Quick bullets:
* more systems, company handbook, software migrations
* re-starting the personal branding content
* Expat Philippines site re-structure
* hiring and optimizing the writer system
* hiring and onboarding a sales team
Longer form:
This lockdown has forced me to really focus on the systems and the team. I feel this is the most important part for a LONG TERM business. Though I do have to admit lacking on the sales and marketing side, still believe once you have a solid system and workflow and team – the sky is the limit.
Which reminds me when I was talking to a team member on a call, a bamboo forest grows suddenly out of nowhere, but for years the network of roots was being built and no one saw it happening.
Thank you to those who applied to be a writer for our team from last week’s update. We are discussing with you and have some test tasks out.
And – will start more formally doing my “personal branding” – again, we have re-organized our team and our systems – now the sky is the limit.
Week Plan Aug 23 – 29, 2020 Shadstone Limited
It is getting a bit chilly here in Shenyang, China – the feeling of the autumn season starting is already here. Can you believe summer is over and there is “back to school” discussions everywhere.
We will continue to home school our kids, spending my afternoon being an English teacher. But it is really nice to spend intimate time while they are this age, so I need to make the most of it.
During a call I had yesterday about some of our SEO strategies, I mentioned the Chinese story of the bamboo forest. The story is, it takes years for the bamboo forest to build out a network of roots underground, but only days for a whole forest of bamboo trees to shoot up high into the sky.
And that is what we are building now, a rock solid foundation for the bamboo forest. The team, the systems, the trust and communication between each other. Especially fully remote, the communication is hard and we need to spend extra time to over-communicate -but we are getting there.
For weeks now we have been re-building the handbook – and it is 85% there, pulled the approximately 2,000 SOPs and all the images from the Google Classic site (that google is winding down) and it is now in our WordPress wiki handbook for long term storage.
Honestly just tired of using third party platforms and hosting – they just don’t give us the data we need.
Another example – a CRM tool I have been using since 2016, Contactually – they didn’t let me export birthdays from it and even pushing them to ask their IT department, they said not possible. So we are building on an open source project now, and manually going to get the data there. Then once its on our own system, we can access birthdays, or any other data.
Tired of the data not being on our own full access – we work so hard to make this data – from blogs, to SOPs, to CRM relationships.
On top of the data, we are also investing in the team. When we bought out expat.com.ph we also gained access to a few new writers and they are coming back to write there again. We just had a huge upgrade of the site “SCU” and seems the team is really excited about Expat Philippines.
GFA FINALLY has a new blog post – actually it drew attention from people in the industry and some want to even offer to buy out the site as they see no blogs for a while and think I/we have stopped working on the site. So I am glad we finally had a blog post – and we should try to do at least 2 a month – epic ones, not just generic ones.
Plan to “turn up the volume” on our content creation – leverage our custom system Key blogging and also
Plan to work with the SEO team more to use the custom tools we have (Ranking Solution. Attraction funnel, Key blogging) to optimize the flow and system more and more.
Also we are bringing back the 1 minute videos from the “Michael Michelini” personal brand. Tryin to do 1 a week. As we got someone in the community wanting to help us boost IG engagement but we need to have regular content on the personal brand. Also using this for our client work.
Hope this helps everyone?