Looking to enhance and grow your business in 2022? This week on Succession Stories, Stephanie Scheller joins Laurie Barkman to discuss success in the face of disruption. Stephanie is the founder of Grow Disrupt, a marketing agency in Texas that grew by nearly 50% in 2020. How? By optimizing recruitment, offering packages that address customer needs, and improving the agency’s positioning. In addition to sharing her story, Stephanie also plays her violin for us, a first for the show!
Listen in to learn more about:
- Fine-tuning your three M’s of marketing; market, message, and methods of distribution
- Testing and adjusting strategies to find those that work best for your business
- Making the most of disruption
Connect with Stephanie Scheller:
https://www.thestephaniescheller.com/
Connect with Host, Laurie Barkman:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauriebarkman/
About:
The Succession Stories podcast is hosted by Laurie Barkman, Founder of SmallDotBig. We’ll help you maximize business value, plan your exit transition, and get rewarded for all of your hard work by finding the right buyer or seller.
If you’re not yet getting our monthly newsletter, now is a great time to sign up. Be among the first to hear about Laurie’s new book, upcoming events, and more great content to help you capture value and transition with success.
Transcript
Laurie Barkman:
Welcome to Succession Stories! I’m your host, Laurie Barkman, Founder of SmallDotBig. As an exit value planning and M&A advisor, I call myself a Business Transition Sherpa. My mission is guiding entrepreneurs on ways to build value in your business, and then benefit by letting it go. On this show, we spotlight the theme of transitions– not only to reward you for your hard work, but also to ensure that you look back on your succession without regret. Catch all the episodes and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to visit successionstories.com to sign up for our newsletter. Here’s to your success!
Succession Stories brings you business transition content and lessons learned from incredible entrepreneurs. Catch all the episodes by following Succession Stories in your favorite podcast player! I’m super excited to share that I’m working on a book inspired by my work with entrepreneurs focusing on exit value planning and having a succession mindset. More to come on that! To hear about upcoming events and get access to even more Succession Stories content, sign up for our newsletter at SuccessionStories.com.
My guest today is Stephanie Scheller. She’s the Impact Authority and founder of Grow Disrupt, a marketing agency in Texas. For the last several years, she’s taught clients about disruption at inspiring large events. In 2020, facing their own disruption, Stephanie set up the company to grow by nearly 50%. How? By managing finances so they could hire, designing packages that people needed, building sales skills to close deals despite fear, increasing marketing, and positioning themselves as the ONLY choice for a specific niche. In addition to sharing her story, Stephanie also plays her violin for us, a first for the show! Enjoy my conversation about growing through the pandemic, and the musical talents of Stephanie Scheller.
Laurie Barkman:
Stephanie Scheller, welcome to Succession Stories. I’m so excited you’re here with me today.
Stephanie Scheller:
Hey, I am excited to sit down and talk, especially about, “How did we pull off growth through the pandemic,” and all. It’s gonna be such a fun conversation.
Laurie Barkman:
You are an interesting person to talk to, not only because you live in Texas, and because you play the violin so masterfully, but you are really connected to small business owners, and it’s become a personal passion for you to help make them successful. A big part of our audience are established companies, another part of our audience are people who are aspiring to be those well-established companies, these entrepreneurs who are working so hard. So tell us a little bit about you, and in your introduction, please share how you chose this path.
Stephanie Scheller:
Okay, the cliffnotes version. I got a job after college that was nothing to do with my degree, I got a degree in equine business and facility management, which yes, I was going to go run a horse barn, and then I got a job in marketing. More specifically in sales, I didn’t realize I was getting a job in sales. I thought I was going to be a marketing consultant but I wasn’t. I was supposed to sell small businesses into buying these packages and by approaching it from that consultant perspective, I did really well, was with that company for three years through a couple of positions and then things were not going well as a newspaper company. Newspaper’s been having a lot of challenges for a long time now. They started messing around and the culture started to get really toxic and so I ended up starting my own business in May 2014–couldn’t remember the year for a second–2014, I started my own business and at the end of August, I worked for the company still, but at the end of August, I was making more money, part time, on evenings, weekends, taking vacation days to do sales, training and coaching than I was working full time so I walked away from the business, and built the sales training business that I was introduced to. That went really well for about a year and a half, we built it to the largest, most active sales practice in Central Texas, and then I had this–I can’t really call it a midlife crisis, because I was like 26 years old.
Laurie Barkman:
No, but you had a crisis of some sort.
Stephanie Scheller:
I had a crisis. I had this realization that I didn’t actually want to be a sales trainer. Obviously very good at it, loved doing it, but it wasn’t giving me that sense of fulfillment, and so then starts this year-long process of trying to figure out, what is my new business model? What am I doing now? I share this because I think a lot of times, especially aspiring entrepreneurs go through this, where they think they have to figure out their business model ‘right here, right now’; it has to be perfect the first time, and you really don’t, because you’re probably not going to land on the business model you love for a couple of iterations. So, get started, start growing your business, and then know that if it tweaks and changes, it’s fine.
I went from being a sales trainer and coach to being a sales trainer and coach and marketing coach, and then to being a sales trainer and coach and business coach, because I thought maybe business coaching would be more fulfilling and did really well as a business coach. Then I realized, “Yeah, this isn’t really what I want to do, either. This isn’t quite doing it for me. I’m making an impact on these businesses, but like one at a time, and it takes months and months.” So then, I shifted again, and we started doing events, which was a skill set I developed when I was doing sales training, because we put on sales training events. I put on an event to educate small business owners and that was when I was like, “Okay, I think I really like this, but let’s do another event just to be sure.” I put on another one and I was like, “I really like this.” We’ve spent–I say ‘we’ because now it is me and a team–the past three years four years really building out, “How do we design and produce events that actually guide the entrepreneurs to take action on what they learn right away?” Because too many times we go to events and we get all this great info and then…
Laurie Barkman:
Nothing happens.
Stephanie Scheller:
Yeah. We were like, “No, those are not going to be our events,” so we have put all this time into figuring out how do we design events where people show up, they learn it, they’re implementing it, they walk off site, and they’re actually growing their business based on what they learned at the event and that’s where I get, like really passionate and excited. But it took all these iterations to land on it and now we have the Grow Retreat. It’s our big one, it’s our internationally lauded event, it’s the event that people say is better than Tony Robbins events, and it just feels great. I love doing events now so this is… that’s my journey.
Laurie Barkman:
Wow, that’s a pretty awesome journey. The grow your business side, we definitely talk about that on the show, and especially in you growing your business, you grew it through events so let’s rewind a little bit on this and also talk through the pandemic side. You needed to completely pivot the business. How did that happen?
Stephanie Scheller:
It is really funny, because when we say, “Oh, we do events,” and then we say, “Oh, we had 48% growth over 2019 and 2020,” everyone goes like, “What? What? How? What did you do?” And there were some big pivots that happened, but I think one of the things that was really crucially helpful was, I take time, every single week, and every single month, there’s certain tasks and things that I do to evaluate what is going on in my industry, what is going on with the small businesses around me, like I have serious time dedicated to being a CEO for the company, and not just a business owner, because I need to know what is happening and what’s shifting, and so what was very cool was we had actually started toying around with live streaming events as early as 2019, which wasn’t new new back then, it just wasn’t done on a very large scale, and it certainly wasn’t done for these smaller events that we did, and so we started playing with it, we tested it, and then we tested again in 2020.
By the time we got to the pandemic hitting, and March of 2020, we actually had already been doing a bunch of tweaking on live streaming or events. One area we did end up making a major shift was we were actually getting ready to launch our first like, major conference in 2020, we were going to do like a large, hundreds and hundreds of people conference-style event in fall 2020. Fortunately, I hadn’t signed – I’d signed one contract – but I hadn’t signed any other contracts when everything shut down and we realized, “Oh, my gosh, we can’t do an event and try and bring together hundreds and hundreds of people doing the Grow Retreat again next year. Bringing together 100 people’s going to be tough enough, it’s gonna be difficult to be tough.”
So we put that one on hold, and then looking for, “What do we replace it with,” we realized, okay, so people still need these events, but they need a couple of things. One, they need to know they’re going to be safe. Because these are small business owners, they can’t afford to take two weeks, four weeks off from their business because they got COVID, because they went to one event, right? They need to know they’re going to be safe, so we need to establish parameters for how we’re going to keep people safe, and two, they still need these events; let’s just do them on a small scale. So we introduced this new event called the Growcation, which is 10 small business owners getting together at a mansion with a celebrity entrepreneur, and that blew up, that went wild. We were shocked at how quickly we sold out on that one. Then the other thing we actually started to do was, because I do events, and — have you ever done an event, Laurie? Have you put on an event?
Laurie Barkman:
Not in the way that you’re talking about. I mean, literally, yes, but not at the scale that you’re talking about.
Stephanie Scheller:
Okay, so where people get a little bit lost with events is they think that events are a build it and they will come concept and they’re not. I can put together a really good event and that doesn’t mean I’m going to sell tickets so we were having to get really creative and effective with our marketing. So we started designing these marketing plans for more people’s businesses, not just my business and what happened? What was really helpful for us was that when the switch flipped, and everything changed overnight for every small business, many of them realized my marketing plans that were working aren’t going to work anymore, and I need a new one. We actually didn’t make that many changes to the Grow Retreat itself. That one still runs in its pure, beautiful form that we have been fine-tuning for years now. We added the workstation, we canceled the conference, and then we started offering the opportunity to actually put together marketing. We don’t do the work. After we build the plan, we do the research, and then we train you and your team on how to do it, because I believe you should own that portion of your business. Those were I say, less pivots, they weren’t 180 pivots, maybe they were like, I think the only one pivot was not doing the conference, that was a big one, but most of our stuff was like, “Hey, let’s shift 20 degrees, let’s shift 15 degrees, let’s make a little change,” and we were positioned to do a lot of that, because I spend all this time watching what’s going on in the economic climate around us.
Laurie Barkman:
If you don’t mind sharing, how big is your firm? Like, how many employees do you have, or what revenue range – if you want to share that – just to get a sense of what size business we’re talking about here?
Stephanie Scheller:
We are seven team members, and not all of them are part time. A couple of them are, and not all of them are full time, sorry, a couple of them are part timers, like, 10-15 hours a week, not gobs and gobs of time, so 17 members, and we are actually coming up on the million really, really fast. We should cross that one really easily next year.
Laurie Barkman:
Well, that’s exciting. You’re a small business yourself, you have staff, and here you are the biggest part of your business, probably the Grow Retreat that you can’t do, and you need to react. What I like about what you shared was that it’s a good lesson for all of us is to be in tune with the market where you said, you dedicate time to looking and listening and trying to figure out what the needs are and so you hit on this growth area, which is a do it for you to get to a point type of service on developing marketing plans. How did you ultimately get feedback on that? Was it sort of a test and learn where you did a pilot with a client and then kind of rolled it out in a larger way, and are iterating on that?
Stephanie Scheller:
For the marketing plan specifically?
Laurie Barkman:
Yeah.
Stephanie Scheller:
My goal is that we’re able to do the events that we do multiple times each year. But the events we do are very high touch, and so in order to be able to do that, and a lot of times when we would interview people, and this is going to get back to your question, I promise, but a lot of times what we would find when we would interview clients, attendees would be like, so why did you attend this event, and the answer was inevitably, Stephanie. I was like, “Well, that’s not great. That’s not scalable.” Like, how do we take the essence of Stephanie and scale it? Because if we’re going to do multiple Grow retreats every year, eventually, we’re going to do multiple rotations, we’re going to be doing that, I can’t be at the level of involved I am for these events right now, and so we started systemizing things. I’m looking at, what can I document? What can I process? What can I do? One of the things that I realized was that just building marketing plans for these events, was oftentimes 40 hours of work now spread across four or five months, but still 40 plus hours of work, and so I can’t be doing that much work for each event and be doing each event.
I said, “Okay, we got to start systemizing how I build these marketing plans,” and so I started figuring out okay, what are they now, backing this up, I had a background in marketing, like I said, I was selling marketing, but I was also involved in fulfilling and making sure the programs worked. I had the opportunity to see campaigns, working and not working and literally like I would have, when I worked my corporate job, I would have like two attorneys come in the same month and they would both be on the same package and they both would be like family law attorneys, and within three months, this guy’s getting like 60 calls a month, and this guy’s getting two, and it’s his mom asking why he has a new number because it’s a tracking number and it’s his assistant checking to make sure the tracking numbers working. I’m sitting here going, “What is the difference? 62? What is going on?”
I started to realize there’s pieces that have to go into marketing. You have to have what I call the three M’s of marketing; your target market needs to be detailed and defined, your marketing message needs to be clear and emotionally evocative, and it goes way beyond the tagline which we don’t even have to get into all that and then last but not least, you need your methods of distribution. What I learned is that most people market backwards. They worry about their methods of distribution and if they get to either of the other two ends, they maybe work on their target market but they miss like 60% of the core criteria for marketing. So I knew we have these key pieces and I started to organize them into an actual structured marketing plan, so that I could start to outsource. I taught my team members, “Okay, here’s how you research a target market,” because that’s like six hours of time, I don’t want to spend doing anymore and so I taught them, “Here’s how you research target, here’s how you audit this, here’s how you do this,” and so we started teaching them how to do pieces of the plan so when someone showed up and wanted a plan, I was like, we could just do what we do for us and so we just literally did the exact same thing. The only difference was that I had to design a new marketing message because obviously, we can’t use our marketing message for someone else’s business. I just told my team, “Hey, here’s the info, go research a target market for this company. Here’s the info, go do the audit, go do this, go do this.” I pulled it all together. We’d already been testing it out, we started testing these in 2017-2018 and then 2019 was the first time we did them for other people so we’ve been testing them for ourselves first. Then we I guess there was some testing, but for the most part, we’d already pretty much fine tuned the process, just because I was obsessed with not being the center of the wheel.
Laurie Barkman:
Well, on this show, and also just with clients, too, one of the things that we really focus on is how do we build the value of your company? If we do a little mini live case study here, what’s actually happened is you are building more enterprise value in your business by enabling others to do the tasks that you would have done so what we start with is we look at is it teachable? Can you literally teach it to someone else in your organization? For you the answer was yes, you have those pieces that you could delegate, you’ve now documented, and you’re teaching them how to deliver that. So it’s teachable, is it repeatable? Your clients want it from you on some level of frequency, right? So teachable, repeatable and valuable, and value is meaning the value to the beholder, so the the client. Do the clients find it valuable? How often are they coming back? It’s relative to you and if you put that in a grid, and write things out on a one to five, and you can even put some metrics on it of relative revenue or profitability, what we do in that exercise is shaping out, what should you be doing as an organization and what then you as the owner, or you as the CEO, should should be doing or not be doing and it could lead you down a path. You inherently did that, you decided how you were going to go about now, the pandemic may have forced that on you, but I guess in retrospect, that was probably something that’s going to stick with your business. Do you think you’re gonna stay with that product line?
Stephanie Scheller:
Yeah, we will definitely and we’ve actually expanded it a little bit more. What happened in 2020 was, we did so many of them in a three month period. It was pretty wild and hairy there. I have worked really hard to cut back the amount of hours I work because I like having hobbies and being sane and having time to be the CEO. I was working like 100 hours a week for a few months trying to get like all of these out because there was still so much of it that relied on me and my team members were doing the same thing. What happened was, we did so many. We found what were all the systems to do the whole thing because there were always little pieces of it that I didn’t think I could teach. Once I did so many of them back to back, I realized I could teach them. So we turned it into a course. We actually have a video series that walks you through doing the same thing, so this is here to stay because it’s something so many small business owners don’t have. They don’t recognize a lot of times when we start our business, how big of a piece marketing is, how much of a skill set it is we need to develop, and that building a marketing plan isn’t intuitive most of the time. Because when I asked people, “What’s your marketing plan?” “Well, I go to some networking events, I have a website.”
Laurie Barkman:
Right. Or the website’s a one pager that they got free from GoDaddy and they haven’t looked at it in a year.
Stephanie Scheller:
Right.
Laurie Barkman:
Let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s talk about the small business owner during this time, because you were having a lot of conversations and I think there was a lot of folks who maybe did close their doors and then there were folks who are trying to get through it and maybe kind of through PPP and other Cares Act that they were able to keep the doors open, lights on, and so here we are. What were the top themes as you look back now over the past year and a half, two years, if you’re going to say there may be top three themes of concerns or challenges that people are facing?
Stephanie Scheller:
One of the themes I kept seeing come back again and again was, “I’ll just wait for things to get back to normal,” and obviously we’ve learned, that’s a dangerous mindset, because things aren’t going back to normal, and here’s what I encourage people to remember is that, our job as entrepreneurs is to adjust to the marketplace. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are, the more opportunities there are, the more chances you have to get paid, so it’s actually a great thing to have here but if you’re gonna sit and wait for things to get bad, I mean, I will never forget, it was May, everything started shutting down in March, in May, a friend of mine reaches out and admits, “I’ve been sitting in the bathtub drinking bottles of wine for two months waiting for things to be over,” and I was like…
Laurie Barkman:
Oh, no. Intervention.
Stephanie Scheller:
That is not good. The theme is, “I’m going to wait it out,” and most of the time, you’re not going to be able to wait it out. Especially as a small business, unless you have massive cash reserves to wait it out, you’re going to have to adapt. That is one of the perks of being a small business owner is that we can adapt and shift much quicker. I can make a change and have it implemented through my entire company by the end of the week, whereas talking about a major organization, they’re not going to be able to make that kind of change. Let’s say, Amazon. Amazon’s not gonna be able to enact sweeping changes across their entire organization in a week, they’ll be lucky if they can make a change inside of three months. So we have the ability to pivot, to adjust. This doesn’t mean you throw away everything you had. But it does mean taking the resources and assets you have available and asking yourself, “How can I use these inside of my current reality to solve the problem that I’m seeing?” That was probably the first theme that I saw; “I’m just gonna wait it out.” No, bad idea.
The next theme that I saw was the — I’m trying to think in terms of themes as I’m going through all these conversations — the next thing that I saw was, increasing marketing. That is both a positive and a negative, which I know sounds strange to hear from a marketer, but people were pouring more money into their marketing budgets and I think that is smart, as long as you’re pouring money smartly into your marketing budget. If you’re just taking money and going, “Well, I know we’re going into a downturn, so I just need to pour on the gas,” you could just be increasing the amount of waste you have.
This is where it becomes important for small business owners to be evaluating the marketing they’re doing, identifying what’s not working and cutting the fat. Someone asked me just a few weeks ago, they said, “Stephanie, how much of your marketing budget do you expect to waste every year, like, get no return on?” And I said, “Like, maybe two or 3%,” and they were like, “Well, that’s just bunk,” and I was like, “Why?” They were like, “Because you have to test stuff and see if it’s gonna work.” I was like, “Yes, but my tests are going to be on a small scale. I’m going to find ways to test marketing ideas that cost little to no money, and if they don’t take off, I’ll tweak it and adjust it and try again, right, and then I’ll tweak it and adjust it and try again and so I will spend a small amount of money finding the strategy that will work, and then I will pursue those strategies full out, but the challenge is you have to put time in there and that’s what small business owners don’t have – a lot of time. So they just do this, “Let me throw more money at it and hope the problem gets better,” and it doesn’t. So that’s at least two of the themes.
Laurie Barkman:
One of the things I like to say is hope is not a strategy so as we enter next year, what’d you call it? You called it the workation?
Stephanie Scheller:
The Growcation.
Laurie Barkman:
Growcation. Those sound interesting. Did vaccinations come into play, people had to show that they were vaccinated?
Stephanie Scheller:
We actually have like a 40 page handbook on COVID protocols for our events. When we built the handbook, it was in preparation for the retreat this year in 2021 and so interestingly enough, we did, I mean, we did have the Grow Retreat in 2021, we had 75 people on site, we had 40 people on the live stream and so we didn’t have vaccines when we built our handbook. We have not done and played around with the vaccine thing, I will tell you, we’ve been talking about it, we just landed on what we are going to do, obviously, we’re going to make adjustments coming up for the Grow Retreat, but what we are going to do is we’re going to say masks are optional, if there’s a negative COVID test on file at the start of the event, because the good news is we have these really quick at home COVID tests that are pretty darn accurate. So all we have to do is say if you don’t want to wear a mask at the event, that’s not a problem, take the test.
If we’re going to give people the option, if they would rather show us their vaccine card, then that’s fine, but I personally think it’s a really bad idea to sit there and be like, “You have to show me your vaccine card to get into the event,” because it only gives the people who don’t want to do the vaccines to dig in further. This whole thing is like, “I’m gonna force you to do so,” I’m sorry, I just disagree with how this is being handled pretty much across the board. Because it’s this whole, I”‘m going to force you to,” instead of, “Hey, I’m gonna work with you to figure out a solution that makes you happy and that hits the criteria which is we have to keep the people safe.” Instead, we’re just like, “Let me manhandle you into this.”
Laurie Barkman:
It’s a tough time and I think there’s a lot of things rolling out at the time we’re recording this about mandates, and so on, so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out with the labor market, because it’s already very tricky. But let’s switch gears, we mentioned early on that you are a violin player and off air, I had told you I was. I’m not anymore. I played in high school. You’ve definitely continued on. But you learned later in life, right?
Stephanie Scheller:
I did. It’s actually really funny because I started learning the violin in high school. One of the ladies came to our church, she was a member of our church, and she came in, she played the violin for the praise team one evening, and I just watched her playing. I was in love and so I went to her. I was like, “I love the violin. I love it.” She was like, “I’ll teach you how to play,” and I was like, “Oh, this is so cool,” so I go over to her house, I have one lesson and then she was military and she deployed. So I was like, “Well…”
At least I knew how to hold the bow and I knew where the notes were so I got a really cheap, what we jokingly call a VSO or a “violin shaped object” that’s not really a violin, off Amazon that was like, it was like 60 bucks for the entire set and I just started playing and playing and printing sheet music offline. I played for the church praise team and I ended up upgrading to an electric violin, which was great, because I didn’t sound that good.
Laurie Barkman:
That’s awesome.
Stephanie Scheller:
Then when I graduated, I moved to San Antonio, I brought the violin with me, but it was in the corner. In 2019, I started to realize that I had no life. Like, my business was my life. That was it. I had no hobbies, no interest, I had a horse, I would go see him. I still have him, but I’d go see him on the weekends and that was like it. I sat there, “So I need something to do,” and so I just started picking up the violin again, and just putzing around and seeing if I liked it, and I liked it so I kept playing. Then I mentioned it to my sister and she goes, “Oh, you should get lessons.” So I started getting lessons and I was doing lessons virtually long before everyone else was and just playing and playing. Then in 2020 – beginning of 2020 –I thought, “How cool would it be if I could use the violin for one of my keynotes at the Grow Retreat,” because there’s something very emotional and evocative about the violin. What I’ve learned is that music creates this beautiful framework to discuss more nebulous concepts like leadership and psychology and even marketing sometimes makes more sense with a framework of music to put it together. That was when all of a sudden it started to shift and so I had to laugh because I was like, “I started playing the violin so I wouldn’t have a life that was obsessed with my business and then I just brought this into my business.”
Laurie Barkman:
It works well and you were motivated to play more because you get on stage. Maybe you could share a little piece with us? What is something that you would play on stage?
Stephanie Scheller:
Yeah, so we’re actually getting ready for — we came up with a really fun opening for the Grow Retreat this coming January and I’m not totally sure which piece it’s going to be but it’s going to be something that’ll be fun and fruity a little bit like an Irish jig type of thing.
Laurie Barkman:
Are you gonna expect everybody to stand up and dance?
Stephanie Scheller:
Sneak peek, we’re not gonna make them dance. We’ve learned our audience in advance. but we are going to get them involved. Our theme for the 2022 Grow Retreat is “Connect” so we are going to get them to connect with the music, they are going to get physically involved. We’re not going to make them dance, but they are going to have to get physically involved.
Laurie Barkman:
I love it. I love it. Well, your energy is boundless and it sounds like you’re really helping a lot of people get through some growth stages. It’s so important that people do have a path forward and you’re inspiring them for that so thanks for sharing your story. Thanks for coming on the show. If people want to get in touch with you, Stephanie, what’s the best way that they can do that?
Stephanie Scheller:
Probably find me on social media. Pretty much all of my handles are Success Steph, but if you look up Stephanie Scheller and look for the chick with the violin and the curly hair, that’s me. You can also go to my website. My personal website is thestephaniescheller.com, like the one and only the coolest, because it had to be, and then if you want to check out the events you can go to growdisrupt.com. You can find me on any of those places, and I love talking with people, clearly.
Laurie Barkman:
Alright, thanks so much for being on the show, Stephanie.
Stephanie Scheller:
Thanks for having me, Laurie, this was a blast.
