless, but have you done anything like that in what you're doing today? Like if we transition from what you you know, what you used to do, to where you are now?
Speaker 2:So with the clients that I work with, that's absolutely something that we encourage of them and I know that you know from I'm not a copywriter. I will say that loud and clear. That is not my area of expertise. But I know with the copywriters that I've worked with in the past they do a ton of you know, voice of avatar work because they want to know what people are actually saying. I mean, we have a way of looking at things and thinking this is what's going to connect with my people. I know this is the way that you know they would talk about it, but then it turns out when you actually do research they would never do that at all.
Speaker 2:So one example would be um, you know, if you have a B2B business and maybe you're referring to people as CEOs, but maybe your people that you're talking to don't identify as CEOs, maybe they call themselves business owners or entrepreneurs. So every time you say CEO, something clicks in their brain and like that's actually not for me and they kind of exclude themselves from your audience every time you say that. So that kind of information is really helpful and it also is really helpful then as you kind of build that out into your you know your sales pages and those kinds of things, how are you talking to your people? I mean, I think it's important to dig into those things. And then, as it kind of relates over to the number side of things, I think that we often make assumptions with our numbers, in the same way that we know what people are thinking or we know that the actions that they're taking, but then we look at the numbers and actually tells a completely different story. So one thing that I see a lot of is people that are trying to get more people to a lead magnet or more people, you know, more sales for a particular product.
Speaker 2:And often, when those things don't happen, we look at the end result and say, oh man, there must be something wrong with my lead magnet or there must be something wrong with my product that people don't want, and they jump to that assumption. I need to rewrite my sales page, I need to change the pricing. That must be what's turning people off, or there must be. You know, the content itself isn't very good. We need to work on that. But when we look at their numbers, sometimes we go back and we look how many people actually saw your opt-in landing page? How many people actually saw your sales page and we realized there's actually not enough people even going to those pages to be able to see if the offer or the opt-in was actually great for your audience, because you just need more eyeballs on the page. But unless you actually look at the numbers and dig into those things, you're left with all of these assumptions and no idea where to start. So the numbers really kind of point you in the right direction.
Speaker 1:Okay, this is such a great topic, so I want to sit here for a second and I'm going to. We're going to talk about a controversial topic, right, Because this is one that people get so up in arms about whenever it comes to online businesses. But whenever you talk about getting more traffic so whether that's to a landing page, to a lead magnet, to your course sales page or whatever you're trying to do are you more on the side of free and organic and really just trying to get on podcasts and get in front of other people, or are you using paid ads and other types of marketing strategies that involve investing in making those decisions possible?
Speaker 2:So I'm not trying to sidestep the controversial issue, but I will say I think that it depends it completely depends on the type of business that you have. For people that have, you know, a lower ticket, higher volume business, you probably are going to need ads to help be able to have that many new customers coming in all the time, especially if you're not trying to kind of have them ascend to different products in your business. If you have one main thing that you sell and it's $7, and you have a $47 bump or upsell or something like that, you're going to need a lot of traffic coming through there to be actually be able to kind of start gaining momentum. That's a very difficult thing to do organically without putting any paid spend behind it. I think one of the downsides is that if you focus solely on paid ads, though, if you have something that isn't already working organically at all, it's very difficult to make paid traffic all of a sudden make your business blow up right, like we kind of look at paid traffic as more of the you know, throwing gasoline on the fire that's already burning. If something isn't connecting and if a product isn't selling to people that you know, it's very difficult to make that actually work with cold traffic, because those are harder people to sell to. They don't know you, they don't know your business, anything along those lines. So I think you know looking at the different business models is important and then looking at how your organic content can support your paid traffic.
Speaker 2:If you're going that route, if you have a business that's smaller, if you have more kind of more you know, done for you services or you have higher ticket items, that kind of thing, I think that having a chance to be able to warm up your audience and really be able to connect with them and getting to know them better and connecting with them one-on-one is so much more valuable.
Speaker 2:Those relationships and getting into the right rooms even as you're talking about, you know, for in-person events. When you get to connect with people in that way, it completely changes. You know your higher ticket offers and your done for you services and that kind of thing, because they want to work with you as a person, because they genuinely like you and they connect with you and they like your vibe and you know they like the things that you stand for and your values connect and that kind of thing, and that's a hard thing to try to connect with over a Facebook ad, right? So I think there's a lot of things that come into play. I think both can be really good. You just have to really know what kind of business you have and then kind of take it from there.
Speaker 1:No, I think that you did a fantastic job answering the polarizing question. Answering the polarizing question, you know the controversial one that people are always like trying to get. They're trying to get everybody to really have a stake in the ground, and I could not agree with you more because that's exactly what I feel like. People come to me and they say, well, is my business? Am I ready to start using ads? Like, should I go ahead and start? And I'm like it really just depends, like because I tell people this all the time even if you had all of a sudden this huge bump in organic traffic, what if you had 50,000 people come to your website tomorrow, where previously you had 50? Is your website sustained? Do you have it set up to really have that happen without crashing and burning? Or are your funnels, you know, capture leads or to get those people like in front of the right offers? Or even, if all, if it's all your free stuff, like connect to your channels in a way that keeps them around.
Speaker 1:Because one thing that's happened, especially in podcasting over the years people would say, well, here's how you can trick and game the system to get on apple podcast new and noteworthy. And I'm like, yeah, you can do that game the system to get on Apple Podcasts new and noteworthy and I'm like, yeah, you can do that, but you're not going to stay. Like it's not sustainable to keep those people around if they're not interested in what you're doing. So I totally agree, like having the what I like to call like your house clean. You got your house in order in all the ways that you can. You know your SOPs are set up and everything's good to go. Then you can have that influx where you're like oh, I love that.
Speaker 1:I was on this, you know, a guest on this podcast, and then all of a sudden, my audience blew up or I started investing $5 a day on this Facebook ad and now things are really working. Like, I think that that's the approach to have. But I'm so curious. You know, because you've talked. I told you this like I was watching some of your YouTube videos before we started recording and you're just like me and you love those SOPs. So I want to know what it is about. Like a good system or process, like did you have something like happened before that really made you focus on? Oh, I think I need to do something about this, because what I'm doing now isn't working.
Speaker 2:Definitely and I see this in a lot of different businesses that I work with my own business, but it kind of actually started for me. Honestly, I, my first job, was working at McDonald's and they have everything, or at least at that time, uh, they had everything so systematized and I came into that as a 16 year old and had never really, you know, seen this kind of thing before nevermind, you know, really working in a different business and everything was, you know, the first time you go in this is what you talk about they'd have a checklist and they would go through and make sure that the manager, you know, taught you all these particular things and you would learn a new station, and they had a checklist again that you would go through, and they also had laminated, you know, kind of horizontal images that would clip onto the station so you literally could go through step by step to remember the order you were supposed to do things in. And I just thought this is incredibly brilliant. And after I'd worked there for about a year or so, I went on a school trip to Europe and I remember standing in a McDonald's in France with another person who happened to work at a different McDonald's and we were watching the things that they were doing and we were like they literally do the exact same things in a different country, but delivering basically the same thing, and I was like this is genius, like this is how they do this.
Speaker 2:They make it simple, they break it down so anybody can follow it, and I think that's what kind of started to really have me love the idea of what could we make things, how could we make things easier, how could we make them more efficient. And I love efficiency. Like efficiency is one of my love languages. It pains me if I'm sitting in an emergency room or something and watching things happen. I'm like, but they could be doing this better, like this could be faster. And I'm married to an engineer who also feels the same way, I love it.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit of a dangerous combination. But then coming into businesses and seeing business owners that were so tired and so stressed out and were doing all of the things and trying to juggle everything simultaneously and they were just getting burnt out and you had kind of said before, there's a lot of people that step into business because they're great at a particular thing, they want to serve people in a particular way, they're great at a craft any of those things and they start these businesses that they love, and this hobby, maybe, or something that they had never thought of using in the online space kind of falls over into that and they have this accidental business and then they realize, oh man, I actually have to run a business with this too. It's not just the craft and delivering that thing. It gets big enough where you need help and you need other people coming in, and you really can't do that without having great systems in place.
Speaker 2:So for me, being able to have something where you can fully hand it off to another person and they know what done looks like they're completely clear on that and they can follow through and get the same results that you have, to me that's a good SOP. So when I'm writing them, I try to think about if I was handing this off to a 10-year-old, would they be able to follow this, if I'm assuming they had no knowledge coming in? Because you might sometimes create SOPs for a particular person on your team. So you're like I know that they're already at this knowledge level, but what if the next person who comes in for that role maybe they're really strong in another area and they didn't come in with that exact skill set? Then they try to use that SOP and they're like I have no idea what's going on, because we started three steps into the process rather than the beginning.
Speaker 2:So I think the ability to create good systems is definitely a superpower and I would say for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially visionaries, that is not their superpower. A lot of them really don't love that aspect of things at all, but they really want to be able to free up their time to get back to doing the things that they love. So if you can find someone to help support you in creating those systems, that is usually very, very worth the time and effort for, just for the freedom that that brings and being able to hand off those tasks and not feeling like everything is on your shoulders, or if you have to step away from the business for a week, that everything's going to fall apart, and that really can't happen unless you have things that your team can follow to be able to replicate the things that you normally would do on your own.
Speaker 1:I mean, I feel like this this alone, like everything that you just said like is something that you could charge a million dollars for someone to pay you, because it is the thing that I wish I would have learned earlier in my life that it's taken me years and years and we've been, you know, having multiple conversations on the podcast lately about hiring and onboarding people and outsourcing particular pieces of the content creation journey that people just don't love, whether it's editing or creating graphics in Canva or whatever that looks like. And I just today actually this morning there was we use a platform called Riverside for our, you know, interviews and recording, and we noticed that something changed, like they updated the software and then now a button that used to live there to you know schedule and add it to your Google calendar. Like it moved, like it's not in the same place, and we had a conversation with the team and I love being able to say, oh, we need to update this SOP. I recorded a video that was like two minutes and then I have my VA update it because he's the one that's doing this. So it's like I showed him, like because he was like I don't have access to this or something's weird and I was like, oh, let's figure it out together. And then I like I handed it off to him, so I'm not holding that burden of like, oh God, I'm the one that doesn't love the SOPs and now I have to go do it.
Speaker 1:It's like no, no, no, have the people that are strategic on your team that can embrace those SOPs and really just kind of step into their zone of genius and create those SOPs with you, or have you know you go record a video, do the thing and have them happen. But I'm so curious, like what does that process look like for you? Like, if you are helping, you know someone that's in this audience and they just said Carrie, I am struggling, I've never implemented an SOP, I don't even know what that means. Like I don't even know what this could look like. Like what would be the first step that you would recommend for them?
Speaker 2:That's such a good question because I think the general knowledge that's out there and what everybody is told is just create a Loom video and send it to somebody and then they can just do it for you.
Speaker 2:So I sort of agree, but I think there's a couple of important things that we missed. So, first of all, I think it, secondly, that it's some kind of document that tells people when to actually do that particular thing, because it's one thing to say, here's how you do X, but then if nobody knows what is the catalyst for actually doing that particular thing, that kind of doesn't really help them very much either, and I do really like Loom videos to walk through. But again, we really have to make sure especially when you're someone who's done the task for a long time, or if this is your zone of genius and you totally understand it that you can't start three steps in. You really do need to start from the beginning and take it step by step. And even if you're clicking on a screen saying you know you can't just go click, click, click and change four pages and the person's like I have no idea what just happened, because it happened so fast, then you're going to click over here and click whatever, right. And so once you do that and you can do that on your own and pass to somebody else a great thing then to be able to do is to say to your team member, can you please watch the video and then can you write out the step-by-step points that need to happen? Because for me personally, I like to watch the video the first time so I can go through and do it quickly because I know the general gist but I don't remember you know which three selections I need to check off before you know when I'm setting something up in Zoom or whatever.
Speaker 2:The case may be right, but it's nice if you can just have those listed out. But then having your person list those out, then you know that they actually saw the steps. It helps them take ownership of the task. If they run into anything they don't understand, they can clarify at that point and then, after they've done the task a couple times, you can ask them to redo the video because you probably forgot things, you probably forgot to explain things, there's probably some extra content or context that you could add.
Speaker 2:That would be really helpful. Then they can take ownership of it and then they own not only the task but they also own the SOP Because, like you said, it's really important that that stays updated. Otherwise they become outdated so quickly and nobody can use them anyway, right? So we want to make sure that we look at this as like an asset and a tool that we're creating. It's not just a I just need to get this task off my plate, which may be true, but if we're going to put the work in to actually pass it off, we might as well do it in a way that it can be like forever passed off and it never has to come back to you.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, yes, and I mean we could seriously sit here and talk about SOPs. I've like I've like 10 other questions about SOPs that I want to ask you, but that's really not what we came here to talk about today. Cause I want to take the conversation back to metrics because, while SOPs are gorgeous and maybe we'll have to have Carrie back on and, like, just talk about processes, because, again, I could talk about this for hours and hours but I want to go back to metrics because I told you before we started recording, like we have basically everyone across the spectrum that is looking at either at their numbers for their podcast, every single day, every hour, they're hitting that refresh. Like I see all. Some people feel called out right now. Like we see you, we know who you are. And then there's the other people that are like I have not logged into any of my dashboards in like six months. I have no idea what's going on. So we see all too. So we're calling everybody out here right now.
Speaker 1:But, carrie, I'm just so curious if there is someone that's hasn't really looked at their stats in a while, or maybe they're brand new to metrics. They just started their online business and they're doing the podcast, they're trying to do sales pages, they're looking at lead magnets. Like you said earlier, there's just like kind of all this information is coming at them and they feel very overwhelmed by the numbers. What would be the first thing that you would recommend for them to do? Like throw everything into an Excel spreadsheet. Do they need to get all their numbers in one place? Like? What would you recommend?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So first I think I would say that if you are somebody who does feel overwhelmed by numbers, you are absolutely not alone in that. There's very few people that I work with that are very confident in numbers and I don't know. You know for each individual person what it is. A lot of times it goes back to people as kids being like I wasn't great in math.
Speaker 2:Or I remember in my third grade class when my teacher called me up to you know answer something on the board and I couldn't do it and everybody laughed at me. Or maybe they weren't great with finances or whatever those things are, but for a lot of people there's this very deep-seated like fear and shame that's wrapped up in numbers and money and all that kind of thing. So that is definitely not an unusual thing. So if you are someone listening who is experiencing that 100%, you are not alone. I have worked with people who run seven-figure businesses who have no numbers that they track in their business aside from revenue, like that's literally all they look at and there's so much power in their numbers and I think that starting small is really important so that you don't become overwhelmed, as you had said. You know there's so many numbers that come at us all the time and if we want to dig into them, you know we could be looking at a thousand numbers every day. Please do not do that.
Speaker 2:That is the best way to get completely burnt out. It's like saying I want to get into shape and then trying to like go the next day and start running a marathon.
Speaker 2:Like you're're going to start to hate it, you're going to think this was the worst experience of my life and never want to do it again, and that's completely the opposite of what we want. We want to start small and be able to look at the things that are most important to you. So I had a colleague that I worked with before who used to say you know, if you were on a deserted island and someone you know, a bird came and dropped a piece of paper off to you every business what are those numbers that you would need to know, like the top ones and we're not talking like you know, a page that has tiny little numbers in there, like, let's say, 10, maybe 15 numbers at the max. What are the most important things? So for a lot of people, that would be, you know, kind of looking at some of their main content creation numbers. So maybe that is their podcast downloads, maybe it is the you know the, how many followers they're growing on a particular platform. If that's a metric that's important to them, maybe it's the number of people that are clicking through from a particular social media profile, or something like that. It really depends on the goals of your business, because those social media metrics can be a little vanity driven, so it really depends on what you're kind of aiming people to on your site.
Speaker 2:So I kind of like to look at what's that big next step. So you know, if it's trying to get people on your email list, well, how many people are hitting your opt-in page and how many people are actually signing up, and maybe you have a couple different opt-ins. You track that for both of those and kind of looking through your journey of this is how people found me, this is how people connect with me, and then what happens next? Okay, so maybe then you have or a course that you're trying to sell to them. Next, the next great thing would be then how many people are hitting that sales page, how many people are hitting the checkout page, how many people are actually purchasing those kind of main numbers that are gonna help you make decisions from? We don't wanna track things that we're not gonna actually make decisions off of. So if you're looking at a number and you're like, wow, that's really great, I ended up with 100 more Instagram followers today, doesn't lead you to action in some way. That number really doesn't help you to track it at all. It's just another number to put in your head and it's just more noise coming at you. Right, and you know we live in a digital world. There is a lot of noise coming at us from every place.
Speaker 2:Any platform that you go on to, you know it's video after short video and all these quick things and all the hooks and headlines and all the things are trying to grab our attention. Don't put extra noise in if you don't have to Try to keep it as simple as possible and then start tracking them. I would use a spreadsheet when you're starting off. This is very basic, you know, and start looking like I said, pick maybe those 10 numbers that are kind of the key ones and track them on a weekly basis.
Speaker 2:There's something incredibly powerful about knowing that you're actually going to go and track those the following week.
Speaker 2:So let's say, for example, if you are a content creator and you know that, you know the way that you show up in your Instagram stories that it particularly drives new lead magnet signups or new sales, and you know that if you show up every day on your stories, you know that consistently brings in sales.
Speaker 2:So maybe you make a. Maybe one of the things that you're tracking is how many days did I show up on stories? So if you're tracking that and you're able to, you know that you're going to write it down. There's something very powerful about that knowing, okay, I'm kind of tired today, I don't think I want to show up on my Instagram stories and I'm like, actually, but now I know that on Monday I'm going to write down the fact that I chose not to do it this Wednesday because I just kind of didn't really feel like it. And you're like no, I actually don't write down that I didn't do that, so I'm going to do it anyway. There's something very like empowering about it and it kind of gives you that extra little bit of motivation to be like I am going to look at this number, so let's make it as good as it possibly can be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that numbers, at the end of the day, they're another accountability partner, right, and I know that we have a bunch of solopreneurs in the audience and they're always like trying to figure out like, well, how can I get feedback on, you know, my podcast, or how can I get feedback on this? And I'm like look at your numbers. Like your numbers can be such a great way to see. Like, is what I'm doing working, or is this thing? You know, I I tried something different on Instagram, or I started with a new format on YouTube, or I did this, or I did that. I mean like and like you said, like, document it, like put a little note on that day. It's like, from this day forward or for the next two weeks or the next quarter of the year, you tried something different and then see what happens. And then, if you see a big spike, awesome, keep doing it. If you don't, maybe you can go back to what you were doing. But at the end of the day, I think that it's so fascinating to be able to look at your numbers and really dig into them and see it's like what are the context clues, right? Like, what are the clues to success, Like so much of the time they live right in our own hands. But I think to your point.
Speaker 1:What you're saying earlier is so many people have this psychological hang up about money and numbers and the things that they're just scary. So I want to talk about mindset for a second. Like If that was me right, I'm like, oh, I just I don't look at them, or I have someone else look at them. I don't want to look at them. If you're dealing with a client who is just really, really struggling in this, what is your advice? Like, do you give them? You know, like, oh well, I'll just handle your numbers. Or is it one of those things where it's like, okay, well, you know, it's like we can turn into therapists real fast, and I know that that's like not our cup of tea, but at the same time it kind of is whenever you're in the coaching space. So I'm just curious of what your advice would be to someone like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's a great question. I think that for people that come in and help people with their operations, there is a huge amount of support that you're giving to the people you're working with emotionally as they're working through some of these things, because you're helping them to be a better leader and helping them to run their business in a better way, and that process isn't always a pretty one and that's not always an easy one, but it's definitely worth it on the other side, right? So I would say that some of the most important things there are just really making sure that you're looking at the state of business that you're at. If you are a solopreneur, you kind of have to be responsible for your numbers, and so, even if that's something that you don't love, like I said, start small and start looking at them week by week, and maybe you make a commitment that for one month each week you're just going to track those numbers and maybe you don't even really look at them that closely, but maybe you're just going through and tracking them and you understand where to pull them from and things like that and maybe, at the end of the first month, have numbers for and say is there anything that I'm seeing here? Am I seeing consistency? Am I seeing big spikes and valleys? What does that tell me? Did I launch a new thing? Is that something that I can see where that's driving traffic and start to kind of pull some of those first pieces of information that you can?
Speaker 2:And I think one of the things that I see regularly with clients, even for people who don't love numbers, is that once they start to make that first connection of like oh, you know what, I can tell that when I launch that lead magnet, I'm just not getting people to opt-in page, I'm not doing a great job of explaining what it is. I need to talk about it in a different way. And they make that shift and they see those change and they're like oh, that's really powerful, like that question that we can ask. And I like to try to think of it in that way of like what's the question? You would ask your numbers, what's the question that you want the answer for, rather than just like, well, let's just collect a bunch of things, but like, what is the answer that you're really looking for when you're looking at a bigger business, if you have team members and if, as you get, you know, start to get a little bit farther away from some of the numbers and the analysis.
Speaker 2:But as the business owner, you are still responsible for your numbers. So even if you have someone that comes in and helps you with it, they can collect them, they can analyze them, they can kind of tell you what could be done from them, but you still ultimately do own those numbers. So having some familiarity with that is a good thing and I definitely come in and I help people with that part of things of you know, of tracking, of analyzing, of saying hey, here's your bottleneck, here's the next thing that your marketing department can look at to be able to start to. You know, really try to free up those bottlenecks and get things moving again. But at the end of the day, you are responsible for them and we need to have comfortability with that.
Speaker 2:As a business owner of like this really does end with me, so I'm responsible for it. In whatever capacity and whatever size team I have, I do have to try to figure it out and find a way to be comfortable with it, because this is what helps your business grow. This is the information that tells you if something's working or not, where you need to put your focus or where not to. Otherwise you're just going with gut all the time and that's exhausting. It really is. You're constantly second guessing. You're thinking I wonder if that worked. I hope it did. I think it worked because of this, or maybe it worked because it was September, or whatever the case may be. But when you can actually start knowing instead of just guessing, the amount of confidence that comes from that is massive.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, like I'm. Actually, while you're talking about this, I'm thinking about the way I used to do launches, like I do so many affiliate launches, and I I exactly what you said earlier, where I was like, oh, I did great that one year, it was fantastic, and I just it was all in my head. I didn't write anything down. I was just like, oh, this is great and it's tracked in this system somewhere that the you know the original promoter was using, and I was like, it's fine, the next time it comes around, I'll just go check it out. I'll just go check it out and I'll look at those numbers again and I'll just replicate it and do the exact same thing. It'll work. This is a genius plan, wah, wah, like it was newsflash. It was not a genius plan. And what I do today is in tracking the numbers.
Speaker 1:I feel so good before the launch even happens, because I can look historically and see, oh, the last two years we did this so minimally. If we just continue in the same way, you know, on the same kind of trajectory, maybe tweak a few things that we know that we've been seeing the last few months, works really well, whether it's in the content or the promotional side. Things will improve, things will continue to get better over time, and I think that that's where a lot of people get lost is they're just in their own kind of chaos and they're making money. So don't fix what's not broken. And I want you to just tell everybody, I want you to kind of like do I know?
Speaker 1:This is like I'm totally putting you on the spot for you to like walk us through like a not a meditation, but kind of like a mindset shift of where someone could be a year from now. So let's pretend it's September 2025 and someone has gone from overwhelmed, confused with their numbers. It's totally chaotic, they can't find anything in any of their online drives and they're just kind of winging it Like they're going with their gut on every single decision. And then now it's 2025. And then now everything is in place in an order and they've implemented SOPs. What could that look like for somebody that's in a situation where everything is just in chaos and disarray today?
Speaker 2:I think one of the biggest things is being able to find things, like you said. I mean, if you know where all of your things live, it is so much easier to pass it off to somebody else. I have seen so many businesses where the business owner is the bottleneck, because you know they want somebody to fill out a podcast form so they can come on someone's podcast and they need a headshot and their bio and they're like oh man, okay, wait, I think I have this image that's in a folder somewhere and it's called copy of copy of copy of image 172.
Speaker 2:And the person was like how exactly would you like me to find it? Like, oh, hold on, I'll just go find it and the task goes back to them all the time, right? Or the task that they want to be able to hand off and they can't because they don't have an SOP. There's so much that can be done in a business to streamline and to take away that overwhelm, and the first thing is really being like what are the first things that I could get rid of, what are the first things that I could organize? Where's the biggest friction in my business right now and figure out a way to stop that?
Speaker 2:So, a year from now, they could know where all of their assets are. They could have team members that they could onboard and, even if someone unfortunately has to leave their team, they could bring somebody new on that could follow the exact same process the other person did, because they have documented what that person was actually responsible for, which is amazing. They could be looking at their numbers on a weekly basis, with a meeting that they have with themselves or the key decision makers on their team, where they reflect over what happened over the past week and look at ways that things could be changed based off of their numbers. So they're like hey, you know what our new product launched? Lots of people, the sales page, lots of people at checkout, but then people aren't buying.
Speaker 1:Okay, well then, the team knows, we need to go check out our checkout page.
Speaker 2:Maybe you know on the mobile view. Maybe a button is in the wrong spot and people can't check out, which I have actually run into before. So it happens and you know, maybe people are looking for a different payment option or maybe we're unclear on, you know, what actually is included in the offer. We can beef up our checkout page. They know how to solve those problems because the numbers are pointing them to those bottlenecks. They can make those decisions very proactively rather than just kind of reactively trying to put out fires all the time.
Speaker 2:It helps you to be able to make those decisions and, as you had just mentioned too, one of the beautiful things about knowing your numbers is that then you can kind of work backwards a little bit. So if you know, for instance, that your sales page over the past eight months historically converts at 5%, which is a great sales page, so we'll go with 5%. And if you know that, then you, if you're like I want to get x number of sales, you know how many people you need to get to your sales page to get that x number of sales, so you can kind of work backwards. Then I'm thinking well, how much traffic? How am I going to get that traffic to the page. Can I get that organically? Is that even possible? Do I need to add some paid traffic to that? How much can I spend on that paid traffic, knowing that it's going to end up in X number of sales at the end?
Speaker 2:And you can actually very strategically start to make those decisions rather than like, well, we're going to launch and hope for the best and hopefully a bunch of people see the sales page and we'll see what kind of ends up, you actually get to work backwards and say we know that this is going to be the end result. What are the steps beforehand that need to take place to get us to those X number of sales? It becomes very powerful and very calm and controlled and proactive, and that has an impact not only as a business owner but also to all the people on your team that are no longer running around trying to figure out. You know what your next move is going to be and if you're going to pivot in the middle of a launch and all of the work that they've done is going to be thrown out the window, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:It calms everything down and it just makes everything so much more peaceful and so much more fun. Like you talked about, business is supposed to be fun. Most of the people who run businesses do it because they love the people they serve. They're solving a problem, they want to change the world, they want to have a big ripple effect. It's really hard to do that if you're miserable and stressed out and burnt out and you're wondering if you should burn your business down. Right, we want to find a way to find that fun and it's really hard to do that in the midst of chaos.
Speaker 1:Yes, oh my gosh. And I don't know if anybody else felt called out. In a previous life. I was the person that was like there's the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy, and it was named like a bunch of random letters or something. And they're like no, I can't find it. And I'm like well, I can't find it either, but let me go spend two hours looking for this one asset. I mean, it's comical, it really is, because it's like you don't realize it. And that's what Carrie and I like.
Speaker 1:We're here today to give everybody that tough love of like it doesn't have to be so hard, Like it really can be better. And I get a lot of pushback on SOPs and processes because people say I don't have time. I don't have time to stop and do this. I need to do this. So what? Like this is the last question for you and then we're going to move on to our next segment. But what piece of advice would you give to someone that says they don't have time to stop to implement these changes in their business?
Speaker 2:I totally get that feeling because I understand, like I feel that too, and I think the thing that snaps me out of that the most is thinking but if I don't make time for it now, what is this going to look like in a year? Because I don't want to be, a year from now, stuck in that exact same spot, being frustrated about that exact same thing. We want to make progress, we want to be able to move forward, we want to be able to build momentum. And is it frustrating to have to take I don't know 20 minutes to be able to document a thing to hand off to somebody 100%? And again, I am with you, I feel that too.
Speaker 2:And there's that pull all the time of like oh, but do I really want to make time for this when there's all these other things that are pressing? But again, if I look ahead here, I'm like do I still want to be doing this task that I hate doing, that I'm not particularly great at that, kills my momentum during the day. That the motivation to be like I can find 20 minutes, I can do this. And and once you do one, it starts to become a little addictive, because you do one and you're like oh, and the person did this and they did it really well.
Speaker 1:What else could they do? Like this is. This is our love language folks. This is why we're loving this conversation today. But we are here with the best intentions, like we are trying to sell you on that 2025 vision of what your business could look like.
Speaker 1:And for me, I've noticed the more that I get you know in a routine and like take control of things in my business. It leaves like the mental space and clarity to do it also in my personal life, like to really like I have SOP. It's like ridiculous, like I mean I'm not I'm gonna call myself out here like in my like meal planning for the family or like doing stuff like organizing vacations, like all of this is kind of bled into other areas of my life where I'm not like a total control freak about everything. But I also just feel so much more organized and I just have this ability to think clearer when it comes to my personal life and my business, because I did so much of this housekeeping in my business to where I don't have to work on the weekends as much because I got like like there's so many other things. It's like a ripple effect whenever you take care of the systems and processes in your business. So again, and you don't have to do things over and over again.
Speaker 2:So, like when you lose files, you have to start over again and your team has to start over again. That wastes so much time. And even in your own life, how many things do you? You know, every time you find a recipe and then you don't put it somewhere and you're like, oh, it's been an hour looking for it again, Right? So all of those things that you can do to be able to prevent having to do the same thing over and over and over again, I mean, not only is it less frustrating, but it just saves so much time and effort. You know, in the end, that it really is worth making those little steps and and and again, implementing bit by bit. It's not something where you snap your fingers.
Speaker 1:All of a sudden, it's done tomorrow.
Speaker 2:I mean I wish it was, it would make life so much easier but it really doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, keri, this has been so much fun, but we are going to move on to our next segment. So are you up for a few rapid fire questions? Sure, okay. So the first one is what piece of advice would you give to a brand new podcaster or content creator?
Speaker 2:One piece. That's hard. I think the thing I would say is that you need to figure out who you're talking to and try to talk specifically to that one person. So any kind of content that you're creating, if you're trying to create it for masses of people, that starts to become really hard. But if you have one person in your mind, one person that you know really needs to hear what it is that you're saying, if you can focus on that one person, I think that really changes the way that the information comes out and the way that we empathize and the way that we give grace and the way that we can give a little tough love. I think it just helps to connect more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. That's great. The next one's a two part question. So what is the dream podcast you would love to be on and who is your dream podcast guest that you would love to interview?
Speaker 2:Ooh, that is a really good question. I don't know if I have a dream, one that I would want to be on, but I think in terms of a guest. Oh, this is a tough question. How do you narrow it down it?
Speaker 1:stumps everybody.
Speaker 2:It's actually kind of maybe a weird response, but I think it would actually be really interesting at some point to interview all of my kids, because I think it would be neat to be able to have a context where you could ask them questions and have them be able to answer them without feeling like, you know, you're really just having like a normal mom conversation, but that they might be helping other people with their responses. I live with a disability and so my kids have kind of a unique life and I think something like that would be interesting for to be able to hear their perspective and to see what they could share to be able to help other people.
Speaker 1:So I think that's what I'm going to go with oh, I love that, I love that, and that's an original. We haven't had that before, so I love that. Okay, and then my final question is do you consider yourself a perfectionist?
Speaker 2:I like to consider myself a recovering perfectionist and I think I need to like hold on to that, because I do definitely have perfectionist tendencies, like that's how I was kind of raised and that's definitely my natural bent and I'm trying very hard to overcome that because it doesn't it doesn't serve me well often. So in my work that I do, it's good to be very detailed and very thorough and all those kinds of things. So I don't, you know, that's not an area where I want to lose my perfectionism, but in some other areas of my life it would definitely serve me better to let go of more of that.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Yes, and I totally relate to that and I think that to do what you do, I think that you would have a kind of more of a notch up on leaning towards a perfectionist side, and that's actually kind of the person that I would want to work with. Someone that's like looks at numbers and they know like the systems and processes, like I can totally see how you can really lean into that, because that's how that's how I've been for a long time too is like wanting to know all the ins and outs of everything, and I think that it's it's so common around here. But, carrie, this has been such an incredible conversation and I know that there are people that are listening that are like, well, how can I work with Carrie? Like where, when can I get Carrie? Like give me her phone number, cause I want to call her today and say please come fix my business. Like come help me with my SOPs. So where can people learn more about you? You?
Speaker 2:bet. So you can find me over on Instagram or my website, just kerrypoppletoncom. And if anybody has questions about even you know the first numbers to start tracking or things like that, please feel free to reach out and ask. I love to be able to help kind of point people in the right direction there because it's so incredibly valuable for their businesses.
Speaker 1:Yeah, awesome. So we're going to have a link to that in the show notes and actually can you tell us a little bit about, because I know you have a free resource for everyone as well and we're going to link to in the show notes. But can you just give us like a high level of what that freebie is all about?
Speaker 2:You bet it's a guide, that kind of five different questions that your data can answer for you, and it's to try to help think about what are the questions that you really could be asking your dad. I think we kind of tend to think of only you know specific numbers, like sales page views and that kind of thing, and hopefully this just gives a little bit of a different perspective as to the numbers that really can help guide your business. So it just gives some other examples and what you can use that for and how it can impact your business.
Speaker 1:Okay, awesome, yeah, and, like I said, we're going to link to that in the show notes. But, carrie, thank you so much for being on the show today. This has been again just a masterclass in metrics and SOPs and I hope everyone go, go do some spring cleaning, go do some New Year's cleaning, like whatever you're doing in your business today, like go and just evaluate and imagine what your life could look like in the next six months, 12 months, because I think that that's so much fun. But thank you for being on the show today, carrie.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. This has been so great. It's so nice to find other people that love SOPs too, because sometimes we're far between.
Speaker 1:Yes, sop nerds for life right.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:So what did you think? Did Carrie and I convince you just a little bit more to pay attention to your numbers, your metrics or maybe those SOPs that you have been putting off? Because that's what I got out of this conversation? I was reminded of things that I need to pay attention to more, and I have to just be super honest, right Like. I had a coach last year that I worked with and I told her that, like, the metrics, the dashboards and like all that stuff is so boring to me or I don't enjoy it. And then she had this one-liner for me that really turned everything around and was like, why don't you make them fun? That really turned everything around and was like, why don't you make them fun? I was like, what? Like, of course, that's like. My whole brand is like, let's make things fun. And so I think that what you could do, if this is your only takeaway from today's episode, is take what Keri and I talked about and ask yourself how can I apply this to my business and make it fun? Right Like, because you have to do metrics and numbers the way that it makes sense to you and your brain, or how you create content, or how your business model is set up, so it's not a one size all like approach for everybody, but I think that making it fun or making it creative or doing whatever you have to do to really customize and tweak it for your business, can be so impactful and even get you excited. Right, dare? I say you could be excited about your metrics and tracking everything.
Speaker 1:So Keri has a free guide for you and I want you to go check it out. It's called Five Questions your Data Can Answer For you and it's at kerapoppletoncom. Forward slash profit and I want you to go check it out. There's gonna be a link in the show notes, of course, but kerapoppletoncom forward slash profit. Go check out this resource. And, keri, again, thank you so much for being on the show.
Speaker 1:This was very eye-opening and, again, it's one of those conversations that I don't think that we talk enough about and I think it's one that's really crucial and something that a lot of creatives right, there's a lot of creators in this audience and you get so wrapped up in the creative and the design and the videos, and but we need to go back to the metrics and the numbers. So, if you are like raising your hand, you're like, yeah, but I really don't want to do that. Well then, lean on someone like Carrie to give you the resources that can help you understand them better and make it easier for you. But that's all I have for you today. I hope that you enjoyed this conversation today. I would love to hear your number one takeaway. So, wherever you are listening to this, take a screenshot and tag me and let me know like what was your number one takeaway from today's episode. But that's all I have for you. So, as always, remember, keep it up. We all have to start somewhere.
