Get Really Good at Building Processes
The following is an excerpt from Max Altschuler’s new book Career Hacking for Millennials: How I Built A Career My Way, And How You Can Too.
Most of the successes I’ve had in my career have come when I worked really, really hard at first, then figured out ways to hire out, build a more efficient process, or automate what I could. That allowed me to switch focus and work on the next piece of the project, the business, or something else I could scale.
For example, at Udemy I had to build out a repeatable sales process. I broke it up into stages, including:
- List Building: Figuring out who our ideal customer profile (ICP) is, where to find them, and how to get their contact info.
- Outreach: Outbound emailing at scale meant personalizing the email just enough and automating the rest.
- Conversation: Once we got a response to the email, setting up the next step in the sales process, which was having a conversation and getting them interested in creating a course.
- Onboarding: After they’ve given a verbal indication that they’re interested, we make sure they follow through and start actually uploading assets like videos and quizzes.
- Course Created: Course finished, approved by the team, and ready to sell.
When I first created this process, I had to do every piece of it myself. I had to figure out our ICP by looking up complimentary or competitor platforms and see what worked for them. We were focused on educational online courses in the tech sector, so I went on Amazon and looked up bestselling books offering tech instruction. These were ideal teachers for our platform. Then to find their email addresses, I built a process around Googling their name and area of expertise and following the links through to a contact address.
I had to do every piece of the process above, perfect it, document it, and optimize it before I could hand it off to someone else. But once it was good enough to hand off, it would run smoothly without me, freeing me up to crank on a new process that needed figuring out.
For simple and redundant things like list building, I hand these processes off to a team of virtual assistants that I’ve built in the Philippines. If it’s something more high level, it goes to an employee or contractor in the U.S. We’re scrappy, and the talent abroad is definitely good enough to take on many of these types of tasks.
The key to growth in business is to figure something out yourself, figure out how to scale it so it can take place in a bigger way, then become unnecessary to it. Once you’re no longer needed for it to run, you’ve done your job.
Of course, the process you build has to be good for this to work. Automation is a magnifier. It can make a good process great, but a bad process terrible. Don’t scale bad businesses that don’t make money. Make sure what you’re working towards can one day be profitable and self-sustaining. Always figure that out first.
We all have the same 24 hours in a day. Distinguish yourself by getting the most out of it. The more you’re able to scale and automate things, the more time you have to advance your career. That requires being resourceful. As Tony Robbins says, “It’s not the lack of resources, it’s your lack of resourcefulness that stops you.”
You can find more on how all this applies to sales in my book Hacking Sales (hackingsales.com).
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