How To Improve Your Problem Solving Skills | Road To A Billion Week 4 & 5

In this episode, I dive into problem-solving after the holiday rush, the everyday problems of business, new interview processes we implemented, potentially getting a Reality TV show, and other major successes.

Welcome To Week 4 & 5 of the Road To A BILLION. The only documentation series of a 23-year-old Millionaire going through the day-to-day operations of a business and scaling up to a BILLION.

This Podcast was originally filmed in early January 2023 for a recap of December 26th - early January.

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Transcript

Luke Lintz: 0:00

All right, this the road to a billion series, week four and five cars I missed a week. So we're going to have a lot to recap in here, I might talk pretty fast, because I want to keep this one short. I want to keep this at about like, eight minutes. But we have a lot to go through basically, right after the holidays, that was kind of like the start week four, it was huge getting back into things where basically so much stuff was being thrown at me, in terms of workers coming back to work, in terms of like with publicity, or in media, with journalists coming back to work and picking up stories that we pitched at the end of the year, it was crazy. And so Week Four was definitely wild. Week five was wild, too, in terms of I talked a lot about this in my recent tic toc about being in a lot of reactive mind space and getting honestly just like being really hard on myself and stressed out in terms of being in that reactive space. Because there were just so many problems managers coming to me, journalists coming back with like ideas for new stories for certain clients and just a lot of stuff on a day to day basis. I feel like outside of the things that I was doing, even though I was working like 1012 hour days, I feel like I wasn't working on any of this stuff that I had planned for. Even though it's still really good stuff still moving the business forward and still bringing revenue into the business still delivering massive results for clients. It felt like there was a lot of stuff that was doing inside of the business and stuff outside of the business. So that's kind of why I'm what I want to go through in this entire video. So we're gonna start off with some major problems over the past week for Week Five crazy problems, the most annoying problems ever. One thing is we pay certain vendors for like press services, certain social media services via crypto where we store all of our crypto Well, up until this point is in Coinbase. Huge mistake Coinbase. After we sent out a few $5,000 transactions in one specific day blocked our account literally sent them an email sent them a shout request and we were cut off from sending any payments more to our vendors because we were storing all of our crypto in Coinbase. It was a huge flaw that happened putting all of our eggs in one basket into one crypto wallet and exchange we've been exited out of crypto over the past like year and a half. And so we have the majority of our funds and liquid cash in cyber bank accounts. And so we didn't think it was that harmful being inside crypto. And we thought in terms of having your funds in other exchanges, we thought Coinbase would be the most safe and secure of all crypto exchanges because it's a publicly traded company. Other exchanges we thought were a bit sketchy where we previously had in Nexo and Kraken, it was super annoying, it actually still hasn't been figured out after a week and a half, that's kind of just been a draining thing where we've had to even though we have the resources and the capital to be spending on certain vendors, we've literally are incapable of so I have to find out other methods of sending payments to them just leads to a whole mess and just annoyance in general. A second thing that's along the same lines is you guys are gonna get kicked out this if you're actually watching this video. But basically, in the New Year American Express decided to change up their bank ID when they withdraw funds from your bank account. So you know, when you go into American Express's website, and you click make a payment, and it withdraws funds from a direct bank transfer. Well, we have fraud detection on our bank. And so you need to be a pre authorized user to be able to pull funds from the bank account. And so since American Express changed their ID, it changed the ID that was verified with our bank. When we went to make a payment it was like a$27,000 payment. It bounced back because it wasn't authorized with her bank account. Even though we obviously have those funds in our bank account. American Express blocked the bank blocked all of our American Express credit card we use our American Express cards for practically the majority of our business. They're great cards. I love American Express, but they pluck their bank from making another payment reauthorizing the bank and then make another payment they block that and so I had to call them on the phone with them for an hour which is like literally one of my least favorite things to do. And it's so not a growth aspect to the business. It's picking up stuff that are just failures of the business. So it's super annoying as it's not directly growing the business from fixing that problem. After I got off the phone with American Express, I had to figure out how I was gonna get American Express right back on they didn't allow me to reconnect my bank and so I had to send a manual wire transfer after I sent the manual wire transfer had to wait four business days after I sent that sent the 17,000 they couldn't find it just the worst type of thing worst type of problem to deal with. I ended up figuring it out I was able to reconnect the bank account, withdraw 27,000 Because the bill ended up being higher withdrew 25,000 from the from the bank account and then was able to get back up and running. But that was a super annoying problem. Another thing is we've had a really good A process recently for finding extremely good candidates finding candidates for hiring certain positions and also for building our processes of our entire interview and hiring process. Right now for practically the majority of positions at Heike, we have a three call interview process. First is the head manager of the department finds the candidate, that's the candidate over email preliminary and then does an initial call with the candidate if they meet the requirements that we have in that specific department of having the resume standards, the previous password experience. Usually we looked at their LinkedIn or their social media accounts, professional LinkedIn social media accounts, and then they'll get on a call with head manager that apartment. Usually it's been my operations manager who's been taking the majority of the interviews for a lot of the different departments. And then in that interview, they're doing a lot of background work. They're talking about past experiences that the candidate has going into a lot of detail if you want to go into it, like a lot of our processes are honestly from like Alex and Leila Hermoza, they absolutely kill it, they've been amazing YouTube channel, go super in depth with Haim bras, I don't want to repeat anything that they say. So just go over there, learn about their hiring processes and implement and put your own like spin on it. That's where we do three call interview process. I'm in there at the last stage, doing a final vet of the person and making sure that they're aligned for the role. But it comes into a major problem because we've been in need for a press manager recently, somebody on our earned media side of things and the publicity side of things at the company. We've been interviewing constantly for candidates, and we just haven't found one in the past two weeks since the New Year's and Christmas holidays, that's been a good fit, which is super hard, because we've been bringing in a lot of new business. And so our current press managers, even though that they're absolutely amazing at what they do, they've been extremely overloaded with things. And so that's been a problem. And that's probably my biggest initiative for Week Six of row two a bill and and you'll probably hear me talk about that, that hopefully, we found somebody went through the entire interview process and start onboarding another thing that I wrote down a major problems of over the past two weeks, I went into this, but you hear the idea of working too much in your business instead of on your business. And I never really understood what this meant. Like I always thought that that was kind of just gibberish that people talked about, but I really do understand it where there's a very clear distinction of working inside of your business, which for me would be like managing people on a day to day basis, actually doing some of the day to day work, whether it be on the press side social media side of things like working on my own social media accounts. That's like a lot of things that are working inside of the business, I have noticed that over the past two weeks, week four and five row to a billion I've been doing a lot of and kind of annoyed with it. But upon reflection, I'm going to be fixing that in the future. And I actually have an entire list that I wrote out of things that I need to delegate over the next month in hire for so and then going on the other side of things of working on the business is creating the new marketing strategies, brainstorming the products that are going to be the most relevant in the next year forecasting what could happen if we go into a market downturn and start entering into a recession and what that would look like in terms of the current people we have hired and the revenue that we're bringing in and what all those numbers would look like where you can't do that if you're working inside of the business. And so it's time to get into some major successes. One is it looks like we're going to be locking in a reality TV deal, which is pretty cool. We're going to be filming the trailer, they call it like a sizzle reel in March where it's already secured. They're paying for the whole thing filming in Puerto Rico. And so that's definitely gonna be a part of this series, we'll pull it up. So that's gonna be really cool. Now the thing is, we absolutely crushed it over the past two weeks for some of our press clients. And people off the top of my head are like amarilla, Mark Nielsen, Luke de, I'll put some pictures up of like some articles that we publish for them. Maybe they'll throw in a testimonial video from one of them about the services. But yeah, it always feels good to absolutely knock it out of the park for some clients. Next thing that's a major success is I'm not sure if I talked about this in the previous row to a billion videos, but our sales team was doing a good job finishing up the year in 2022. But they weren't doing the best job with hitting the KPIs we had in place for specifically cold calling people within our pipeline, because right now we have a pipeline with 5000 leads that have come in mainly through like direct advertising methods over the past six months, and I wanted every single one of those leads to be called repeatedly until they answered and so we set metrics in place for that and they just weren't being hit. And so I think it was in week four that I set an initiative with the sales managers that if any sales team member Our sales rep doesn't hit their KPIs in their specific department either. Like setters have different KPIs that put in place than the closers for doing those cold conversations. But if they didn't hit those marks, then they would be kicked off the team. And we actually saw a really good bump up where practically every single person hit KPIs. At the end of this week five, there was a major success, ton of more conversation 10 or more book calls just a lot more activity on the sales side of things, which was great to see this is kind of like the last thing on the major successes side of things, is I was finally able to align with the team, which was I was able to align with the executive assistant, and a couple of others, our team of the entire rebrand that we're doing. I mentioned this earlier in one of my other videos, but we're rebranding the entire Heike agency website. And we're going to be rebranding all of our other websites after high key agencies complete. And we're rebranding all of our social media pages. Basically, we said 2023 is the year of professionalization of our social media digital presence, because up until this point, we have a really good product in place, we have a really good service, we have clientele, a lot of clients from the past clients that really enjoy our services, the new clients that we want to bring in are constantly more and more high level. And we're wanting to get into that upper tier business level. And the only way we can do that is by really professionalizing every aspect or a business, stop doing any of like the kid stuff that we used to be doing before we're we're extremely like loud and obnoxious on videos, and where it was mainly like myself and my brother's face on our brand, we want to start getting our clients face our brand, we have an absolutely amazing team. So we want to start getting our team's faces on all of our social media pages and the websites so that they can start speaking about our brand, because there's a lot of people within our company that are much more educated than me, and they're specifically specific department space. So it only makes sense to do it like that. And then to wrap this video up, another major success was we submitted a license that should be complete within the next one to two weeks for a business that we've been working on for the past year. I can't really speak too much about it on this video, I just wanted to make sure I documented it just so that I can look back on it in the future. But it was a huge success point. I'm a really big believer of staying focused on one thing, one project and one business for a very extended long period of time. And that's exactly what I'm doing with highkey enterprises is I've been extremely focused on highkey enterprise literally since the beginning seven and a half years ago now. And I'm going to stay focused on it for the next 10 years. There's just an opportunity that came to us that was too good to pass up with the business partners that we have in place for it. I can't talk too much about it. I will definitely be bringing up in the future once it's all launched and once it's running, but it's something that will be a huge driver of revenue and business to be able to expand the Heike enterprise business in the future, which is the reason why we led to the decision of working on that and putting so much effort into that. That's super cool. Yeah, this is row 2 billion Week Four and week five. Watch this this entire video and like Big applause to you. You're probably only watch this once a week. I'm a billionaire. So peace